ERIKA ALIN

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SOUTHERN HEADLAND

PUKASKWA NATIONAL PARK

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Fog drifts between the trees as I walk the mossy perimeter of my campsite admiring twinflowers, bunchberries, and budding pink pyrolas while ringlets of steam rise from the coffee cup in my hand. Each summer in early July, I return to Pukaskwa to see the encrusted saxifrage open its moon-white flowers on the dark rim of the Southern Headland, a massive buttress of rock separated by a deep bay from a second headland. The second headland used to be called simply the Northern Headland, but now carries the more evocative Anishinaabe name Manito Miikana or Spirit Trail. The fog this morning is soft and gracious, so unlike the oppressive grayness that sometimes drizzles down on the coast during my visits. Even before I leave my campsite, the land wraps me in a liminal light. 

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The Pukaskwa Peninsula dips south between the towns of Marathon and Wawa in the far northeastern corner of the lake, creating a vast forested wilderness that was first inhabited by hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice sheet into the region. Though the peninsula’s name is of uncertain origins, according to the website of Pukaskwa National Park, the Anishinaabe word pukasu refers to the process of cooking the marrow of animal bones on an open fire. The park borders the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg or Pic River First Nation and Anishinaabe names today appear alongside English and French names on trail maps and signs. 

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Even at the height of summer, when the campground at Hattie Cove seems nearly full, I set out on the short trail onto the Southern Headland knowing that I’ll meet few, if any, people. The trail loops west from the visitor center overlooking the cove, a slender, tranquil body of water known to Anishinaabe as Bii to bii gong, “water between two rocks.” Dark spruce-clad knolls enveloped in faint curtains of fog bound both sides of the cove’s narrow inlet from Pulpwood Harbour, and as I follow the trail upslope through the forest a warbler trills from the canopy. The song quickly fades, however, once I leave the trees for the rocky slope that climbs toward the headland’s top.

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Long, glacially-polished humps and knolls ripple across the slope. Low shags of juniper spill down their sides and three-toothed cinquefoils, blueberries, and pin cherries fill out dips and crevices. A few dead birches raise scraggy white branches up from between the foliage of living trees in larger depressions. As the trail winds uphill, chunks and dikes of white quartz cut across the darker rock, occasionally peppered with the same sage-green and gray lichen that cover the surrounding slope. The climb is steep but short and I quickly reach the top and step onto a plateau of mounded rock, a world as far removed as I can imagine from that of the paved parking lot only a ten-minute walk below. 

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A breathtaking view unfolds to my east of the long forested finger of land that shelters Hattie Cove and the domed hills, rocky islands, and black islets around the entrance to Pulpwood Harbour. South of the harbor, the coast meanders toward Campbell Point and then continues winding around stubby east-west trending peninsulas and coves until it reaches the mouth of the White River. The river is crossed nearly two miles inland by a suspension bridge that serves as a popular day hike for park visitors. As I look toward Pulpwood Harbour, ribbons of fog brush the water and valleys between the low forested ridges to the south in a wash of assorted greens, charcoal-grays, and pearly sapphire-blues. A shrouded islet emerges with sudden clarity into a patch of transparent air only to dissolve back into the drifting fog moments later. 

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I rarely linger before views and often feel distanced from what I’m looking at when unable to move in close and circle around. Yet Pulpwood Harbour must be one of the most serenely sheltering places around the lake. For minutes I stand transfixed by the view, watching the fog sweep along smooth-backed islands and bands of water that appear and disappear into a silky universe of ever shifting forms.

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The headland’s top offers a clear view to the south and east of the rolling spruce-clad landscape of the park’s interior. The park mainly sits on gneissic and granitic rocks, but is bounded to both the northwest and southeast by greenstone belts. The coastal regions around the Southern Headland lie within the eastern extension of the Schreiber-Hemlo greenstone belt, which is separated from its western counterpart around Schreiber by the Coldwell Complex.1 Inland and coastal regions of the park alike are blanketed in cold-hardy spruce. Across the harbor, battering winds and storms have reduced trees that rise above the canopy to scrawny, pole-like spires, creating a landscape that looks both raw and sheltering all at once.

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I turn from the view and begin to wander across the gray humps and knolls that roll downslope from the headland’s top. Clusters of white spruce, tamarack, and birch create large snaking islands edged by mosses, blueberries, and Labrador teas. Junipers and thickets of leatherleaf and young aspen and birch hunker in larger dips while a few smaller dips host clumps of wool grass or riveting combinations of powder-blue reindeer lichen and mosses in varied hues of pine-green, rust-red, lime-yellow, rose, and cream, here and there accented by a sprinkling of mayflowers, blueberries, or false toadflaxes. Vegetation presses itself into nearly every conceivable place of shelter atop the rock. Along the margins of an island of scraggy spruces, pillows of reindeer lichen pour out from around the silvery dead branches of a prostrate tree and spruce saplings poke up from the mosses.

