Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park: The Lost Relics Tour

by Brian Retzler

The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, sometimes referred to as the Porkies, is Michigan's largest state park. It occupies 93 square miles of land near the Lake Superior shoreline in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The park was established in 1945 as a way to preserve one of the largest tracts of virgin timber--mixed hardwoods and hemlocks--in North America.

The park is home to a wide variety of plants, birds, and animals, including the bald eagle, barred owl, several species of warblers, black bear, bobcat, woodland wildflowers, lichens, ferns, and mosses (some of them rare).

The Porcupine Mountains are also part of an area of land referred to as the Copper Country. The Copper Country stretches almost 100 miles from the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula down toward Ontonagon County, During its peak mining years, the Copper Country was one of the world's largest producers of copper.

In 2012 the author and two friends hiked a portion of the park's 93 miles of trails and visited a couple of its historic copper mines, as well as the abandoned Fourteen Mile Point Lighthouse east of the city of Ontonagon. This book details their visit.

85 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 24, 2013