Brockway Mountain Adventure

We headed for Copper Harbor the last weekend in May for a birthday celebration and to make our annual pilgrimage to Brockway Mountain, Eagle Harbor and other points north. Spring is well underway in Houghton-Hancock (how nice for early June). But north of Mohawk, the budding of the trees and sprouting of the leaves are noticeably behind even the slow-starters of Houghton County.

With the cooler-than-normal May temperatures, and despite lots of rain, I’m willing to bet you would still have found a spot of snow here and there in the deep woods off the Mandan Road.

The lunch business seemed pretty good at the Harbor Haus and there were several customers in the general store, where we bought our post-lunch treats (“I just love coming to Copper Harbor,” Laura said in between bites of Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream). While there, we also managed to dispel a disturbing rumor making the rounds – that Marquette-based Jilberts Dairy was going to stop making ice cream. The general store’s proprietor said he has heard nothing about that, so we’re chalking it up to an tale stemming from the sale of Jilberts to Deans (no relation) Foods a couple of years ago.

On the way up Brockway, we made a stop at a relatively new hiking trail on land owned by the Michigan Nature Association. The trail descends partway down the hill (not all that far – it is a pretty easy hike) and affords a view of Lake Superior before turning back uphill. It was there that we spotted two freighters plying the waters. To me, freighters always seem to barely move against the horizon, particularly from the far-away vantage of Brockway Mountain.

Passing freighters from Brockway Mountain

This time, though, we were treated to freighters heading in opposite directions in the same shipping channel, giving a perspective on their speed. It was pretty interesting and, since I had a camera, I had to try to capture the moment of passing on film. (Or, I guess, on silicon substrate, since it is a digital camera. Whatever.)

After walking around the top of Brockway and paying a visit to the Skytop Inn, we navigated along the coast to Eagle Harbor, past the new mega-homes that have sprouted in northern Keweenaw County over the last few years. We talked about the prices such abodes must fetch, then the car fell silent, with each of us lost in our own thoughts. I think of it as lake effect – the contemplative spell of Lake Superior.

May you experience its effect in the not-too-distant future.

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Letters from Last Time

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From John Titlow (jtitlow@conxall.com)

Hi Dean:

Nice to see that you're back "on the air" so to speak. Your e-mail below did make a point about paid advertising and the potential of customer steerage. One can take that item a step further and compare the drivers "home" data with the in-travel data to actually "steer" customers to and from a service, based upon an assumed racial profile. (It is electronically possible, and if there is money to be made then the probability of racial steering by an electronic database becomes real.)

One of the items that us as a nation or world are missing in the mad rush to compile data for money is the mix and mix-up of data. The old phrase "garbage in = garbage out" needs to be modified to "private identity in = mixed identity out". As US citizens, except Californians, we have no laws
that protect us from a corporation screwing up our data files or using those corrupted files to make a buck. So your Home Depot analogy is not all that far fetched.

Is the U.P. going to digital TV? Of course they are as they have no choice. All digital was to take place on Feb 9, 2009 now I read it is Feb 20, 2009. My thought is to watch out. A typical TV broadcast antenna will consume over 100,000+ watt hours of electrical energy and that is a big cost to a television station. To go over to all digital TV across the board, the major TV networks wanted to turn the antennas off and legally they can. Provided that 90%+ of the viewers in a 30 mile radius of the transmitting tower are on cable.

The other item is that in between the TV station frequencies there are cell phone signals that can screw up a digital TV signal. (Not cable) Digital has no snow it is either "on" or "black", there is no in between. Another reason the networks use to request the ability to turn off their antennas.

Myself, and many others I might add, simply won't pay the extorted costs for cable TV. In the Chicago area currently $49.95 a month (less taxes) for "Basic" service and soon to be $69.95 for digital including the monthly lease for a "special" digital box. So far in the new millennium it has been good bye to a land phone line and soon TV. Anyone up in your area saying good bye to electronic communication devices because of the high cost? Simply too much of a good thing.

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Dean sez: Yes, the UP is going to digital TV along with the rest of the country. There are notices, it seems, that run every Sunday on the two over-the-air stations from Marquette. I’d like to do some research, but I’m guessing the U.P. was in the vanguard of cable television. I remember when I was in school at Tech, the mid-70s version of the Weather Channel was a camera that panned back and forth over three analog gauges – temperature, humidity and barometer. It provided great dinnertime entertainment.

Personally, I believe cable is pricing itself out of the market – the Woodbecks dropped to Extremely Basic cable (now $16/month) a year ago. I get the hankerin’ for SportsCenter and “Dirty Jobs” every once in awhile, and can’t participate in the swooning over Stephen Colbert, but somehow life goes on.

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Email from Art Rathke (artrathke@yahoo.com)

Dean,

I have to tell you that there IS a place for GPS in the Copper Country. A couple of years ago we were looking for a kennel for our Westie. There was (or is) a fairly new place somewhere south of Boston Loc. We NEVER would have found it without the GPS. That road had two names and was not the easiest to find, but the GPS took us right there.

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Dean sez: That road does have two names and one of them is “New Road.” I’ve ridden my bike on it. It’s not that new…