Lake Superior: True to its name

About a year ago I watched a mysteries-of-the-world style TV show about twelve mine sweepers that France commissioned to be built in Canada during WWI because, well... Germany. Built in Ontario, the ships were floated and sailed through the great lakes out to Montreal and then delivered to France. Each steel ship was 135 feet long, with a crew of 76 French sailors. In November of 1918 two of the minesweepers were lost in a storm on Lake Superior and, to this day, have never been found.

You all know I grew up on Lake Champlain, a massive lake that forms the western border of VT, separating the humble chosen-frozen people of VT from the New Yorkers. Champlain is 107 miles long and up to 14 miles wide. Storms on Lake Champlain have wrecked ships and taken lives. It even has its own Loch Ness style monster. Champlain is not a lake to be trifled with.

But the idea of a lake large enough to conceal two mine sweepers that have NEVER been located?!? Questions about this have taken up an embarrassingly large piece of my think space. How could it be so big? How come SONAR could not find the shipwrecks? Didn't anybody see them go down? I mean, it’s just a lake, right?

Thus, I pointed RosieVan north from Copper Falls, Wisconsin to finally lay eyes on this giant lake. I made my way from Duluth, Minnesota east to Sault Ste Marie, Michigan - a distance of 400 miles. The whole way across I marveled at the epic size and influence of the lake. I watched the clouds pile up over the water like a traffic jam and the temperature swing 30 degrees depending on the wind blowing onto or off-of the lake.  Every bit of landscape and ecosystem of the area was all about that lake.

One Saturday I drove from Ashland up to Bayfield and took the ferry to Madeline Island, part of the Apostle Islands National Seashore. That day happened to be the morning of their inline skate marathon which was great fun to watch and wave past.  Apparently, you can bring your airboat from the Everglades to the Apostle Islands and use it on the ice in the winter. Fewer gators for sure.

At the Soo locks in Sault Ste Marie, I got to see a barge clear the locks (24 feet and 21 million gallons of water in 15 minutes!). At the Army Core of Engineers visitor center I learned that the great lakes are home to 21% of the world's fresh water. There was a wall-sized contour relief map of the full inland waterway from Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. Way way down in the bottom right corner of the wall map, north of New York City and south of Montreal, was a little feeder lake called Champlain.