Amy's So-Called Life: Up north in the U.P.

I'm a little behind on this, but I'm finally posting this....

Feb 28-Mar3, 2014

Once again I headed up to Big Bay to enjoy another Becoming an Outdoor Woman (BOW) weekend. I took off from Holland Thursday afternoon and made it to Marquette around midnight on Feb 28^th. The drive up was not bad at all, but the weather was unbelievably cold. The UP was getting temperatures down in the -30s at night. As I opened the car door when I arrived at my hotel for the evening, the sharp cold air hit my lungs like a knife making me cough instantly. I should have known it was going to be a cold weekend when the inside of my windows were frosting over during my drive up, something I had never seen happen before. Anyway, I checked in to my hotel and pretty much crashed for the night.

The next morning, I grabbed some free breakfast downstairs before heading out to meet up with a group of girls in Chatham. The plan was to hike to Eben Ice caves before driving up to Big Bay to check in for the weekend.

When I arrived at the village pub around 10am, there were only 4 other girls there (Tammy, Candi, Angie, and Kate). I guess the rest of the group bailed because of the extreme cold conditions. So, we drove from the pub over to the parking area for the caves. From there, we had about a mile hike back into the woods. For the hike, I was wearing: 1 pair of Under Armour long underwear, gortex running pants, bib ski pants, an under armour turtleneck, and under armour sweatshirt, a down winter jacket and a wind breaker shell on top, 2 pairs of wool socks, 1 pair of boots, plus 2 pairs of gloves and a buff to cover my face and head. Even with all those layers on, my hands were still ice cold!

Since there were only the 5 of us, our hike into the woods went fairly quickly. I have been to these ice caves before, but because of the extreme cold, the areas ‘behind’ the ice falls were frozen enough this year to walk on. It was awesome to see the light shine through the ice and the yellowish and greenish colors that it made.

After hanging around the caves for a little bit, we trekked back to the parking lot and drove back to the pub for some lunch. Afterwards, I took off and made the final hour drive up to Big Bay to check in to BOW.

I wasn't kidding about the cold.

Hiking to the Eben Ice Caves

Behind the ice

I arrived at Big Bay, checked in, laid out all my stuff and still had about 2 hours before dinner.

I decided to grab some snow shoes and hike down to Lake Superior and walk along the beach for a little bit. It was cool seeing all the ice and snow formations, but as I walked along I noticed that some of the ice was a distinct blue color. I had really never seen blue ice before. There was one area where the water had been leaching out of the rocks and formed a frozen waterfall. There was just enough room between the waterfall and the rocks for me to squeeze in. From this vantage point, with the light shining through, the ice looked brilliantly blue. At that point, I had just enough time to hike back to the camp to hear the first announcements and have dinner with the rest of the girls.

I was still cold

Frozen water walls along Lake Superior

Walking along the shores of Lake Superior

This ice has a blue hue to it....

Very blue from the backside where I squeezed in

After dinner that evening, we had some free time to do whatever we wanted. I just headed back to my room to lay and read. That’s when I first met my roommates. They were three older ladies that had been coming to this camp for several years now. They had known each other for a long time, but this had become their ‘girls weekend’ getaway.

The next morning, bright and early we all got up to head to our first class of the day. Since my goal is to sleep as late as possible, I just skip breakfast and sleep until everyone else gets ready and heads off to breakfast before I got up to get ready for the day. At 9am was my first class which was self-defense. Meghann took this class last year and said it was really interesting, so this year I signed up. We learned different points on the body to target to inflict pain on our attacker, how to dive and roll if we are pushed from behind and how to get out of different situations if we are being held down. It was actually pretty fun and amazing how you can apply very little pressure to certain parts of the body and make someone hurt really bad! Of course, when in doubt, always go for the gonads. Lol

Our morning class got done around noon. We all headed to lunch and then I had just enough time to run back to the room, bundle up and get ready for my afternoon snowmobiling class. As I was getting ready, the ladies I roomed with were there discussing their morning class and kind of secretly talking about ‘happy hour’ later on. I thought they were referring to some evening activity that we were going to do, but actually what they were talking about was having their own personal happy hour after dinner. We are not supposed to have alcohol on the camp grounds, but these ladies had snuck several little bottles of wine in their luggage and were planning on drinking after dinner. At first I think they thought I wouldn’t approve, but I just laughed and said I see no evil and hear no evil so don’t worry!

The first part of the class was learning snowmobile safety and just discussing all things snowmobile related. After our class portion, it was time to go actually snowmobile. Again, it was so cold outside, that our instructor gave us all face masks because she didn’t want anyone to get wind burn. I had on my 500 layers of clothes, but my hands were still burning cold. I even put hand warmers inside my mittens and it didn’t help much. The snowmobiles kept stalling and we had a hard time keeping them running, even though they had only sat there about 2 hours not running in the cold. I honestly have never experienced cold like this before in my life. I’m pretty sure I could have set myself on fire and still have been freezing. Anyway, after getting situated, we all got on our snowmobiles and headed out on the trail. Our instructor led us thru the woods on some nice, packed trails. Once we got used to our sleds, she let us speed ahead of her down the trail as fast as we wanted. I think I got mine up to 55mph, which doesn’t seem fast but it was fast enough for me and it was really fun. At the end of our class time, we headed back to camp for dinner and the evenings activities.

