Isle Royale consistently ranks as one of the least visited national parks in the country. The reasons for this are numerous. It’s one of the most isolated parks in the lower forty-eight states; sitting in the middle of Lake Superior some fifteen miles from the shores of Thunder Bay, Ontario, it’s almost not in the states at all. The island and surrounding archipelago are only accessible by private watercraft or by ferry boats and seaplanes. Services to the island run out of Grand Portage, Minnesota, and Houghton and Copper Harbor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Nobody wanders onto the island on a whim. Those who venture here do so with intent.

Most national parks are endowed with a defining feature — some instantly recognizable landmark or geographic feature. Yosemite has the valley. Yellowstone has Old Faithful. On the surface, Isle Royale has no comparable distinctions, nothing to slap on a postcard or highway billboard. That’s not to say that it isn’t a beautiful place, or that it doesn’t have its own draws, albeit for a much smaller group of people. For Isle Royale and those who visit it, these shortcomings — low attendance, isolation — aren’t shortcomings at all. They’re the main attraction.

I was initially drawn to the park, as many are, by the dark skies and the wildlife. I wanted to see stars, and I wanted to see wolves. The night skies on Isle Royale do not disappoint — on clear nights, the cloud of the Milky Way is visible to the naked eye, if you’re willing to stay up to see it (at the peak of summer, the sun doesn’t set until ten or eleven at night). Finding a wolf, however, is a little bit trickier. Had I not known, months before I set foot on a ferry, that I wasn’t going to see any wolves, I would’ve been very disappointed when I arrive on the Rock Harbor dock.

“What happens if we see a wolf?” asked a young boy, no more than seven or eight, at our orientation. The park ranger smiled.

“You aren’t going to see any wolves,” she said. “You have better odds of getting hit by lightning.”

The group had a friendly laugh at her answer and at the naivete of the boy’s question. But even as we laughed, there was a tiny but nagging sense of loss on the dock at that moment. If you asked any of the adults standing there if they’d come all this way to see wolves, none of us would’ve answered honestly, would’ve told you that we did. That would be crazy. Nobody sees the wolves here, not even the rangers. But the eight year old in each of us, in some dusty corner of our imaginations, holds out hope. And the island, for all the things it is and everything it is not, has a distinct knack for waking up the child in people, for sending their imaginations running. To see a wolf here, in the wild, would be magic incarnate. And as long as you’re sharing an island with them, there’s always a chance.

Until there isn’t. There are only two wolves left in the Isle Royale wolf pack at the time of this writing, and their future looks grim. Marred by generations of inbreeding, scientists believe that these two remaining wolves will mark the end of the pack’s lineage. In years past, wolves living here were able to cross over to the mainland via ice bridges that formed over Lake Superior in the winter and mingle with a much wider gene pool. As the climate has warmed in recent decades, the ice bridges have often failed to materialize, and the Isle Royale wolves have suffered the consequences.

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I spent the better part of my second morning on the island hiking the Mount Ojibway trail from the Daisy Farm campsite up to the Ojibway Lookout Tower, named for the native people that first inhabited the region. As I walked, my eyes scanned the forest on either side of me, hoping to see the other half of the famed Isle Royale predator/prey study. If I couldn’t see a wolf, I at least wanted to catch sight of a moose. I walked softly, experimenting with each step on how to best keep my backpack from making too much noise. The trail is steep in several sections, and the higher the sun rose in the north woods summer sky, the more I sweated. I would learn later on, from firsthand experience and the advice of a fellow backpacker, that this was not an ideal time to spot moose. They hate the heat as much as any hiker does, and so they wake up early to feed, and spend the hottest parts of the day tucked away in shady hiding places. If I wanted to see a moose, I had to wake up when they did.

I didn’t see any that day, or any animals at all bigger than a squirrel. There are no porcupines, skunks, or racoons on the island. They are too small to make the journey from the mainland to the island via the ice bridges. There are no bears on the island, either. They could ostensibly make the trip, but are hibernating when the bridges are formed. And so, moose rule the day on Isle Royale. Upwards of 1,600 moose and counting, to be exact. This comes as good news for people hoping to see one, and very bad news for the island and its future. Biologists say that the explosion of moose will devastate the island’s ecosystem from the roots up. Then, once the food is all gone, all animal life will begin dying off en masse, leaving the park a shell of what it is today.

Evidence of moose overpopulation is already stark on many sections of trail. In the fir forests, one finds row after row of trees, all bare trunks and broken branches, picked completely clean to about twenty feet up. The devastation continues miles in every direction. These overgrazed areas offer a haunting portrait of the island’s future, should the federal government fail to act.

The U.S Department of the Interior released a draft of their plan for the park in 2016, and is expected to announce in the near future whether they will let nature take its course, or intervene and stock the island with twenty to thirty genetically diverse wolves. At its peak, the Isle Royale wolf pack numbered 50 wolves, while it averaged 25 wolves over the decades since the study began in 1958.

The philosophy behind not taking any action has origins in the park system’s obligation to allow nature to work uninhibited — the parks are, in many ways, supposed to be a haven away from the footprint of humans. However, the parks system is also obligated to protect nature within its borders, and it is likely that without man-made global warming, the wolf population would be healthy or even thriving.

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The sun shone through the trees and glinted off the leaves, making them shimmer with each breeze in the early morning haze. Somewhere behind me, in the distance, a frog or a fish or a turtle surfaced, and then dove back below the water with a faint kerplunking sound. For a brief moment, I made eye contact with the moose. I didn’t realize it then — wouldn’t realize it until later that day, as I walked and replayed the encounter over and over in my head, wouldn’t really be able to articulate it until I was back on the mainland, eating French fries and sleeping with a pillow under my head — but that moose encapsulates everything that Isle Royale is.

I always knew that moose were big, but it’s hard to capture in words or photographs just how imposing they are when you stumble upon one standing several feet from you. And yet, when the moose saw me, it moved with a speed that I didn’t think a creature of its size could be capable of. It moved with a ferocity and a striking purpose, like a Lake Superior storm, covering large swaths of ground before you even realized it was moving. When the moose ran, it did not direct its path around trees. Rather, any saplings or small trees that were in its way were simply trampled and ran through, snapped and pulverized into the earth. Isle Royale can be, and often is, brutal and harsh. Its position in the lake dictates that it must be so. It is an uncaring environment, and that is why so many love it, and why we need to care enough to protect it. It is a place that strips you of everything unessential and offers solitude, and in that solitude, context for yourself in the world at large. The island is vast, powerful, impersonal. We are small, vulnerable things. And yet, through our action and inaction, Isle Royale is now at a crossroads, standing on the precipice of potentially irreversible devastation. In that way, it is something of a forty-five mile long microcosm of the planet. It is an imposing and at times callous place, but it is not without its fragilities, and in those fragilities, a certain heart-rending, life affirming beauty. It is a place where you can fall asleep listening to loons and the water lapping against the shore and wake up to the chittering of chipmunks and when you breathe the air it feels new and electric in your lungs. You will curse every choice that brought you to the island as black flies attack you on your fifth straight mile trudging through ankle deep mud, but the frustration and the blisters all fall away when you see the sun set over the water, and it paints the sky with pastel purples and reds at the day’s waning hours. Losing the brilliance and wildness of the park as it currently exists would be a very visible and very painful early wound in the march of global warming.

Isle Royale is one of the least visited parks — I saw more people while eating lunch on a trail in the Grand Canyon in the dead of winter than I did in a week of backpacking in peak season on the island — but it also sees more return visitors, more backcountry usage, and longer average stays than almost every other park in the system. It is a special place, and a place worth taking special measures to save.