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Unfinished business – returning to the mouth of the Sand River
You might think the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is so vast and so wild that it doesn’t change much. But when you visit more than once and pay attention to the details, you soon discover that change is constant. Friends board member Neil Howk shares a case in point on the way to the mouth of the Sand River.
In mid-September, Mark Peterson, Garry Miller, and I took three sea kayaks to Little Sand Bay for a paddle trip along the mainland shoreline west toward Big Sand Bay. Our goal was to reach the mouth of the Sand River and paddle up into the slough. We made it within about a mile of the Sand River when the wind started picking up out of the northeast. We turned around and battled a head wind and some white caps all the way back to the kayak launch. We were glad we turned around when we did, leaving the Sand River exploration for another day.
Neil Howk paddling Little Sand Bay
On October 28th, I returned to Big Sand Bay to take care of some unfinished business by walking the beach out to the mouth of the Sand River. Though I had the beach pretty much to myself for about an hour, I saw signs that others had recently made the same walk. There were fresh deer tracks in the wet sand. Boot and paw prints were evidence that someone had walked their dog on the beach earlier that morning.
Tracks on the beach – Neil Howk photo
A bald eagle soared past me out over the bay. It was a couple years ago that I last made the trek to the river mouth. A lot about the walk seemed familiar, and yet something had changed. As I scanned the shoreline east of the river it hit me…the eagle nest was gone.
Mouth of the Sand River – Neil Howk photo
Sophie taking water samples – Neil Howk photo
Big Sand Bay eagle nest – Neil Howk photo
“The eagle nest was gone” – Neil Howk photo
Fifteen years ago, my daughter Sophie was a sophomore at Bayfield High School. Her science teacher encouraged her to do an independent research project to compete in local and regional science fairs. At the time National Park Service scientists were gathering blood and feather samples from eaglets in the Apostle Islands area to analyze them for the presence of chemicals like DDT and PCBs. One of the eagle nests they studied was near the mouth of the Sand River.
They suggested to Sophie and her teacher that it might be interesting to take water samples from near the nest and analyze the samples for temperature, acidity, and dissolved Oxygen content. I volunteered to transport Sophie to the nest site near the Sand River on a weekly basis in the spring of 2010. The nest was in the top of a large white pine tree. Based on the size of the nest, it was used repeatedly over a period of years.
The tree with the nest is no longer standing, nor are the other pine trees that surrounded it. As I walked along the beach yesterday, there were areas where I had to scramble over the trunks of several large pine trees that had toppled in the past several years. The Apostle Islands are a work in progress. Lake Superior is constantly working to reconfigure area shorelines. Recent high lake levels and windstorm events have caused a lot of shoreline erosion. The shoreline at Big Sand Bay is an example of this “unfinished business”. Part of the Apostle Islands’ mystique is that they are constantly changing.
Visitors can regularly return to familiar areas that may be completely different from the way you remember them. I wonder how things will change the next time I visit the Sand River.
Downed trees along Sand River shoreline – Neil Howk photo
Neil Howk began working as a park ranger/interpreter for the National Park Service in 1978. He worked at a number of different parks over the years and served as the assistant chief of interpretation at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore from 1993-2016. He now serves as a board member of Friends of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
Additional topics related to this article | Interpretation | Little Sand Bay | Plants and Animals | Visitor Stories
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