North

I just got back yesterday from another road trip up to Marquette to see Spring, my girlfriend. I didn't get many pics while I was up there...we were too busy enjoying each others' company for me to spend much time taking pictures. One has to keep one's priorities straight.

I spent parts of three days driving up there. I left Wednesday, camped that night and Thursday night and then arrived in Marquette Friday, spent the weekend in Marq. And then headed back Monday morning (giving myself all day to travel which I broke up with frequent stops to take pics. So anyway, the point of this whole paragraph is that I took a few more pictures than will fit in one blog entry, so I'll do two entries: one for the drive up there and one for the drive back.

The Drive North:
Do y'all remember a few weeks ago how I talked about forgetting to take the camera attachment for my tripod with me and how, because of that, I set the shutter-speed fast enough for handholding and just underexposed the pics? (See blog entry "Rolling" posted July 9th) Despite their obvious technical incorrectness I got word that some people still thought they were cool. I was out taking pics near a stream that runs through Platteville, WI shooting some of the plants growing hear the water that were in direct sunlight. I had just been on a trail near the stream that was shaded and had set my camera to “Manual” to adjust for the lower light conditions in the woods. Now that I was out in the sunlight the settings needed to be changed (or, as I usually do, I need to set the camera to automatically set the shutter speed and aperture and stuff...the camera is really much smarter than I am when it comes to stuff like that). Anyway I forgot to change the settings and exposed several pics. I also forgot to look at the LCD which would have shown that the pics were horribly overexposed. I thought I was getting these cool pictures. Some of the leaves I was shooting had contrasting color in their veins. The veins were one color and the main part of the leaf was different. So when I finally saw the pictures I was kind of torqued off...but after a second they started to kind of grow on me.

I stayed one night at a Forest Service campground that was directly on the Brule River (in this place the Brule makes the border between the U.P. Of Michigan and Wisconsin). As is par for the course for me I spent quite a bit of time walking around in the river (which is pretty small here...hip deep was about the maximum depth right here). I took a picture of my feet in the river.

This picture is of a fern that was leaning out over the water of the river. The background of the picture is water in the river. It looks so dark because the sun was shining on the fern leaf but not on the background.

It was kind of tricky (and we couldn't be sure in our identification without being able to see the leaves) but Spring and I identified this as some kind of Arrowhead. This was also on the Brule River.

I bought a Gazetteer of Michigan just so I could have some sort of clue as to how to get around and where natural features are. But road names are not included on this map...which is kind of frustrating. So anyway, I saw a waterfall on the map but didn't know how to get there because roads didn't have names. So I stopped in the very small town of Republic to ask directions on how to get there. I went in a bar and the people seemed friendly enough...and not too drunk. I pointed to the falls I wanted to go to (they weren't named on the map kind of like the roads) and said, “I want to go here.” They gave me directions and I thanked them and left. I still couldn't find this damn falls so I stopped and asked directions again. Turns out that the first set of directions got me to a different falls (in their defense, the falls were on the same river).

This is Black River Falls, the mystery falls I talked about in the last paragraph.

Sugarloaf Mountain (“Mountain” being a relative term...this would have been considered a small rise if we were in the Rockies) is close to Marquette and overlooks Lake Superior. And plus the weather was awesome. We climbed it and enjoyed the view and roped a kid into taking our picture while we were up there.