The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2020. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Travis Barningham is the kind of kayak guide you want leading you through sea caves so small that in order to get through them, you must lie back flat against your kayak and use your hands to scoot through.
“Don’t worry about your paddles!” he shouted as my mom and I squeezed through a formation he called the wormhole, in Lake Superior about 1 mile north of Meyers Beach along the Bayfield peninsula in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
I was glad he had given us permission to not worry about our paddles, because I hadn’t even thought about them since we had entered the tiny tunnel. I was solely focused on pushing against the rock that was 6 inches from my face and getting us the heck out of there before an errant wave smacked our heads into it.
We safely emerged from the cave to a larger one where we could sit upright again, and our relief gave way to whoops and laughter.
I had kayaked these caves before, but without a guide I had no idea the wormhole existed. And I’m not sure other guides would have taken us through it.
But Barningham, who owns the outfitter Rustic Makwa Den, offered the right mixture of safety and daring you want when you’re exploring somewhere like the sea caves. Plus, as a member of the nearby Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, he provided a one-of-a-kind tour of an area that his people have lived in for hundreds of years — an area that holds special meaning to his tribe. The stories he told shared some of that meaning and made our two-hour paddle more meaningful than just a fun, scenic trip.
In February, I had gotten a taste of that extra meaning when I went on a snowshoeing tour with Jon Michels, who lives on the Red Cliff reservation and also guides for Barningham and Rustic Makwa Den in the summer.
“We’re trying to really develop a connection — guides as people that can share this place in more than just a tourist way, more of a connected to the culture and the spirit of the place,” Michels told me in February. “I think most people have walked or been to a place where they feel something, and that’s here. It’s here and it’s strong, and it’s especially strong for us here, but I know that other people come here and feel that. Bringing people to special places and letting them have that experience is one of the things we’re trying to do. … There’s more to this place than ‘I got the T-shirt' kind of tourism.”
Sea caves and waves
Barningham started Rustic Makwa Den in 2017 with fellow tribal member Troy Gordon. In addition to summer kayak tours of the mainland caves, they also offer tours of the sea caves along the Red Cliff reservation on the east side of the Bayfield peninsula in the summer and winter.
Because that side of the peninsula is more protected from Lake Superior’s brutal west winds, the ice freezes more easily in the winter, making it possible to access the caves even when the national lakeshore ones are not open. In the summer the waves are usually calmer, making it possible to kayak there on days when it might be too dangerous to do so on the other side.
We encountered that situation on our scheduled tour date, when a strong northwest wind whipped up large enough waves to warrant a small-craft advisory.
Barningham moved our tour to the Red Cliff caves, but by the time I got his message about the new location, we were already at Meyers Beach. We walked down to the beach where two- to four-foot waves bashed against the shore. Only two kayakers — who clearly knew what they were doing — were playing in the choppy waters where there would normally be dozens of kayaks on a nice day.
Thankfully we were able to reschedule our tour for the next afternoon — an important reminder to leave yourself a cushion if you’re planning to kayak or do anything else in the Apostle Islands. Lake Superior weather can be unpredictable and change quickly, and the lake is the boss.
The next day we pulled into Meyers Beach around 2 p.m. for our tour, and cars already filled the small parking lot and lined the road leading out to Highway 13.
Kayaking in the islands has become popular only in the last 20 years, and especially in the last five years after the ice caves went viral on social media in 2014 and made the area and its caves world-famous.
Bob Mackrel worked as the park’s west district manager at Meyers Beach in the ‘90s and said "you never saw” that kind of traffic parked along that road back then, when the parking lot was even smaller. It was expanded about 10 years ago, and he said they thought that expansion would be sufficient for the future.
“It was overwhelmed very quickly. Nobody anticipated it,” he said.
Barningham and his assistant guide, Ethan Gordon, were waiting by their van in the busy lot and outfitted our group of seven with life jackets and spray skirts and helped us carry our tandem sea kayaks to the beach (where there thankfully weren’t as many boats as the traffic in the parking lot would have indicated).
