Exploring Beaver Island

 By Mary L Fox

Traveling from around the southern tip of Lake Michigan, Sierra Club travelers met in Charlevoix, MI, early on September 1, 2022, to catch the Emerald Isle ferry for the 32-mile cruise across Lake Michigan to explore Beaver Island. Ed Max, a horticulturalist and enthusiastic part-time island resident, organized and led this exploratory trip with the assistance of Paul Saindon, Berni Kolasa, Mike Davis, and Jan Bradford.

Despite concerns about seasickness after seeing rough seas and whitecaps on Lake Michigan the day before, the ferry made its way through the harbor channel, and the lake was relatively calm with no whitecaps to be seen. People mingled and got to know each other. One participant shared sweet, juicy Michigan peaches gathered on her way to Charlevoix. Ships were sighted along with several islands. From a distance, the trees from one island created the illusion of a power plant.

As we approached the small harbor at Beaver Island, low-slung clapboard and brick buildings were seen along the main street. Upon arrival, luggage was claimed and loaded into cars. Glad to be able to move around a bit, most folks walked the one-mile route to The Brother’s Place, a quaint rustic inn that would be home base for the next five days. The inn was reminiscent of summer camp, complete with an orientation and delivery of house rules before rooms were assigned. Each room was decorated with a theme – such as the Music Room with instruments, Germany and Paris with travel posters, and Japan with a beautiful fan. The Brother’s Place was once a retreat house for the Christian Brothers, known for their brandy – which is another story. The inn is decorated with vestiges of that history, with lamps and chandeliers made from Christian Brothers brandy bottles. Alas, no full bottles were to be found for sipping.

After settling in and having lunch, we headed out on a short hike through a meadow, to a boardwalk in an old cedar swamp leading to a beach. At the beach, we took off our boots and waded into the beautiful aqua and surprisingly warm waters of Lake Michigan. The water was shallow well past 50 yards out. We returned to the inn to help with dinner preparations or just sit back and relax on the long screened-in porch or in one of the comfortable sitting rooms.

Jan Bradford, dressed in a black chef hat and apron, was chef extraordinaire, providing tasty menus of classic favorites, including made-from-scratch blueberry pancakes, egg-in-a-hole, and Jell-o cheesecake pies, to name a few. Group members pitched in with meal preparation and clean-up. Lunch fixings of bread, cheese, meat, peanut butter and jelly, along with granola bars, cookies, and chips were set out after breakfast to make individualized sack lunches before setting out for the day’s activities.

Highlights of the trip were trail talks by local experts and stargazing. On Saturday, Ed showed us one of his favorite hikes through old growth forests and varying vegetative zones ending at a rocky beach known as French Bay. At a pond along the way, we met Pam, a fourth-generation islander, who gave a brief history of Beaver Island. Out of a total of 34,000 islands, it is the largest island in Lake Michigan at 56 square miles, and one of 24 islands on the Great Lakes with permanent communities. Pam stated that Beaver Island has the distinction of being a UNESCO Bio Reserve. During the hike, she pointed out ancient trees and provided fun facts, such as a turtle’s sex is determined by whether the egg was in sun or shade at the time of conception.

We were also joined by Gina, a mycologist (a fungi foraging expert), who showed the group edible mushrooms she had gathered and described how she planned to prepare them. She also cautioned that many mushrooms are poisonous, and foraging requires education and guidance. Foraging is both art and science, and what you don’t know can make you very sick or kill you. Yipes! After that rousing talk, some of the group enjoyed a fun bumpy and dusty ride to the trailhead on Gina’s ATV.

While exploring the rocky beach at French Bay, Paul Saindon found a gneiss (pronounced “nice”) rock on the beach. You may be wondering what a gneiss rock is. That evening, our very own geologist, Mike Davis, entertained us with a geology lesson. Beaver Island and others in Lake Michigan are the result of a band of resistant bedrock which caused glaciers to deposit enough sediment to form the island. Gneiss is a metamorphic rock with bands or striations of different compositions layered over time. This rock has a line along where the bands were displaced and indicate that it was once part of a large mass of rock involved in an earthquake much earlier in the earth’s history. The rock, known as a glacial erratic, arrived at the island via an ice-age glacier from the Canadian Shield, the area of ancient exposed igneous and metamorphic rock located mainly in Canada.

On Saturday morning, the group hiked through a cathedral of trees opening to the blue sky and sun high above a stand of birch and other hardwood trees. The group saw a full spider web hanging from one of the trees and a carpet of lime green moss and hidden fabulous fungi. The sunlight created a kaleidoscope of green ranging from pale sage lichens to emerald green moss in between the waist high deep blue-green ferns. The ground beneath our feet, a combination of pine needles, decaying leaves and sand, was spongy soft and cushy reminding me of a bouncy house. In the afternoon, people had the choice of walking along the somewhat rocky beach at Donegal Bay or climbing the heights of the Mt. Pisgah sand dune. While not nearly as high as Mt. Pisgah in the Appalachian Mountains, it proved to be a challenging climb. After the hikes, some headed into the small town near the harbor to visit Mary’s Toy Store, a combination of toy museum and art gallery and the Beaver Island Historical Society to learn about the island’s colorful and varied history.

On Saturday night the group enjoyed some amazing stargazing at Sand Point with local astronomers providing a hilarious commentary on where the best location would be to see the aurora borealis. One man responded in a deep, raspy baritone, “I asked myself that question, and I haven’t yet received an answer,” and so this conversation continued a bit. The moon was almost full, and when it set, Jupiter and Saturn were visible to the naked eye. Jupiter’s four moons and Saturn’s rings were visible through a telescope. The local astronomers were more than willing to share their knowledge and allow Sierra Club visitors to look through their telescopes. The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) were on display. With some adjustments to his cellphone camera, Steve Turner captured some spectacular images that the naked eye could not see.  

On Sunday, the group headed to Ed’s home either by kayak across a lake or by foot past the proverbial fork in the road marked by a human-sized dinner fork. We enjoyed drinks, appetizers, and dinner while sitting on the deck overlooking one of the inland lakes. The evening culminated with seeing a loon family swimming on another lake as the sun set. This is the night when we longed for some full bottles of the famous Christian Brothers brandy to take the chill off.

Monday, the group visited the cabin and tomb of Feodar Protar, one of the Island’s most beloved citizens from 1893 until his death in 1925. He was highly respected and renowned for providing healthcare and sharing his knowledge, gained mostly through self-education and observation, to the community. An informational marker at his home displays the circular calendar he created to mark the seasons with notes and cut-out magazine pictures on planting and harvesting. 

The group then hiked along the Kuebler Trail, developed along an old logging rail line. Some of the participants ended the day with a visit to a local watering hole to sample the unique and refreshing local brews.

On Tuesday morning, everyone quickly packed up, ate breakfast, made lunch, cleaned up the kitchen, and caught the ferry back to Charlevoix. As the ferry approached the harbor, three wave runners approached and began jumping the wake of the ferry. Some of the riders shot up almost vertically in the air as they jumped the wake. It was quite a spectacle and entertaining end of our Beaver Island adventure!