I wake before dawn to the peal of a snowmobile opening throttle on Lake Superior outside my hotel room window. As the sun rises pink over Basswood Island across the shore from Legendary Waters Resort and Casino, I fix instant oatmeal cups and shelf-stable microwave bacon for my kids in our deluxe queen room. I feel clever for arriving early.
I drove from Minneapolis up to Wisconsin’s Bayfield County the night before the Apostle Islands ice caves were set to open to the public for the first time since 2015. But I don’t fully appreciate the public’s enthusiasm for the event. Even though we check out of our hotel room well before 8 a.m. to drive 18 miles to a shuttle bus parking lot in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, I’m stunned by the roughly 200 people who are already lined up when I steer my minivan into the gravel lot. Everyone’s waiting for a bus to ferry them to Myers Beach, the access point to the ice caves.
I send my oldest child running to snag a spot in the growing line. Then I park and pay the $10 lot fee. My younger kids help me organize our backpack full of snacks and Steger and Bancroft expedition-level assortment of ski masks, stocking hats, and back-up mittens that will accessorize our outfits of snow pants, puffy coats, and waterproof shells.
I planned the impromptu trip on Saturday night after the National Park Service announced that the ice caves would most likely open to the public this morning. Located along the south shore of Lake Superior, just east of the Apostle Islands, the mainland sea caves are accessible during snow-free months by kayak or hiking trails. Every winter the cliffs and caves are coated with ice from snowmelt and Superior spray, but the park service only opens the ice cave access to foot traffic when the surface lake ice is thick and stable enough to safely support ice tourists willing to walk a mile to reach the site.
Climate change has shrunk ice coverage, on average, year-to-year on Lake Superior, making ice-cave access anomalous. Eleven years ago, in 2015, I couldn’t make it to the caves, and I’ve had FOMO ever since. The ice caves opened only twice in the 2010s and three times in the 2000s. This might be my only chance this decade to see them. With rising carbon levels and a government that seems to like greenhouse gasses more than people, I was willing to drop my long weekend to-do list and venture north to see the frozen spectacle.
Our arctic explorer get-ups keep us warm while we wait in the parking lot and befriend our line neighbors, a young couple from Duluth who drove over early in the morning, and a middle-aged couple from Lakeville who’d already been up north for the long weekend when they saw the serendipitous news alert. We wait. And we wait some more. Shuttle buses arrive every 15 minutes and barely affect the line in front of us.
I take laps around the parking lot, partly to stay warm and partly to find out from where my fellow Yaktrax-clacking adventurers have arrived. Also, as a Minneapolis member of the resistance, I can’t turn the out-of-state plate part of my brain off; it’s a federal occupational hazard. I note license plates from Wisconsin and Minnesota, of course, but also Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, and Ontario.
An hour passes. Then another. If we had walked along Highway 13 to Myers Beach, we’d certainly be there by now. Estimating when it will be our turn to board the 28-passenger shuttle starts to feel impossible, like climate math. There are simply too many carbon parts per million in the atmosphere. There are simply too many people ahead of us in line.
I consider carving an ice cave out of the snow pile at the edge of the parking lot. But I never consider leaving without seeing the caves themselves. Finally, somehow, the Earth turns, the buses loop, the line moves, and we’re at the front. Our shuttle pulls up and a skinny guy carrying Nordic skis disembarks—the first return trekker. “How was it?” I call to him. He yells back, “Beautiful!”
After a short ride that costs $10 per person for a round trip, my kids and I arrive at Myers Beach. I pay a separate $10 per person fee via QR code printed on a sandwich board next to a bank of porta potties. The logistics will later be criticized online, but the temporary toilets remind me that organizing a pop-up ice tourism event is a huge undertaking for the park service. While the shuttle wait wasn’t great, I’d rather have an imperfect but regulated way to safely reach the ice caves than an unregulated free-for-all or, worse, a privatized cash grab.
