When we left off, 
In the picture above you can see Lake Superior to the left as well as the city of Copper Harbor in the middle left. Just to the right of the town is Lake Fanny Hooe and the smaller Lake Manganese in the foreground. I will explain where this photo was taken from in just a little bit.
At just about the end of Highway 41 is the Copper Harbor State park. We decided to drive through the park to see if it was someplace we would want to stay sometime. There is a historic fort on the grounds of the state park. Since it was already afternoon, we decided to skip visiting the fort. I remember going there as a kid and it really wasn't anything super special. If you have seen one historic fort you have kind of seen them all.
The park was nice but the facility buildings were very old and the camping sites were very much on top of each other. Add to that the place was literally crawling with mountain bikers and it will probably not be a place we ever camp at.
You can continue past the end of Highway 41 deeper toward the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. My coworker told me that it is mostly two track roads and since we needed my truck to be in good condition to haul us all the way home, we made the decision to avoid off-roading. Apparently at the end of the road is an old rocket range which could be visit someday when we have the proper vehicle.
Instead we made our way back through town and I started heading up US-26 along the coast of Lake Superior to try and get us to Agate Beach. We got detoured when I saw the Brockway Mountain Scenic Byway and decided to take a drive up it. I had read about it online before we made the trip, so I knew it has some pretty fantastic views.
That is where the photo at the beginning was taken from, as well as these:
There are lots of spots on the narrow mountain road to pull over and take photos. Again, I was surprised by the number of mountain bikers that were all over the mountain. It make it very hard to find a good place to park with my big ole truck. Apparently, there are bike paths all up and down the side of the mountain.
I know it probably sounds like I hate mountain bikers. I don't, trust me, I don't, but I have found they can often be very self absorbed and not so aware of the environment around them when they are all "geared" up and focused on their bikes. We had a run in on an elevator several years ago with a couple of mountain bikers and their bikes (yes, on an elevator!).
Anyway, it makes it a little hard to enjoy the scenery when you have to constantly worry about a biker popping up suddenly from some side trail and getting run over by your 7000 pound vehicle.
Here, enjoy some more pictures:
By now it was getting to be late afternoon, so we turned the truck around and started to head back down 41 towards our campground.
We did make a quick stop at this popular tourist attraction. Many people get their pictures taken next to this giant snow thermometer. You can see that the highest recorded snowfall for a single Winter was in 1978-79 at 390 inches of snow. That is over 32 feet of snow! Last year they got off a little easy with a snowfall of only about 26 feet.
As you can see even on a light year like in 1999-2000 they still got just shy of 15 feet of snow. Imagine all that snow paired with the roads I was telling you about earlier in Houghton and Hancock and you can imagine how precarious it gets.
Continuing back to the campground we just had one more stop to make for this day trip, but that is something I will get to tomorrow.
Come back to find out what it might be!
Previous posts in this series can be found here
@bozz/bozzlife-the-beginning-of-a-grand-adventure
@bozz/bozzlife-traveling-the-up-part-1
@bozz/bozzlife-traveling-the-up-part-2
@bozz/bozzlife-traveling-the-up-part-3
@bozz/bozzlife-traveling-the-up-part-4
@bozz/bozzlife-traveling-the-up-part-5
All pictures taken by
