community weblog - [ Digging the Keweenaw ]

On Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, distance is both curse and blessing.

Jutting deep into Lake Superior, it's far from big cities — for Detroit residents, Nashville and Washington, D.C., are closer than the Keweenaw (pronounced KEY-win-awe). It was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon," statesman Patrick Henry told Congress after early mining attempts were abandoned in 1771.

But its deposits of pure copper were the world's largest, and in 1843, a copper rush brought in workers from dozens of nations. By 1913, 60,000 people lived in Calumet, extracting millions of pounds of copper for Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. But a failed strike that year soured life for workers, and declining demand, low prices and another strike ended the mining era for good in 1968.

Now the Keweenaw merits only an occasional blip on the national radar. Backpackers know that Copper Harbor is the jumping-off point for Isle Royale National Park, and park headquarters is in Houghton, a college town that National Geographic Adventure magazine in 2001 called one of the nation's Top 10 "gateway towns" for summer sports.   more...