On to Ontario, Canada

Before leaving the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) highway 123 invites us to Tahquamenon Falls State Park and a last look at Lake Superior before crossing the big bridge at Sault St. Marie.  Stopping to read the interpretive signs on the way to the falls I was informed that over a billion board feet of logs were floated down the Tahquamenon River around the turn of the century.  Of course when the logs went over the falls there was a huge loss of timber due to damage.  It was just considered a cost of business and after all, the logs were unlimited.  I found that same perception expressed at Theodore Roosevelt Nat’l Park regarding the boundless raw materials to be found in the wilderness.  Buffalo hunters, who virtually decimated buffalo for the hides to support the saddle, tack and harness industry of the late 1800s, also figured the supply would never run out.  Now the oil frenzy in North Dakota is fueled by such notions that there’s even more in oil fields to the south so extract away and don’t worry that the fracking method used to extract the oil contaminates the ground and water within 1000 feet of the well (according to the ranger at the park and this website: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fracking )

One of the ironies of having a resource rich country is that it has instilled in us a culture of extravagance and now that we need cut back to reduce our imprint it’s either too hard or unthinkable.  Old Edward Abbey was right when he said we needed to re discover economies of scale.  Enough

 Interesting thing we noticed on Canada Highway 17.  The road goes through 400 miles of forested covered rock.  Every road cut exposed 5 to 50 feet of solid rock.  On many of these cuts, we notices piles of rock.  We would call them cairns or ducks.  But the Canadian Inuit would call them inukshuks.  The Inuit placed them for several reasons.  They would stack the rocks along ridgelines to herd the caribou to a place they could be killed.  Or they sometimes they were just playful artistic espressions and then they might mark a route.  Whatever the purpose of these modern inukhsuks, they were enjoyable to see.

Pictures: Tahquamenon Falls, MI, Roadside inukshuk, Ruth in the woods,  more woods