Porcupine damage

Nicolet National Forest is a land of aspen-birch-maple-fir woods, glacial lakes, beaver dam wetlands and cold, fast flowing streams. This recreational wonderland is about a five- to six-hour ride due north of Chicago. It's one of those places that you're shocked is not overrun by Illinois Flatlanders or cheeseheads from the southern portion of Wisconsin. I'm hoping the tens of readers of this blog don't all sprint there.


Highlights of the ride up included an american white pelican soaring over the I-43 bridge in Green Bay and a male northern harrier gliding across US 141 north of Titletown. We pulled into Lost Lake campground in the late afternoon on Saturday. Of 20 sites or so at the campground, only about two-thirds were taken. We chose a site on a slight rise that offered a good deal of privacy. Trillium carpeted the forest floor in much of the Nicolet, including the area right around our site. (I've uploaded a few photos from the trip. Trillium was not camera shy.) The campground is in the middle of an aspen-maple forest. It doesn't offer direct views of the lake, but the shore is readily accessible.

Expensive fossil fuel prices be damned, we decided we wanted to see Lake Superior on Sunday. We drove an hour to the town of L'Anse, where the nearest arm of the lake comes in east of the Keweenau Peninsula. A bank temperature gauge gave the Fahrenheit reading as 54, but with a stiff wind blowing the wind chill must have been in the 30s. This didn't stop intrepid Yoopers from wandering along the shore in shorts and setting up a picnic in the town pavilion.

We stopped off at Canyon Falls on the way back toward Wisconsin. Here the rushing Sturgeon River plummets about 30 feet in a narrow gorge. I don't think pictures or a written description can really capture how green and lush the vegetation was throughout the trip. The Sturgeon Gorge was especially impressive after a rain shower.

The skies finally cleared when we settled in at camp yesterday evening. The last bit of sunset had disappeared when we heard a steady rustling in the underbrush. The noise was approaching our site. Flashlight beam showed a rotund gray animal moving steadily past the site. If it was a raccoon, it was shocking how little interest it had in us and our food. Two outhouses are just about 30 yards away, and soon we hear a steady scratching at the rear of the men's latrine. The flashlight revealed not a raccoon but a porcupine. Having never seen one before, at first glance I thought it was an incredibly mangy, weird raccoon. But it would occasionally flare the quills on its back. (We thought porkies could shoot quills but later learned this is not true.) It had a long neck and a thick, furry tail. The porcupine continued gnawing on the wood of the outhouse wall for at least an hour--apparently eating wood is part of its diet. In the morning, we saw that a large patch of siding in the shape of Australia had been removed.