Final Historical Cruise Of The Season

The Keweenaw Waterway historical cruise series comes to a close for the season with Isle Royal National Park offering visitors one last ride aboard the Ranger III.

Passengers boarded the 165 foot vessel for a final 3 hour tour where they learned about some of nature’s forces that shaped the Keweenaw Waterway as we know it today.

“It’s really quite nice. Once we leave here we turn around and go out the lake to the canal out to the south entry where we turn around and come back. There’s some really great landscape down there, saw a few eagles, and got a good historical perspective from our friends at the Keweenaw National Historical Park,” said Captain Rand Attaway of the Ranger III.

While on the trip, folks learned about how glacial movement at the end of the last ice age left these bodies of water and made a natural path to Lake Superior.

At one time, it was a small river, used for transportation and fishing by the natives, but was extended and dredged in the 1860’s to allow for trade and commerce to the cities of Houghton and Hancock.

The project of the Portage Canal was also supported in part by local mining companies that saw the benefit of providing easier water travel for the purposes of exporting their product from the region and importing immigrant laborers.

The park has been offering waterway cruises for quite some time, but the historical part of the tour was added last year.

Although the Keweenaw Waterway historical cruises have come to an end for the season, ferry service to and from the island will continue for a couple more weeks. The park entered its low season rate schedule earlier this week, effectively dropping the price of round trip ferry service until mid September.

“At that point, we are going to start slowing down and start pulling things off the island. We’ll be all wrapped up by the end of October,” said Attaway.