NEXT AVENUE SPECIAL SECTION
Return to Isle Royale: Two Brothers Relive a 1963 Hiking Trip By Dan Gjelten
Our father was a guy who, even late in life, woke up in the morning asking, "what are we going to do today?" His need for activity led to a love of travel and camping for weeks each summer. In the summer of 1963, he and a friend from our small Iowa town decided to take their middle school aged sons (two each) all the way to Grand Portage, Minnesota — a seven-hour drive — and then a boat to Isle Royale National Park and hike its forty miles from west to east. Isle Royale is a rugged and isolated island in Lake Superior, the least visited national park in the U.S. Dad was in his early 40s, and my brother and I were 15 and 12, respectively.
In 2022, Tom and I had both recently retired — he after a 40-year career as a correspondent for National Public Radio. I'd spent my life working in libraries, mostly in the university. Since childhood, we'd never lived close to each other, Tom in other countries or in the DC area, while I lived most of my life in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I always envied my brother's exciting life but also realized that he may have envied the domesticity of mine.
In 2021, one of us (I can't remember who) proposed a return trip to Isle Royale. It took a year to find a week that would work for both of us. We finally decided on a six-day trip — over the long Labor Day weekend of 2022, when the bug population would be minimal and the temperatures comfortable. We started to lay out a plan — we wanted to hike the same route as we did in 1963 — following the Greenstone Ridge Trail from Windigo Inn on the west end of the island to Rock Harbor Lodge at the east, a 45-mile wilderness hike. I was 71 at the time of the hike and Tom, 74. I began to see the trip as a way for us to reconnect after a lifetime of being apart and observing each other's lives from a distance. Nearly every time we talked, we mentioned Dad and his audacious idea to do the trip with his young sons.
Read more of this story on Next Avenue.org
21
NEXTAVENUE.ORG
Made with FlippingBook Ebook Creator