We spent a delightful Sunday exploring the shore of Lake Superior just north of Marquette, Michigan. Owen showed us a nice spot where he watched the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) when he was at Northern Michigan University. Little Presque Isle is a stretch of the Lake Superior shoreline that has a combination of sandy beaches, old-growth trees, and 2.3 billion-year-old granite outcrops/ledges/cliffs. There is a nice trail that runs along the shore and many trailheads in the area.
The term “Presque” comes from the French, meaning “almost,” which refers to a peninsula that is connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land. Early explorers and the Ojibwe tribe members used this location as a landing area to access the mainland. It was also an area where lumberjacks could bring logs to float down to Marquette. William Wetmore was a 19th-century businessman who owned slate and iron mining companies and other business interests, including logging. He founded the company town of Arvon, which we visited earlier in our holidays.
Our son noticed that the KP Index which measures geomagnetic activity on a scale from 0-9 was measuring a 5 for that particular Sunday evening. A “5” indicates a moderate level of geomagnetic storms and the Aurora Borealis might be visible in northern US states like Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center has an informative visual map that I didn’t learn about until after we spent a couple of hours on the beach that evening. It didn’t matter because
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