Wesley Hamilton
My family has the same conversation every year while waiting for the Karfi, the small passenger ferry that shepherds campers to and from Rock Island State Park. Next year we are bringing less stuff.
Three tents. Several totes of food. Four coolers (two just for beer). Tarps in case it rains. Camp chairs. Frisbees. A chessboard. Hammocks. Inflatables for the beach. Binoculars. Guides on Wisconsin birds and plants. A hatchet. A handsaw we always bring but never use. A kitchen’s worth of utensils. A collapsible cart to truck all these luxuries from the ferry dock to our site. And two cast iron frying pans.
This is how the Brogans take on the great outdoors.
We’ve camped on Rock Island a few days each year since I was in the first grade. This July will mark our 24th visit to the park. No RVs, cars or even bikes are allowed on the island. There are no restaurants. No electricity. No showers. Nearly all the bathrooms are pit toilets (only recently were a pair of flush toilets installed). But it’s Rock Island’s lack of amenities, its acres of quiet wilderness and its geographic isolation that keeps us coming back each year.
Many visit the park just for the day, which is enough time to walk to the Pottawatomie Lighthouse, the oldest in Wisconsin. Volunteer docents give tours of the
historic building in exchange for living there for part of the summer. But others stay for days in the main campground. The most adventurous will hike over a mile to the secluded backpacking campsites. That’s the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere.
Linda Falkenstein
Campers love to watch the sunset from the rocky beach or elaborate stone boathouse.
Most years, we race up the less touristy-side of the Door peninsula on Highway 57 — past Valmy, Baileys Harbor and Gills Rock — to catch the car ferry to Washington Island. Once there, we dash past the Albatross, Mann’s Mercantile, Schoolhouse Beach Park and the Farm Museum to reach Jacksonport Harbor, where campers park their cars before boarding the person-only Karfi ferry.
On one recent pilgrimage, my wife and I as well as my brother and parents arrived just in time to catch the last Karfi of the day. A young couple, backpackers, were the only other passengers. They seemed like the type who cut their toothbrushes in half to reduce the weight of their packs. True outdoors people who, days in advance, carefully portion handfuls of gorp to eat for lunch on the trail. They look baffled as we transfer bag after bag, cooler after cooler onto the small ferry. It’s an embarrassing amount of stuff but it’s the price we pay for being able to eat well and imbibe among the trees. Not to mention Pepperidge Farm cookies to snack on late at night.
The captain of the Karfi is ready to end his day and we begin the 15-minute excursion to Rock Island. The elaborate stone boathouse grows larger as we approach, the ship’s bow swaying against the heavy waves of Lake Michigan.
Since the state bought the land in 1965, Rock Island State Park has been a summer retreat for thousands of visitors each year. The whole island was once the vacation estate of inventor and industrialist Chester Thordarson. A native of Iceland, Thordarson immigrated to the United States at a young age. After working for the Chicago Edison Company, he founded his own manufacturing business that made industrial and commercial electrical components. His innovative transformers, inductors and high-voltage coils helped build the modern energy grid and made him millions.
In 1910, Thordarson used his fortune to purchase nearly all of Rock Island (the U.S. Coast Guard still owns a small section where it maintains an automated navigation light near the original lighthouse). During the first half of the 20th century, crews of laborers, artisans and landscapers came to the island to build Thordarson’s private resort.
His most striking addition to Rock Island is the boathouse. It‘s the size of a palace ballroom and functions as a museum and de facto shelter for campers during downpours.
And it’s called Rock Island for a reason. There are countless rounded, pale grey stones throughout the island and along its shore. Visitors frequently stack them into artful formations along the water. It’s a common sight to see silhouettes against the horizon skipping rocks by the dock, where campers gather to watch the sunset. Heck, all of the structures Thordarson built on the island — many of which still stand — are made of the island’s native stone.
From the dock, it’s a half-mile walk to the nearest campsites. With supplies in tow, you trek from the dock past the stone wall — another legacy of the Thordarson-era — past the spigot with drinkable water and the woodpile where the ranger sells campfire logs from 4:30-6:30 p.m. With our excessive amount of provisions, it usually takes several trips to-and-from the dock to complete the haul.
The 42 sites in the campground vary. Some have relatively private access to Lake Michigan and tall trees to provide shade. We soured on these sites during one of our first stays on the island. It’s likely not the norm, but there were so many black flies that year that three or four of the buggers would congregate on a wayward Cheerio.
Better may be the breezy campsites atop the cliffs on the southwest corner of the island or those nearer the sandy beach. As you continue down the main path (past an old cemetery of early European settlers) there’s a cluster of campsites in a valley-like area surrounded by sand dunes. If you are camping with a few families or friends, these sites are close together, beach-adjacent yet still under a protective tree canopy. Archeologists say a Potawatomi village, complete with a palisade, was on this land in the 17th century.
Linda Falkenstein
Chicago industrialist Chester Thordarson incorporated Icelandic motifs in his grand boathouse made from island rocks. His dream was to create an Icelandic-themed resort on Rock Island.
By the time my dad, brother and I take the last load of supplies to the campsite, the tents are up, a table cloth is on the picnic table and the camp chairs have been placed around the fire pit. Per tradition, the first night on Rock Island we feast on fillets of fresh white fish cooked over a campfire. The cast-iron pans don’t seem as heavy the next morning when frying up potatoes, green beans and thick-cut bacon.
Once camp is established, your options are wonderfully limited. You can head down to the beach for a swim. Hike the Thordarson Loop Trail — in total 6.5 miles — which takes you by the lighthouse, the site of a long abandoned fishing village where eagles are known to roost and along the tall bluffs on the north side of the island.
If you’re up for a challenge, try to find all the cliff carvings made by Thordarson workers decades prior. Or hang out in the open space near the boathouse. It’s usually filled with people flying kites, playing touch football or, after dusk, looking at planets and binary star systems through telescopes pointed at the inky black sky.
But most nights, the only thing to do is toast marshmallows, sing songs and tell ghosts stories in front of a crackling fire.