After a safety lesson on the beach, we paddled into Lake Superior, which was much calmer than the day before, heading northeast toward the sea caves.
Along the way, we saw evidence of an intense storm that had passed through a couple nights before. Downed trees lined the cliffs, some of which looked freshly eroded. The mainland trail that follows the cliffs had been closed since the storm and wouldn't reopen for a week. When we kayaked in the caves later, Barningham said it was weird to not see people walking along the cliffs above. Sometimes they'll ask you to take photos from below, he said.
Before we reached the caves, Barningham searched the remaining trees for a large bald eagle nest he usually points out on his tours but couldn’t find it in its usual spot. The eagle is sacred to the Ojibwe, who consider it a messenger that carries their prayers to their creator. Barningham said he might hike the cliff top the following day to search for eagle feathers. While it is illegal for most people to keep eagle feathers they find, he said their treaty permits tribal members to keep any they find.
Chief Buffalo
Like many people who live in Red Cliff, Barningham has ties to that treaty beyond the fact that it helped establish the reservation he lived on. His son’s mother is a descendant of the tribal chief who made it happen — Chief Buffalo (Kechewaishke).
I had never heard of Chief Buffalo until Michels told me about him on our snowshoeing tour — a sad whitewashing of the Apostle Islands’ history, perhaps, considering how instrumental he was in maintaining peace in the area and securing a permanent reservation for his tribe.
“If he hadn’t been overshadowed by all the Indian wars, I think he'd probably be one of the most famous and respected native leaders in the country,” Michels said.
For background, Michels shared some history of the area and the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He said Lake Superior made the area a great place to live, providing good fishing and a transportation avenue, as well as some of the best wild rice beds in the world. On land, the Ojibwe did prescribed burns on sandy soil, which provided habitat for the bison and elk that they hunted.
The French arrived in the 1600s, establishing a trading post on Madeline Island, which had been the spiritual and economic home for the Ojibwe. They mostly had a good relationship, Michels said, noting that the French seemed to respect and assimilate to native culture rather than trying to bend the Ojibwe to their culture.
Things began to change in the 1800s. While the Indian Removal Act of 1830 affected southern tribes more than the Ojibwe, pressure for the tribe to be moved to Minnesota grew after Wisconsin became a state in 1848.
Michels said a “cabal of characters” (in the federal and local government) wanted the tribe to live in Minnesota so they could have access to the tribe’s annuity payments, issued in October. In 1850, the federal officials changed the payment location from La Pointe on Madeline Island to Sandy Lake, Minn. A group of Ojibwe went to Sandy Lake to retrieve the money and supplies, not expecting to stay long. But the payments were delayed until December, and 400 Ojibwe died of starvation, freezing or disease while waiting and on the journey home.
Barningham called it Wisconsin’s “trail of tears,” and it cemented the tribe’s resolve to stay on their lands.
As the area inched toward a possibly violent conflict, Chief Buffalo led a delegation to Washington to convince President Millard Fillmore to rescind the removal order. The chief — who was well over 90 years old at the time — and others made their way from La Pointe to Sault Ste. Marie by birch bark canoe, then by steamship and trains to Washington D.C. There, a New York congressman got them in to see the president. They met for a few hours and smoked a peace pipe Buffalo had brought from Wisconsin. The president so enjoyed the meeting that he invited them back for another the next day, then rescinded the removal order for the Lake Superior Ojibwe and ordered treaty negotiations to begin.
The 1854 La Pointe Treaty came out of those negotiations and established reservations including those for the Lac du Flambeau, the Lac Courte Oreilles and the Bad River bands in Wisconsin. The Red Cliff Reservation, however, was not directly established through the treaty. The land, known as the Buffalo Estate, was initially given to Buffalo for his work in the negotiations. The rest of the La Pointe people were supposed to move to the Bad River reservation, but many stayed with Buffalo at Red Cliff. In 1863 the U.S. government attached Buffalo's land to the 1854 treaty and established the Red Cliff Reservation.
Chief Buffalo died in 1855 at the age of 100 and was buried on Madeline Island. Two busts of the chief — one marble and one bronze – are in the U.S. Capitol building.