My kids and I descend a flight of stairs to the lake, which is covered in low fog. The footprints of our cave-peeping forebears have packed down a path in the snow, which, off trail, is the consistency of granulated sugar. We pass a cache of federal workers doing worthwhile work, connecting sno-bulances to the backs of their snowmobiles, a reminder that some federal agencies are still good, actually. We walk, forest barely visible through the mist on our right and, to our left, a blank space of lake ice and haze. A mile in, the light turns gloomy and darker as the shoreline rises up into a sun-blocking cliff. We get close and spot our first ice cave. We tromp through the ankle-deep sugar snow, then slide on glazed ice to reach it.
It’s a cliff covered in ice and we walk into it, then under a ceiling of ice and through an ice tunnel. I run my mittened hand along a smooth ice wall. As a city dweller, when I think of ice, I think of the clear ice dams that form on the eaves of my house, or the opaque oval of a hockey rink. In my regular, quotidian life, ice is clear or white. But here, at the ice caves, the ice comes in washed out Caribbean aquamarine and turquoise.
Through sheets of transparent ice, we see gradations of the cliff. In other spots, deliquescence creates ombré ice that fades from white to tan to brown to yellow. Up close, inside the ice, I can see air bubbles and stripes and striations. On the surface are ripples and crystals and rounded lumps and jagged corners. The ice comes in every imaginable texture and shape, as if an ice god decreed to all the water molecules in the Apostle Island National Lakeshore vicinity, “If you can dream it, you can be it,” and the little H2Os became sharp and smooth and delicate and tough and, really, it’s wild to think that everything here, all of it, is a permutation of water.
There’s a cliff with a hole through it that must be the Keyhole ice cave. Otherwise, I don’t know which cave is which. The map I printed from the National Park Service website is imprecise and the signage is scant and inaccurate. That’s OK—we’re in an ice warp, where time and geography don’t matter. We wander in and out of cliff formations, ogling gargantuan icicles. We marvel at solid mounds that look like puffy perma-clouds. We climb up onto ice shelves to peer inside cliff openings covered in more ice.
My favorite are the micro caves, small openings close to the lake surface. Craggy ice teeth beckon, like a benevolent cave-ice monster inviting us to view his insides. My kids and I slide into the small caves on our bellies. In the dark, along seams where rock meets frozen lake, lines of bluish light glow. On the ceilings, frozen bulbs the size of eggs have grown spindly frost crystals.
Back outside, I try to get a few pictures without people in them, but it’s impossible. That’s OK, too. There are so many of us, it’s a group experience with everyone grinning, taking turns, and snapping selfies. Two boys, one toddler and one teenager, independent of each other, both point to a giant bulging ice wall and chuckle. Each of them points and exclaims, “BLUE!”
I feel lucky I get to see this. Also guilty that, just because I’m white, I have freedom of movement in Minneapolis, and that I can afford to leave the city on a spontaneous ice vacation and forget, for a day, about ICE. I get a little weepy about being one of the thousands of winter tourists who gets to be here. I get a lot mad that we can’t harness this enthusiasm for micro-climate geographic wonders and use it to do something, anything, everything to reverse carbon pollution parts per million in the atmosphere so that winter can stay cold, so that I don’t have to wait another decade to experience this marvel. I hate to think that this could be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s so special, so pure, so marvelous. How could we not do everything in our collective power to make sure Lake Superior will get covered in surface ice again and again and again?
We can’t stay at the ice caves forever. We’re out of snacks. One of my kids has wet feet. We have to pee. Everyone’s anxious about another long shuttle line. So we leave the cliffs and hike back. The fog has lifted and the sunshine feels summery. We shed our layers and march back to Myers Beach across a Hoth-like landscape. Hopefully not for the last time in my life.
If the ice caves reopen this year, or ever again, here are my tips:
- Think about what time you want to arrive. Subtract three hours. That’s when you should get to the designated parking lot to catch the shuttle bus.
- If you’re coming from the west, consider overshooting the ice caves and parking at the gravel pit lot near Bayfield. At Myers Beach, lines for the return trip to the gravel pit parking were much shorter than the lines for the shuttles back to Cornucopia.
- The National Park Service website recommends bringing water and dressing for subzero temperatures—follow this advice! But also, wear waterproof boots and bring an empty backpack for the layers you’ll shed as you warm up on the hike.
- Pack handwarmers, snacks, a lunch, and sunscreen.
- Bring cash for the shuttle and a credit card for the park service fee.
