Sky, Sand & Surf

FIELD GUIDE

Exploring Michigan: Tips, trends, and tidbits

CHERRY FEST RETURNS: The 95th National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, with in-person, virtual, and hybrid events, is July 3-10. The Arts & Crafts Fair and the Old Town Car Show will be held in a separate location. Due to COVID restrictions, the Bayside Music Stage and the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds air show will not take place this year. cherryfestival.org

GREAT LAKES CRUISING: Dreaming of exploring the Great Lakes? Victory Cruise Lines includes several Lake Michigan and Lake Superior cities as ports-of-call on its small-ship round-trip Chicago itineraries. See the variety at victorycruiselines.com.

STATE PARK DIGITIZES: The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has launched a Facebook page called Michigan State Parks, Trails and Waterways to focus on its 103 state parks, 13,000 miles of statemanaged trails, 1,300 state-sponsored boating access sites, 140 state forest campgrounds, and 83 public harbors. facebook.com/mistateparks

WATERWAY WONDERS: Boaters and paddlers can experience all or part of the 40-mile scenic Inland Waterway connecting Crooked Lake near Petoskey, the Crooked River, Burt Lake, Indian River, Mullet Lake, the Cheboygan River, and Lake Huron at Cheboygan. Along the route are state parks, campgrounds, nature preserves, and paddle and pedal options. michiganwatertrails.org/northwest.asp – Compiled by Ron Garbinski

Have news that pertains to Michigan travel and exploration? Send a note to MSwoyer@Hour-Media.com.

Shoreline Preservation

Elk Lake property owners strive to maintain a healthy aquatic ecosystem

By Jeff Nedwick | Photography by David Lewinski

B ob Kingon vividly recalls the excitement of traveling north to his family’s cottage as a child. His pulse would quicken upon reaching that bend or rise in the road every southern Michigan resident recognizes — the one where row crops suddenly turn to hardwoods — because he knew they were getting close.

His four-hour journey up U.S. 27 to Elk Lake near Traverse City seemed twice that long until, finally, the bright blue waters of Elk Lake came into focus from between the pines.

Over time, the family cottage was passed down to Kingon from his parents. In 2008, he razed the old cottage and built a new year-round home. As the decades passed, Kingon’s appreciation for the natural beauty that endeared the property to him as a child morphed into a passion for helping others preserve and protect

Left: Elk Lake property owners Mary and Jim Lill are enjoying the results of their work to preserve natural shorelines by adding plants, trees, and stormwater retention areas. Right: Many residents have placed rocks along their beaches to prevent erosion.

Elk Lake’s quality and natural shoreline, which is about 1.5 miles wide and nine miles long. At a maximum depth of 192 feet, it’s the second-deepest inland lake in Michigan, right behind Torch Lake. That means there’s a lot to safeguard.

Kingon works tirelessly to help his Elk Lake neighbors implement their own shoreline protection projects.

As a past president and a current board member of the Elk–Skegemog Lake Association, he has recruited a community leaders, local government officials, and conservation groups to promote the preservation of natural shorelines and the implementation of shoreline improvement projects.

Kingon practices what he preaches, especially when it comes to protecting the lake against the negative consequences of runoff. While the natural power of erosion can be spectacular and beautiful, manmade changes to the landscape can be destructive, resulting in runoff from heavy rains that floods the lake with nutrients, pollutants, and sediment.

Kingon addressed this concern by observing the natural flow of rainwater on his property and installing stormwater retention areas to capture and hold rainwater.

For additional protection, Kingon promotes the use of natural filters, such as plants with leaves that reach skyward for enhancing wildlife habitat and roots that burrow deep beneath the soil to intercept and extract phosphorous and other nutrients before they can reach the lake.

Like Kingon, Jim Lill’s memories of Elk Lake span decades. An owner of a Chicago-based business, he commutes between his Elk Lake home and the Chicago area aboard his King-Air C90. The aerial view provides a unique perspective of the area’s natural beauty.

Shortly after marrying his wife, Mary, Lill transformed their home into a seasonal residence that serves as a testament to the compatibility between old growth forests, native plants, and stunning lakefront views.

Careful placement of a patio that considers sight lines through the hardwoods, a walkway to the boat dock that minimizes the impact on native plants, and the addition of rocks to prevent shoreline erosion were all part of the Lill residence’s transformation into a conservation-minded homestead.

Karin Wolfe is a fellow Elk Lake lakefront resident who advocates for healthy, natural solutions that beautify her property. Wolfe spent her childhood in southeast Michigan and much of her adult life in the Florida Keys. It was there that she became active in local garden clubs and conservation groups supporting the protection of the Everglades.

Upon returning to Michigan with her husband, Ted, in 2016, she brought her passion for nature to her Elk Lake property, planting native grasses and flowers to attract pollinators and birds.

For Kingon, Lill, and Wolfe, the shoreline is a thread to cherished memories — an interface between the family homestead and the pristine waters of Elk Lake. And just like connections between people, all three agree that shorelines require nurturing and protection to stay vibrant for generations to come.

Picking Pretty Stones

Rock hounds search for prized finds along Great Lakes shorelines

By Meagan Francis

O ne cool July night last summer, my 11-year-old daughter, Clara, and I meandered along a Keweenaw Peninsula stretch of Lake Superior shoreline in Eagle River, carefully studying the rocks. We exclaimed over and over, “Is this it?” “How about this, is this it?” as the light from a small UV flashlight illuminated glowing bits on the rocks’ surfaces.