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In a process known as layering, both black and white spruce that grow in harsh northern climes where reproducing by seed may be difficult can also spread by sinking new roots from lower branches covered by soil or moss.2 The young roots produce saplings that receive nutrients from the parent tree but eventually become independent. The saplings I see may be offspring removed by several generations from a taller tree in the island’s core. As they, too, eventually root down from their lower branches, a widening ring of progressively smaller clones spreads outward from the parent tree. Elsewhere, I see dainty spruce seedlings that stand only one to two inches sharing mossy dips with tiny tamaracks. Mature tamaracks are less common than spruces, but their wispy branches with soft bursts of needles and roselike cones bring a touch of luxuriance to the islands. 

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Despite the presence of another oversized pair of red Adirondack chairs slightly downslope, the headland’s top evokes the uncompromising ruggedness of a place far removed from human claims. It also creates a transition zone between the open coast and the endless canopy of the boreal forest, an in-between land where life gains enough distance from the unremitting battle for survival at water’s edge to stabilize and begin filling out, but remains limited in its growth by meager soils and fierce exposure. For all their mosses, saplings, and tamaracks, the islands have the tenacious look of a land born of bitter cold and wind, where each season struggles to wrest another few inches of growth from the surface of the rock.

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The rocky knolls of the headland and shores of Pulpwood Harbour remind me of the vegetated gray mounds that dipped into the sea north of our cottage in Sweden and limned the lakes on the outskirts of Gothenburg. A few years ago while wandering the upper slopes of Manito Miikana on the other side of Horseshoe Bay, I ran into an American geologist who had settled in Sweden and was traveling around the lake with a Swedish graduate student studying the effects of glaciation on the land. As we stood looking out at the sparing vegetation and mounded rock atop the Southern Headland and coast beyond, the student said in a voice tinged with disappointment, “It looks just like Sweden. I’ve come all this way to see a landscape I see almost every day at home.” I wanted to stand up for the lake and point out the many features that make its coastline unique. But I suspected the student was already aware of these, and that his comment instead pointed to the common appearance and feel that a glacially-scoured, winter-born landscape takes on, whether it be in North America or northern Europe. 

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Like the upper reaches of the craggy knolls that I frequented in Sweden, the headland’s top belongs neither fully to the coast nor the forest. Shaped by the confluence of worlds, it creates a constantly evolving landscape that joins the open bedrock and vistas of the coast with the sheltering growth and closeness of the forest. I slowly follow the serpentine edges of vegetated islands across the rock, thinking of how my own yearning for rootedness over the years has often been accompanied by a draw to places that straddle boundaries between worlds, that both unify and transcend the features of distinct geographies and cultures. Steady but searching, the islands find their way between dips and rises and here and there exhibit a near extravagance of laborious growth. 

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After continuing southwest across the headland’s top, the trail leaves the open rock and winds downslope into a birch grove with mossy hummocks and Labrador teas. A white-throated sparrow fills the silence with a slow sequence of clear notes. I stop and turn toward the song and see the bird seated on a branch eight feet or so to my side, gazing directly at me with dark, inquisitive eyes. Once the bird flies off, I walk on and after descending into a ravine and moving back upslope finally glimpse the water between the trees. Another magnificent view soon opens up from the headland’s southern rim, this time not only of the coast to the southeast but also the fog-draped island in the mouth of Horseshoe Bay and outer tip of Manito Miikana to the west.

 

Like much of the Pukaskwa coast, the headland’s rim creates a harsh growing environment for plants. Winds scour the open rock, lake-cooled air and fog depress summer temperatures, and frigid bursts of spray drift inland during storms.3 An interpretive sign affixed to a sawed-off log a short distance inland of the rim explains that though the exposure stunts surrounding trees, the lake’s cooling effect creates a favorable microhabitat for arctic plants such as the encrusted saxifrage, Saxifraga paniculata. As shown in an illustration on the sign, the encrusted saxifrage forms cushions of ground-hugging rosettes with stems topped by flat, branching panicles of white flowers. Also called a white mountain-saxifrage, though it also grows at slightly higher latitudes, it’s mainly a plant of low- and subarctic lands and rocky alpine slopes.4 Around Lake Superior, it mostly grows on the Canadian shore and Isle Royale, and where found further south in northeastern Minnesota favors north-facing and shady cliffs.5  

