Superior Wilderness: Isle Royale National Park

Rating:
Summary: The second-best book on Isle Royale
Review: Isle Royale is an unusual national park. You have to take a boat trip of at least three hours to get there, and your options leave from out-of-the-way places like Houghton or Copper Harbor, Michigan, and Grand Portage, Minnesota. As a result, the people who go there tend to say a while--four days, on average. The park is 99% wilderness, so most of those people are backpacking, canoeing or kayaking, while the rest stay at the Rock Harbor Lodge and take day trips.

Given this usage, the book that every visitor needs is Jim Dufresne's guide to trails and water routes. Dufresne also includes information about the flora and fauna.

However, "Superior Wilderness" should be your second book. It is organized around chapters dealing with particular habitats and an animal found in that habitat. Shelton talks about squirrels, falcons and snowshoe hares as well as the famous wolvees and moose. Shelton also spends a lot of time on the forests and the varieties of flora in different parts of the island. (If you like trees, supplement this book with Bernd Heinrich's "The Trees in my Forest.")

I found the book interesting before I went to Isle Royale, and I enjoyed reading it again after my return. The writing style put me off a little bit, which is why I gave it 3 stars instead of 4. Shelton reaches for lyricism about nature but doesn't, in my opinion, quite pull it off. If you want lyricism, read Bernd Heinrich's books.

The author's own comments state that he wrote the book for armchair travelers as well as for people visiting the island. If you want to read about Isle Royale without going there, this is the best book available (and I'd give it four stars).


Rating:
Summary: The best general book on Isle Royale
Review: Isle Royale is one of the country's most spectacular wilderness areas, and also one of our most remote and least-visited National Parks. It's a delightful place, with an intriguing natural and human history, yet the number of books and publications currently available about Isle Royale is amazingly small. At last, here's a book that does the island justice, essential reading for anyone who is even thinking about a trip to this out-of-the-way paradise.

Shelton does a superb job of describing the island's flora and fauna, devoting plenty of attention to the animals visitors especially hope to see -- the wolf and the moose -- without neglecting the role of humbler species like the gull, the loon, the beaver and the red squirrel. He also gives a good account of the various human activities carried out on the island -- copper mining, fishing, lumbering, resorts and finally running and caring for a National Park. All in all I found "Superior Wilderness" by far the best introduction to the park, better than, for example, Jim DuFresne's "Isle Royale: Foot Trails and Water Routes," though DuFresne's book is very useful in planning hikes and campsites. True Isle Royale aficionados should also pick up Howard Sivertson's "Once Upon an Isle," a series of reminiscences about growing up in the island's fishing community, illustrated by the author's delightful paintings, and "Isle Royale: A Photographic History," which charmingly documents the island's human history.