An older couple stopped to peer at our haul. “Did you find it?” the woman asked. We nodded with excitement. This had to be it!

Sadly, we later discovered, we had not found “it” — a fluorescent sodalite, the mineral that’s been causing a hunting frenzy along the Lake Superior shoreline since its discovery a few years ago. While sodalite looks like a normal gray rock in regular light, under a UV light, it glows. But, it turns out, so do a lot of things.

Under a UV light, “fossils will glow, synthetic fish egg bait glows, frogs glow, and even a left-behind water bottle will illuminate,” says Molly Reddish, an avid rock hound from Rochester who’s been hunting rocks since she was a little girl.

“I grew up pouring buckets of cold water from Lake Superior on the beach so my mom and grandmother could look for agates,” Reddish recalls. She’s more recently become enthusiastic about searching for fluorescent sodalite, which glows orange under longwave UV light.

Reddish now regularly finds herself on the Lake Superior shore near her Michigan summer cottage in Grand Marais, in the pitch dark, often alone in search of these glowing stones. She’s such an avid rock hound that she even invented a special UV display case she calls the “miniUVdisplay” so she can show off her prizes in the proper lighting conditions.

When asked how she’s developed such an eagle eye for the prized fluorescent sodalite — sometimes referred to as emberlite, Yooperlites, or Yooperstone — Reddish credits patience and experience.

“Like anything else, you have to know what you’re looking for,” she says. “When I take someone out (rock hunting), the first thing I do is carry a fluorescent sodalite down to the beach and shine my UV light on it so they can see the color. Then I drop it and have them find it on their own.”

Just like she did at first, she says, people tend to pick up a lot of fossils. “Everything that glows is so new and fun to see,” she explains, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with collecting fossils, either.”

While searching for glowing stones late at night is definitely an exciting way to hound, there’s also a lot to be said for the simple pleasures of collecting agates, quartz, Petoskey stones, and other Michigan staples by daylight.

Like many Michigan kids, I grew up idly picking pretty stones along the Great

An avid rock hound searches the Lake Superior shoreline for treasures at night, including the elusive sodalite (right). It’s often referred to as the Yooperstone, and glows under a UV light.

Lakes coastlines and testing my skill at skipping them across the water’s surface. It wasn’t until I started traveling with Eric Neilson of Lansing (my brother-inlaw) that I witnessed serious rock-hounding in action.

While my sister and I strolled up and down the shore, chatting and occasionally picking up an interesting-looking rock, he’d wander far away from us, down the beach, squatting, wading, and sometimes abruptly plucking out a treasure like a bird swooping in after a glittery fish. His contagious enthusiasm eventually caught on, which is how I found myself braving conditions such as high winds, whipping sand, drizzle, and chilly Upper Peninsula evenings in order to troll the shorelines the past two summers. Most of the rocks I find stay on the shore — in many protected areas, that is required by law — but as with anything else, often the thrill is in the hunt more than the harvest.

“I’ve been rock hunting for as long as I can remember,” Neilson says, citing how “dazzling and downright magical” even an ordinary quartz crystal can seem when pulled out of a pile of gravel. He recalls the pencil box where he stashed the rocks he collected in his grandparents’ driveway when he was little. On the box lid, small Eric had written “Top secrit, open and die.” He still has the box, but over the ensuing decades his hunting gear has gotten somewhat more sophisticated.

“Thick gloves are handy,” he suggests. “At the beach where the rocks tend to be smooth, it's less important. But in a wasterock pile or gravel site, digging your bare hands into chunks of rock can be painful.”

Neilson doesn’t limit his searches to the shoreline like most recreational hounds. He literally digs through piles of rocks at excavation sites and gravel pits to find his treasures (make sure to ask permission if it’s an active or private site, he advises).

Another recommended piece of gear is a squirt bottle. “Dusty, dirty, and dry rocks mostly look the same. A quick squirt of water can bring out colors and features that are otherwise difficult to see,” he explains. And a heavy-duty bag or backpack is “a must,” since the weight of your haul can easily snap cheap handles or straps. On bigger hunts, Neilson might bring a shovel or trowel, reference book, a bucket of water, or even a metal detector if he’s looking for copper or iron.

Patience and planning pay off. “I've found chunks of copper bigger than my fingers and strange minerals that are typically deep underground like chrysocolla, hematite, and epidote,” he says. When asked what makes him such a prolific hunter, Neilson says “it takes patience, plus a fascination with the rocks that you don’t intend to take with you. For each exciting find, there are three trips where I find nothing but ordinary rocks.”

By night or by day, rock-hounding has become one of my favorite ways to spend time on Michigan’s shorelines. Whether it’s the thrill of possibly finding a collectible stone or just the simple pleasure of strolling the coast, eyes to the ground, I’ve discovered that when you consider the beauty of the coastline, the meditative sound of the waves, and the tantalizing possibility of finding something really special, it’s always time well spent.

Read more about rock-hounding in this issue’s Studio Visit feature.

Inspired by their mother and uncle, these youths have become enthusiastic rock hounds.

PLAN IT! Rock-hounding in Michigan facebook.com/MIRockhounding/