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Encrusted saxifrages are uniquely adapted to tolerate the harsh growing conditions of exposed cliffs and outcrops. The low cushions deflect cold, desiccating winds and help retain moisture and warmth and, like those of many arctic-alpine plants, their leaves remain over the winter, allowing photosynthesis to begin before the growth of new leaves in spring.6 Even more impressive, the rosettes can curl their outer leaves inward if threatened with desiccation, closing into balls that reduce evaporation and exposure to the sun and shelter the tight core of more vulnerable young leaves that emerge each season in their centers.7

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As I wander around the headland’s rim and short upper slope below, I see scattered clusters of white flowers reaching out from between the branches of low-growing junipers and crevices in walls. The flowers often sit six to ten inches above the rosettes and offer the best clue to the whereabouts of the plants. Wandering downslope, I spot several cushions in mossy mounds that bulge up from crevices on shelves high above the water. While some of the rosettes spread their leaves more widely, the most attractive create loose balls of under one inch in diameter. Others are no larger than a penny. By now the rosettes have mostly greened up, though the tips and backs of some of their outer leaves are still tinged in burgundy. Also common on the flower stems, the burgundy color comes from presence of anthocyanin pigments, which are ubiquitous in the plant world and appear in many evergreen arctic plants early in the growing season,8 possibly to protect against cold temperatures, drought, and intense radiation from the sun.9

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Many rosettes have a remarkable radiance and symmetry. As the name encrusted saxifrage suggests, their leaves are rimmed by white crusts made of evaporated lime-rich waters, secreted by pores at the base of fine teeth along their margins. I kneel down by a cushion that hugs a mossy mound below the rim. The chalky crusts on its rosettes mostly create delicate squares or wedges, but in some cases either lighten into fine stipples or thicken into gleaming frosty splotches. Only a minority of rosettes actually flower each summer, and those that do die after setting seed.10 In addition to eight green living rosettes, the cushion includes two dead silvery-brown rosettes that probably flowered last summer. More silvery leaves are partially visible under a few of the living rosettes, part of woody-looking wads that gradually thicken as older leaves die off and accumulate at the base of the plant. 

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Exquisite as the rosettes may be, what drew my gaze to the cushion wasn’t mainly the leaves but the bright glow of a panicle of white flowers against the dark nearby rock. The cushion has a lone flowering rosette with a lightly hairy reddish stem hugged by a few scale-like reddish leaves, they too with white crusts. Standing around eight inches, the stem is topped by twelve flowers with broad sunken yellow centers ringed by creamy-white petals with minute red dots. I kneel a few feet away and watch a hover fly flit between the flowers and tiny nectar-seeking ants crawl across the petals. Perched on a small shelf high above the lake, the flowers create a beacon of both light and life.

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Just west of the sign on the rim, the trail loops inland along the edge of the forest to skirt a large south-facing basin. Once back on the rim, I veer off the trail to descend into the basin across a slope of short walls and ledges. At the basin’s bottom, tall gray walls surround me to both the north and west while giant blocks partly obscure the view of the water to the south. The walls have a generally dull, weighty appearance, especially where wet by seepage, but here and there they turn smoother and blacker or take on faintly shimmering blue-green casts accented by orange lichen or chunks of white quartz. The basin’s floor, meanwhile, is covered in shingles and boulders, many with the same lightly lustrous bluish surfaces that appear in places on the walls. Lording over the other stones appear to be massive blocks of brown diabase, which left dikes on the Pukaskwa coast during the Midcontinent Rift period.11

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A low-lying tongue of dark rock angles a short distance southeast into the lake from the basin’s outer edge, ribboned with loosening blocks, mounds, and chutes. As I make my way onto the tongue, the basin gradually vanishes to my back until I approach the smooth outer tip of the rock and water surrounds me on three sides. The sun has begun trying to sift through the downy blanket of the sky and the fog around the harbor to the south and islands near Campbell Point appears to be feathering up. Looking toward the point, I remember my surprise on realizing many years ago that nearshore islands often form extensions of points and peninsulas on land. How obvious it had suddenly seemed that a continuous sheet of flowing rock unifies land and lake, and that submerged knobs and ridges sometimes rise high enough to break the water’s surface. As the wandering fog caresses the islands now, the basin remains out of view to my back and for fleeting moments I’m overcome by a feeling of being neither fully on land nor on the water but instead standing suspended between two worlds.  

