Royale Air Service Offers Seasonal, Daily Flights to Beautiful Isle Royale National Park


 

     A densely forested island wilderness in the northwest corner of Lake Superior, Isle Royale National Park offers outstanding backcountry recreation and rich human and natural history. It's one of the few places in the United States that's beyond the reach of the automobile; the only way to get to the park is by seaplane or boat.  The island itself is a jigsaw puzzle of land and water, a complex topography that attracts kayakers, canoeists, divers and anglers, as well as back-country hikers.


     A giant, jagged seam in the enormous crease left in the earth as glacial ice retreated some 10,000 years ago, Isle Royale is the largest island in the world's largest freshwater lake.  Native Americans dug copper here 3,000 years ago.  Later French, English and Americans trapped a wealth of furs.  During the 19th century's "copper fever," mining companies sank shafts in the bedrock; left behind are more than 1,000 mining pits.  Commercial fishing eventually supplanted mining in the early 20th century, until the National Park was established in the 1930s.
     Isle Royale is ecologically complex.  Three distinct forest types, including a remnant of ice-age boreal woodlands, grow on an island just 9 miles wide and 45 miles long.  A century ago, lynx and caribou were the dominant mammals.  Today, these species are extinct, replaced by wolves and moose, which only arrived here from the mainland in the 20th century.

 


     Because of it's location, Isle Royale is one of the least visited of our National Parks.  Anyone willing to make the extra effort to travel to this beautiful, mysterious place will be richly rewarded.