Extreme snowmobiling

One of the things that they do is this ‘silent auction’ for charity. They have a bunch of different things for sale, mostly outdoors or camp related, and you write your bid down. Anyway, I was perusing the items one last time before the auction was over and I ran into one of the ladies from my room. I quickly realized that she was wasted, apparently from their ‘happy hour’. Lol. Some of the ladies are a little bit older and I talked to this one lady that had knitting stuff with her. I started talking to her about it and she was telling me that not only does she knit, but they also had their own sheep and would shear the wool off their sheep, she would spin her own yarn and then knit socks, scarves, sweaters or just about anything out of wool. We had a great conversation, because I had a million questions for her about wool (How to do you wash the wool after shearing without it shrinking? Can you use wool from older sheep or does their wool get coarse and thick like old people’s hair does?) and she was delighted to talk about it and answer all my crazy questions!

The next morning we had one more class before camp was over for the weekend. My class was dogsledding. I did that same class the year before, but since I like playing with the dogs, I decided to take it again. We had the same two ladies teach this year as we had the previous year. The first part of class was just going over the basics of the sled and other equipment, the second part of class was actual sledding. Since I had done it before, I knew what to expect. I took my turn a couple of times and then I was just too cold to stand outside any longer. I ended up leaving class about 30 minutes early just to go inside the main building to be by the fire the warm up. Seeing the number of other girls who were sitting there, I guessed that a lot of them couldn’t take the cold any more either.

Dog sledding

After lunch everyone just went back to their rooms to back up and head home. My plan was to make it back to Holland that evening, but I was going to follow Tammy and Angie for a while and stop at different points to see some frozen water falls and ice formations on Lake Superior. I met up with them just outside of Marquette and we followed each other towards Munising stopping at some waterfalls along the way.

They were planning on staying the night in Munising and then heading back on Monday to Benton Harbor where they both live. I stopped with them at their hotel to change into warmer clothes because we were going to walk across the lake to Grand Island, which had not had a frozen bridge in almost 10 years. After changing and getting ready to head out, my car totally would not start. It seemed like it was the battery. Luckily, I had Gary’s portable charger with me. We hooked it up and jumped my car. However, things still didn’t seem quite right. The battery didn’t seem to be charging and here I was, only a mere 8 hour drive from home and it was a Sunday. So, I told my friends that I would have to forgo the super cool walk across the ice and high-tail it home before my car died.

I hopped in the Jeep and drove as fast as I could down the two lane UP roads. As I was coming into St. Ignace, the dashboard lights started to fail, the power steering started to fail, the radio wouldn’t turn on anymore and my phone wasn’t charging. I knew the battery was finally on its last leg. Just as I was exiting from Route 2 onto I-75 South, in front of the Mackinac Bridge toll booths, my Jeep died and ran out of steam. Luckily, the jeep rolled to a stop at the foot of the driveway to the state police post. I was just starting to look up tow trucks on my phone when a cop pulled out of the station and stopped by my vehicle to check on me. I told him what happened and where I was headed. He said that he could have dispatch call for a tow truck to George’s (which seemed like the only tow/car repair place in St. Ignace). Just as he was about to call, he says, “Hey, there’s one of George’s tow trucks now just coming off the bridge”. Within about 30 minutes from my Jeep dying, I had gotten my jeep towed to George’s and gotten dropped off at the nearest hotel by the officer. I thanked him immensely, checked in for the night and called the first person on everyone’s call list when you are in trouble: mom. Told mom everything was ok, but I would have to stay the night in St. Ignace and wait for them to hopefully fix my car on Monday.

Monday morning the guys at George’s called me and told me that both my alternator and my battery needed replaced. They said that because of the extreme cold temperatures at night, lots of people’s alternators and batteries were freezing up. He even said that one of my battery cells was completely frozen slush. So, they would fix my jeep up and hopefully have it done by the end of the day. So, here I was, carless and homeless in the U.P. Since I had nowhere to go, I talked to the girls at the front desk. They were nice enough to let me check out at noon instead of 11am. And, they let me hang out in their lobby watching TV and drinking free coffee.

After a couple of hours of being bored, I decided to get dressed and walk to the bridge, since I couldn’t have been more than ½ mile away. So, I layered up and took off walking towards the bridge. I was there about 5 minutes taking some pictures. Then I hear, “Hey, don’t we know you?”. I turned around and it just happened to be Angie and Tammy, the two girls I had to bail on back in Munising when I was supposed to walk to Grand Island with them. They were on their way back to Benton Harbor and had stopped for one more photo opp. I told them what had happened and they wished me luck before running back to the warm car to head home. After they left, I started trekking across the ice to the bridge. I was too chicken to walk on the ice under the bridge, but it must have been solid because I could see snowmobile tracks all under the bridge. After a few minutes of standing out of the wind, I decided I had had enough of freezing my butt off, so I started walking back.

I had just gotten back to the hotel when the guys at George’s called to let me know that my Jeep was finally done. I changed out of my layers, packed up my stuff and waited by the front entrance for them to pick me up. One of the guys came and got me and we headed over to downtown St. Ignace. On the way there, I asked him what all those 'dots‘ were on the ice between the main land and mackinaw island. He said that it was the Christmas Tree bridge for the snowmobilers. Apparently, when it freezes enough to drive on, they use Christmas trees to line the ice road bridge that forms between the mainland and the island. He said that this was the first time it had been cold enough to do in about 10 years. That, by far, was the coolest thing I had ever seen. So, back at George’s I paid my bill, thanked them a ton, and started my long drive home. But, not before stopping and taking a few pictures of the Christmas tree bridge first.