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The large blocks and ribboning tongue help shelter the basin from storm waves, allowing bushy shrubs of alder, raspberry, dogwood, and wild rose to grow between slabs and boulders. One dogwood creeps a low branch under a heap of blue-gray shingles and then raises a short red tip into the air, the large cluster of white blossoms at its end seeming to leap up from the bare stones. Less conspicuous are the bird’s eye primroses, harebells, and encrusted saxifrages that lurk in occasional mossy crevices and cupfuls of soil between larger blocks and on ledges on the basin’s outer wall. Though few in number, the saxifrage cushions provide especially enticing arrangements of rosettes. 

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Encrusted saxifrages can spread by producing new rosettes both from the base of existing plants and the ends of horizontal runners that creep across the ground.12 I stop by a cushion that includes a few small rosettes that spill loosely onto the surrounding rock from its margins. One tiny rosette angles out from atop a wad of dead leaves under a living plant. Though the rosette has a diameter of only one quarter of an inch, it has already amassed a bundle of dead leaves of its own. From the lower base of this bundle, a smooth, sturdy auburn runner connects the rosette to the remains of a larger dead rosette, from which two additional runners extend into the mossy earth and a third runner ends abruptly where a former rosette seems to have rotted away. The cushion seems to exist in a continuous state of formation, birthing and joining generations of plants that live to reproduce and then die back. Looking down at its living and dead rosettes, woody wads, and runners feels surprisingly intimate, as if I had been given a privileged view into the bonds of a close extended family. 

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Several cushions in clefts on the slope to the east of the basin put on an especially lavish show of flowers. In one dip between small boulders I count over a hundred rosettes, including twenty with flowering stems, they too attracting ants and hover flies. A nearby cleft with forty rosettes has fifteen flowering stems. In both cases, several stems measure a full twelve to fourteen inches and bear panicles of twenty to twenty-eight flowers. In contrast, most cushions that I see elsewhere on the headland have no more than three dozen rosettes, and often far fewer, and usually include only one or two flowering stems of less than ten inches. Though the plants are at the height of bloom, some have already shed their petals and in their centers sport only a sunken yellow disk with a ring of backward-arcing stamens. 

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Other petal-less flowers, however, have begun developing fruit. Instead of a disk, they have a swollen pink-tinged ovary with a slit from which two styles reach out like red beaks. Gradually, the ovaries will turn into dry seed capsules with gaping holes and the flowering rosettes begin to die down. Whether flowering, birthing new offspring, or dying down, each encrusted saxifrage fulfills its purpose in the great circle of creation, no less than the tiny ants and hover flies and white-throated sparrow with its night-black eyes. 

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Pukaskwa National Park takes in 135 miles of lakeshore between the Pic River in the north and the Pukaskwa River in the south. The lower reaches of the Pic River were the site of Indigenous settlements as early as twelve thousand years ago and, though the river’s banks lie outside the park boundary, archaeological objects found within the park have been dated to nine thousand years ago.13 The Ojibwe name of the Pic River First Nation, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, translates into people of “the place where the river erodes.”14 In the nearby Pic River settlement, a historical marker explains that the river formed a halfway point for people traveling by canoe along the lake’s northern shore, while also providing an access route north to James Bay and Hudson Bay.

 

For roughly a century beginning in the late 1780s, the west bank of the Pic River’s mouth hosted a trade outpost that fur traders reached halfway into their two-week paddle from Sault Saint Marie to Grand Portage. The post was initially operated by independent French traders and later taken over by the French Northwest Company and then the English Hudson’s Bay Company. Marked today by a historic plaque, its location makes up one of four archaeologic sites representing both Indigenous and more recent European occupations around the lower river.15 As Europeans moved west, the inhospitable topography and remoteness of the Pukaskwa Peninsula limited logging and other intensive forms of resource exploitation. Yet spruce and fir were still harvested from the watersheds of both the Pic and Pukaskwa Rivers. Logs were driven down the Pic to the river’s mouth for assembly into rafts and then towed to pulpwood mills first in Wisconsin and later in Marathon.16 The river drives on the Pic didn't end until the early 1980s.17 

 

By then, stray logs had piled up on the two long sandy beaches that sit between the river and Manito Miikana, covering one beach nearly entirely and the other partially. The sawed-off logs lack elegantly twisting root tangles and branches, but often have stunningly smooth, bleached backs. Heaped ashore in untold numbers, they intrude on my notion of being in a wild, untouched place, and what I know of their history makes it hard for me to fully appreciate their beauty. Yet in their slowly decaying, weather-beaten forms, the sawed-off logs blur the boundary between the human and natural worlds.  

