June 24, 2025
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
Last night we fell asleep lulled by the sound of Lake Superior’s waves, and we wake to the same water music. Today we are moseying toward Copper Harbor with a list of places to visit along the way.
Our first stop is Black Creek Nature Sanctuary, where we follow a trail through conifer and hardwood forest past starflower, bunchberry, Canada mayflower with its foamy white flowers, bearberry, pipsissewa, false Solomon’s seal, and a plethora of stemless lady’s-slipper in various stages of bloom. Thimbleberry blossoms promise berries later in the season, and fly honeysuckle flowers sweeten the air. Where a bridge crosses a little stream Canada anemone bloom white among the grasses. A bird calls, and wind rustles the needles of pine trees. A holy sort of silence permeates the air.
On our way to our next stop we spy a roadside ditch crowded with blueflag iris, yellow pond lily, and flat-leaved bladderwort all in bright bloom, a colorful micro-habitat we’ve never seen before. We’ve learned in our wanderings that sometimes the roadsides we’re driving by are the real riches, and this begins to turn into a roadside sort of day.
Farther along we stop at a nameless fen where last August Kelly found hooded ladies-tresses blooming. Now at the end of June we’re way too early for the ladies-tresses, but we do find water avens, meadow buttercup, and four platanthera huronensis orchids. We’ll return in August (if we can) in hopes of seeing the spectacular spectacle of hundreds of hooded ladies’-tresses in full flower.
Our next roadside stop is a side-of-the-highway sand blowout with more beach heather than we’ve ever seen before in bright yellow flower. It’s also when I discover that I can’t find my notebook where I record everything we see throughout the year–flowers, weather, sights, sounds, and GPS coordinates.
Panic ensues. We tear the car apart without finding the notebook and try to remember the last time I wrote in it. Before lunch? After the fen stop? We retrace our route back to the fen, and there we spy the notebook by the side of the road, where it must had fallen when I got out to eat my soup. Clearly it’s a day for roadside finds.
Jubilant, we drive on to our last flower chasing stop of the day, a parking lot at Great Sand Bay where wind blasts across the lake, and kite surfers skim over the water. Along a trail heading into George Hite Dunes and Marshes Preserve we find giant rattlesnake plantain and tesselated rattlesnake plantain, both in bud, for a total of three more orchids seen so far on the trip.
We end the day at our motel in Copper Harbor, home for the next few nights. Outside our room the lake lies placid now, but all day we have felt its wild energy. Tomorrow our class on wildflowers of the Keweenaw Peninsula begins, and we can hardly wait to learn more about this rich and amazing place.
See more of what we are seeing now.