He is also immortalized in the name of the bay that Rustic Makwa Den launches its kayaks from for tours of the Red Cliff caves.
This year, as the park service celebrates the national lakeshore’s 50th anniversary, they have shared bits of its history, including Chief Buffalo and the 1854 treaty, on their Facebook page.
But outside of that, his history is largely unknown by most white visitors.
“For whatever reason, history was overshadowed by so much other stuff,” Michels said. "All the relations with natives in history was all about warfare, and Buffalo did the opposite. He used the political process and was successful at it, and it just didn’t catch historical traction.”
That’s partially what Michels and Barningham hope to change with their tours.
Keyhole and wormhole caves
We continued ours along the mainland sea caves, paddling into any openings in the red-brown rock that stood more than 40 feet tall in spots.
We had the caves to ourselves, including a narrow gorge known as the crevasse or the crack that Barningham said you sometimes have to wait for other tour groups to get out of before you can explore.
It was unusual for the caves to not be swarming with kayakers on a sunny summer afternoon, even on a weekday.
Part of that could have been due to outfitters choosing not to operate or offering fewer trips because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Barningham said he’s decreased his offerings, opting for “quality over quantity” and having either himself or Michels lead all trips.
Fewer boats meant we could take our time in all of the caves, including one of Barningham’s favorites, which he called “the singing cave” for the noise the waves made bouncing and echoing off the rock inside.
He said the wormhole is also among his favorites, and despite high lake levels making it an even tighter squeeze than usual, everyone in our group — which included a young couple in a tandem kayak, and a father and his two young children in a triple — managed to get through it. Only our assistant guide aborted on his attempt. Barningham said it’s sometimes easier to get a tandem kayak through because they’re heavier and sit lower in the water than single kayaks.
The beauty of our trip was it was a choose-your-own-adventure trip with no pressure to kayak anywhere you weren’t comfortable. Don’t want to squeeze through the wormhole? No problem. You could hang out along the caves outside and explore larger ones while you waited.
And if you’re more adventurous than your kayak partner, you can do what I did and put her in the front so you can pretend to not hear her objections when you steer the kayak toward it. (Disclaimer: Not recommended for married couples.)
But adventure is about pushing your comfort zone, and under the safe guidance of an experienced guide, it was worth pushing for the reward of exploring one of the most beautiful and unique natural features Wisconsin has to offer.
More information: A handful of Apostle Islands have sea caves, but the biggest and most popular are along the national lakeshore’s strip of mainland near Meyers Beach, about 15 miles west of Bayfield.
Lake Superior is cold and can be dangerous for inexperienced kayakers. It’s much more like an ocean than an inland lake. Unless you have the proper equipment (a sea kayak, not a sit-on top one) and experience (including the ability to self-rescue, since there is nowhere to swim ashore once you reach the caves), you should only explore the caves with an authorized guide.
Some outfitters rent kayaks, but they require you to pass a safety course that includes self-rescue techniques before you head out.
Rustic Makwa Den rents kayaks and offers a variety of tours, including of the Meyers Beach caves. The beginner-friendly two-hour tours depart at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. daily through the beginning of October. Tours are weather-dependent and may be rescheduled if conditions are too rough on Lake Superior; leave yourself an extra day or two in the area in case you need to reschedule. Tours cost $110 for a tandem kayak (two paddlers) and $145 for a triple (two paddlers and one child between ages 5 and 12). For reservations and more information, see rusticmakwaden.com.
For more NPS-authorized outfitters, see the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore website, nps.gov/apis.
This is part of a series of stories about the Apostle Islands as the national lakeshore, the only one in Wisconsin, celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Related: Apostle Islands cruise is one of the best ways to see the national lakeshore
Related: No longer a Midwestern secret, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore celebrates 50 years
Contact Chelsey Lewis at clewis@journalsentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at @chelseylew and @TravelMJS and Facebook at Journal Sentinel Travel.
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Kayaking the Apostle Islands sea caves in 'more than just a tourist way' - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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