Writer Mark Wedel decided to check one off his bucket list by riding his bike--the Surly Troll--across Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Taking the Surly Troll on a variety of dirt trails and state roads, he hoped to witness wildlife, get close to giant log trucks, eat pasties and whitefish, and stay in mom-n-pop motels through Munising, Christmas, along the shore of Superior, and into Marquette before finally climbing thousands of feet up a hill into the woods on the Iron Ore Heritage Trail.
Here's a recounting of his journey.
Can I be sisu, yet still a Troll from below the Bridge, pedaling my bicycle through the Upper Peninsula from St. Ignace to the end of the Keweenaw?
On day five of this June-July excursion, I pedal into Da Yoopers Tourist Trap outside Ishpeming to buy a t-shirt, and to tell the ladies at the cash register that I'm from way down in Kalamazoo.
I have this burning desire to tell them I'm riding a bike... the brand is Surly, the model, Troll. Get it? Huh?
"Surly Troll? Oh, dat's no good," one says, jokingly. I wondered if she was laying the accent on thick for the tourists.
Yooper accents become more-common the further west I go. It's not quite the upper-Midwestern of "Fargo," and it's not quite the Canadian of Bob and Doug McKenzie. But all those accents are definitely of the same family, and could even be fraternal triplets.
Day six, I'm stuck in Canyon River Park, as a storm moves in. I mention this to a couple guys at work pouring concrete around the pit toilet.
"Oh, we're not going to get a storm. It'll go around us," the one in charge says.
Ten minutes later, I walk back to them, pointing up at the sky, making sure they see the black/gray rolls of a menacing shelf cloud moving over the trees.
"It'll go around us," the boss says with a defiant smile as large drops start to fall.
They begin packing up hurriedly. He says, again, "it's goin' around."
I ran to hug the side of another building while the downpour tested the waterproofness of my Ortlieb bags, and thought about the word "sisu."
After the recent Father's Day Flood of Houghton and Hancock, people in online Yooper groups kept using term "sisu strong."
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Photo by Mark Wedel.
Yooper Finnish descendants kept the word from the Old Country. It's fitting for U.P. life: Sisu is an attitude that's a mix of guts and resilience, plus a certain craziness and bull-headedness. It's what's needed to not only survive a Yooper winter, but to find fun in common Yooper activities like plunging into a hole in the ice when it's 0 degrees.
I can relate. On these solo bike tours, there is always that moment when I wonder, what the heck am I doing this for? Did all those 17th-century French voyageurs hauling furs around this craggy peninsula also get this weird sense of doom, a fit of self-questioning, the sudden realization that they're alone? Were they driven mad by the three types of biting flies (mosquito, horse fly, deer fly) that had me covered in welts by the time I got to the Seney Stretch?
But on day seven, heading up the Keweenaw, I feel a bit more sisu, less surly. A long morning's rain had me trapped in a Houghton coffee shop staring out at Dodge Street.
The street, shown often in reports from the flood, is still a mess of pavement slabs broken up by the torrents that had turned the steep hill street into a waterfall.
This will be a great day, when the rain ends, I'm thinking.
As the rain turns into a drizzle, I roll along the lift bridge into Hancock, then hump up over 500 feet in a five-mile climb.
The Hancock/Calumet trail becomes dirt. A canyon-like washout blocks my way. I'm not going to Evel Knievel it. The Father's Day Flood had sliced a deep impassible chunk out of the trail.
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Photo by Mark Wedel.
I leave the trail and head north on very steep neighborhood streets. An elderly lady walking her little barking dog stares at me with amusement as I'm panting and spinning at 4 mph.
The sun comes out, turning the day hot and humid. I dig a water bottle out of my bag.
Back on the dirt trail on the other side of the washout, the Troll hits a dip, and there's disaster at the rear. I'd failed to close my top bag. It'd flopped over my wheel, spilling DEET wipes, water bottles and Lärabars along the dirt.
I get off the bike, let it fall over on its side. Stare at the mess. The Troll is like an old French voyageur's horse dropped to the ground after suffering a mortal wound.
Hear a burbling stream next to the trail. Take off my shoes, put my feet in. The water is clear and cold.
This is a fine day. Really. I'm ecstatic. I pick up the mess, roll on.
Seeing what's between point A and point B in the U.P.
This is the sixth time in seven years I've hopped on a bike to pedal hundreds of miles. This is my second long ride in the U.P.
Some might wonder, why?
I ask myself the same question. But I know I'll be stunned into an epiphanic state by Lake Superior and Presque Isle at sunset, charmed by tiny towns on the Keweenaw, awed by eagles soaring over the Hiawatha National Forest.
"I did a bike trip, a lifetime ago," Carol Fulsher, Marquette resident, says.
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Photo by Marl Wedel.