 

The small, arc-shaped beach in Horseshoe Bay contains a more sparing display of logs, sheltered as it is by the long reach of Manito Miikana to the west. I wander onto a craggy platform of dark rock at the Southern Headland’s southwestern tip. Across the water, the steep, forested ridges of Manito Miikana lumber lakeward for a third of a mile to shelter not only the bay but to a lesser extent the platform on which I stand. Labrador tea, bog birch, alder, juniper, and cedar lurk behind the platform’s short walls and mounds and join sweet gale around small pools and water-filled grooves. Mossy dips and crevices harbor saxifrages, harebells, butterworts, and bird’s eye primroses. I gravitate toward a damp corner of rock with a cluster of firmoss and bend low over dozens of three- to four-inch stems with spiraling spikelike leaves that shift between a nearly luminescent yellow and lime-green. 

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The stems display significant variations in appearance and several shorter, darker stems appear toward the cluster's back and under the branches of an adjacent alpine bilberry. A few smaller clusters elsewhere on the platform include a helter-skelter of both upright greenish stems and twisting, prostrate stems in insipid tints of amber and auburn. The latter stems could easily be taken for dead were it not for their green tips. Skulking around the clusters’ margins are often preciously tiny shoots that only stand between one quarter to one half of an inch tall. Other young firmosses create their own diminutive clusters, tight spiky gatherings of short radiant stems tucked into dark mosses and crevices. Though most stems grow straight and tend toward yellowish or green, even young clusters sometimes shift between pallid and vibrant hues.

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For many years, I mainly visited the headland to see the encrusted saxifrages. But then I started returning later in the season, when other plants were more prominent. Ever since, I’ve been surprised to discover how many small, attractive plants I failed to notice before. A large pool spreads across a shallow basin toward the middle of the platform, bounded to the east by steplike walls of vertically striated rock. A dash of white around a few sedges and shrubs on a ledge at the pool’s eastern end soon draws my attention. The flicker comes from a flowering colony of sticky false asphodels and a dozen nearby small false asphodels that are partially concealed by the reaching branches of low shrubs. Both asphodels favor abundant moisture and sunshine and have straight naked stems topped by short spikes of starlike white flowers. Yet the small false asphodel has a more strictly northern range and is rare on the lake’s U.S. side.18 

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True to its species name pusilla, which comes from the Latin word for very small, the tallest plant that I see by the pool reaches a full six inches, but most plants stand around four inches. Several only measure slightly over two. I first saw the small false asphodels some five or six years ago, but couldn’t remember exactly where they grew. For several summers thereafter I searched the margins of the pool but failed to find them, though I did see sticky false asphodels. Most small false asphodels don’t flower in any given year and their short bundles of swordlike basal leaves would have been easy to miss amid other vegetation.19 The small flowers sit in a tighter raceme than those of the sticky false asphodel and also bear pale yellow anthers, instead of prominent red anthers. In a month’s time or so, the small false asphodel will mature nondescript cream-colored fruit while its taller relation puts on an eye-catching display of waxy red fruit. Of the two asphodels, the latter easily steals the show. Yet as I look from one species to the other now, the delicate small false asphodel more than holds its own with its simple, understated glow.

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I’ve begun to cast my gaze more widely than before when on the headland’s tip, but it’s still mainly the encrusted saxifrages that I return to see. Fortunately, here too even the smallest crack or button of moss can provide a foothold for rosettes. Among the plants I see, gatherings of only three to five rosettes are especially common, as are small rosettes that squeeze up between larger plants or hug the margins of cushions. Five daughter rosettes create a tight ring around a solitary quarter-sized plant while a second lone rosette has a single offspring of barely three-sixteenths of an inch. The smallest rosette I see, however, measures a mere one-twentieth of an inch and grows entirely alone in a spec of moss enclosed by bare rock, not another plant in sight for over four feet. I wonder how it will survive absent the shelter of kin, yet suspect that in a few years time it, too, may have birthed offspring of its own.

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Leaving the tiny rosette, I finally make my way onto a broad shelf along the mouth of Horseshoe Bay. The clean, rippling surface of the rock shimmers softly and across the bay the slopes of Manito Miikana spill down into the water. Soon the sun’s rays will break through the thinning clouds and bathe the headland. But for now, drifts of fog still curl around the island in the outer bay and move in diaphanous drapes up the slopes of the Spirit Trail. As it hovers on the thin edge of creation, the world holds me in a secure, transient light.