She’d pedaled from Seattle, Wa., to the U.P. Being on quiet bikeable roads instead of speeding down the interstates, she says, "opens up a whole other part of the United States to you that most people don't see anymore. Because we're so focused on getting from point A to point B, we don't really care what's in between."
Fulsher lived in San Jose, Cal. Riding through small towns, and feeling the slower pace of out-of-the-way places, "made me move" to the U.P.
She became administrator of the Iron Ore Heritage Trail, helping to make the Marquette area a destination for pedals and gears.
Bike tourism in the U.P. has been growing, she says. Pedalers range from people who drove their bikes to Marquette to ride the trails, to "the cross country traveler. I see people weighed down with saddlebags and everything, getting off the highway and onto the Heritage Trail."
The U.P.'s mountain bike singletracks are especially popular, she points out. "They've gotten so much publicity. I've lived here a long time, and I've been mountain biking a long time. I used to have the trails to myself! And now I don't anymore."
The landscape is just right for adventuresome pedaling. Wild and near-mountainous like the West or Alaska, yet the black bears aren't as ferocious as grizzlies, the mountains aren't as steep as the Rockies, and you aren't too far from a good pastie or fried whitefish as long as you don't get lost in the woods.
Fulsher does have complaints -- the new 65 mph speed limit on some state highways, for example.
This summer, "with the speed limit up to 65, you've got campers going about 50," she says, laughing, "you get some road rage! And then add biking to that."
I didn't encounter any road rage, but on the sections of M-28 where a bike has a white line and a few inches of pavement between it and logging trucks, I had to keep one eye on the rearview mirror and one eye ahead.
On the other hand, there are long stretches of M-28 and M-41 with a nice, wide shoulder, and rumble strips to keep the dozing/distracted driver from drifting into a bike. The wide shoulder is paradise for the long-distance biker.
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Photo by Mark Wedel.
The road never ends
After seven days of 40-60 miles, I rest at a Lake-side Keweenaw cottage my wife and friends rented. It was a drizzly day. It's good to be around loved ones -- or any humans -- again.
Sit on a beach of stones to watch friends in kayaks disappear into Superior fog. I was tempted to paddle, but that's a big lake, and the water matching the sky's gray nothingness creeped me out. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" had a significant impact on me when I was a child.
The next day, I get back on the Troll to ride to the end of the Keweenaw. I fail that mission, get a bit lost on the crazy rough dirt trails that lay after the "Road Ends" sign east of Copper Harbor.
Needing that sense of completion, I tried again July 4. It's a joy to see everything along M-26 at 13 MPH. Rocky shore, evergreens, choppy blue water, along this northernmost stretch of Michigan (not including Isle Royale).
Stop at little Eagle Harbor, watch the shenanigans of a parent-child skipping race, an Independence Day right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sit at Jamsen's water-side picnic table at Copper Harbor, eat a thimbleberry pastry as a guy paddles a canoe by, gently telling his nervous-looking bulldog, "Stay in the boat, Fred. Stay in the boat."
Friends had dared me to ride up Brockway Mountain. I wasn't planning on it. But I did it. Over 600 feet for two and a half miles. The view over the forests and the Lake is different, and vastly satisfying, having climbed it with pedals instead of a motor.
Fly downhill to Copper Harbor, town busy with July 4 activity, yet still not the tourist madness of Mackinac Island in the summer.
Ride to the end of the road, and keep going. Into the rocky dusty dirt of the two-tracks. It being the holiday, many ORVs, trucks, SUVs, misguided people in regular cars, motorbikes, pedal bikes, and one guy on an electric bike chasing his skinny hound dog, were also on the trails.
This time I took the turn I should've taken the day before, at the pole with spray-paint characters that look something like "Hl9h:Rock."
That’s High Rock Bay Road, which weirdly enough doesn't exist on my Garmin GPS. Of course there is no voice/data service here, so Google Maps and the iPhone are worthless.
Fork in the dirt: Right, High Rock Bay, where you'll find the last stop sign, the real end of the road. Left, the Keweenaw Rocket Range, where NASA launched probes into the lower atmosphere, 1964-1971.
I go to the ends of both forks. Both provide the spectacular view of Superior, spiky pines on the rocky shore, Manitou Island.
I get to High Rock Bay, and it's populated with off road vehicles, campers and people who've clearly been drinking all day. A group are sitting at the shore, arguing over who has the guts to go swimming.
I lay the Troll down. Take my shoes off, and maybe looking a bit demented, still in my helmet, walk into the cold Lake, feeling pretty sisu.
Mark Wedel has been a southwest Michigan based freelance journalist since 1992. He's written of a wide range of subjects for Second Wave, including many stories on biking in Michigan. He's published a book on his 2017 ride from Pittsburgh to Washington D.C., "Mule Skinner Blues." For more information, see his site.