The Upper Peninsula's Porcupine Mountains. Photo by Jeffrey Foltice, courtesy michigan.org

With two national forests, America’s first National Lakeshore, and dozens of state parks and woodlands, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula offers as many beautiful fall locales as anywhere in the U.S. Furthermore, it is one of the most isolated places in the mainland. The UP makes up one quarter of Michigan’s land area but is home to only three percent of the state’s population, making it secluded enough that visitors can enjoy natural serenity without getting overrun by “leaf peepers.” Here are some of the most notable places in the UP.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Lake Superior waves meet cliffs at the Pictured Rocks' Battleship Row.

This destination in north central UP on Lake Superior is worth visiting at any time. There are hundreds of miles of trails, sandstone cliffs, waterfalls, a seemingly endless beach, and sparkling turquoise blue water. Unlike most Great Lake beaches that are simply sandy, Pictured Rocks’ shoreline is strewn with literally billions of small rocks, each a different color, and a reminder that Superior sits on much more rocky terrain than its cousins. Spring brings a myriad of wildflowers, summers are a pleasant 70 degrees, and winter affords snowmobiling and cross country skiing opportunities.

Chapel Rock, a famed sandstone formation at Pictured Rocks. Photo by Joel Feenstra.

However, Pictured Rocks becomes positively enchanting in fall. Trees such as beech, aspen, maple, and birch put on a show each autumn, their vibrant colors complemented by a palette of evergreen, sandstone, and shimmering blue. An interesting species is the Tamarack, a deciduous conifer tree. Although this may sound like an oxymoron, it is one of only a few trees in the world that sheds needles in fall, changing from a dark evergreen to a golden yellow in the process. Due to the moderating influence of Superior, Pictured Rocks is one of the last places in the UP to experience leaf change even though it is at the northern edge, making it available later in the year. Perhaps best of all, cooler temperatures mean that fall is a time when visitors can enjoy the park without being pestered by what locals call the “UP State Bird”–the mosquito.

Waterfalls

Upper Tahquemenon Falls, the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi.

One special thing about the UP is its unique geology. It sits at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, a feature named because it extends from the Great Lakes all the way around the Hudson Bay into the arctic, giving it a shield-like appearance. In the last ice age, receding glaciers stripped the Shield of most of its topsoil, exposing massive quantities of bedrock. This means water doesn’t easily carve out riverbeds in the UP, but instead travels over unyielding rock. The end result: waterfalls. The UP has over 300 of them, including Tahquamenon Falls , the second largest east of the Mississippi.

Bond Falls in the western UP. Photo by Myron Reynard.

It is hard to think of a better example of nature’s beauty than a waterfall surrounded by fall foliage, and this is a sight that welcomes visitors regardless of location on the peninsula. Majestic Tahquamenon is in the east. In the west, Ottawa National Forest offers Agate Falls (see photo at top) and Bond Falls. Chapel, Sable, Munising, and Miners Falls are among over 20 waterfalls in Alger County, which is also the home of the Pictured Rocks. Eagle, Silver, and Canyon Falls await in the northern Keweenaw Peninsula, and Pemene, Rapid River, and Haymeadow Falls exist to the south.

Keweenaw Peninsula

The Northern Lights reflect off Lake Superior. Photo by Dan Urbanski, courtesy pasty.com

Keweenaw is the Upper Peninsula’s, well, upper peninsula, and its remoteness makes it consistently listed among the top places in America for leaf color road trips. Some say that it is the best place in the U.S. mainland to see another type of fall color—the aurora borealis—for a number of reasons. Keweenaw is, of course, northern. Its small population makes light pollution low. Fall brings clear night skies and one can see for miles across the lake, and it is the season when the aurora begins to pick up.

A typical autumn drive in the UP. Photo by Brenda Leigh, courtesy pasty.com

Keweenaw’s history also makes it worth a visit. It was once home to the largest copper deposit in the world, which American Indians started mining before the Egyptians built the pyramids. Occasionally, visitors stumble across the ancient hammers and tools they used. Copper really boomed in the 1800s, and historical mining ruins are everywhere. One last thing worth seeing is Brockway Mountain Drive. This scenic road travels along the Keweenaw Fault, a remnant of a billion-year-old continental rift system, and offers endless panoramic views.

Special thanks to Brody Block at Pictured Rocks, Charlie Hopper at pasty.com and the good people at michigan.org.

Fall Travel: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula The Saturday Evening Post

Here comes summer, and with it, your garden’s biggest growth spurt. Get ahead of those extra inches by pinching back new growth on annuals and perennials to encourage more branching and blooms. Use your garden shears or thumb and forefinger to remove the plant’s tips just above the uppermost pair of leaves.

Tall, bushy, and vining plants (e.g., delphinium, peony, or clematis) benefit from support, so get plant cages, bamboo stakes, and trellises into the soil now. Old fence posts, shovel handles, or sections of snow fence make economical plant reinforcements.

Amend garden soil while there’s space to work around your plants. Add in 2 to 4 inches of compost, aged manure, or peat moss to the top 8 inches of soil and follow up with a fresh layer of mulch. Fallen pine needles, grass clippings, or even shredded leaves will do the trick in a pinch.

Primp the Patio

Spruce up outdoor furniture for spring with a quick clean up. Whisk away dirt and cobwebs with a broom or soft-bristle brush, then sponge down chairs, tables, and cushions with a solution of 1/4 cup mild dishwashing detergent and 1 gallon of warm water and wipe dry with a clean rag. Use fine grit sandpaper to remove peeling paint, mold, rust, or even bird droppings and follow up with touch-up paint as needed. Treat wood furniture with a coat of water repelling wood sealer, metal furniture with liquid or paste auto wax, and aluminum furniture with a one-to-one mixture of vinegar and water. (Check the manufacturer’s care instructions.)

Close Companions

By planting your veggies with the right partner, you’ll keep pests at bay and encourage growth. Cheerful nasturtiums deter squash bugs and whiteflies (their edible flowers also make a tasty addition to fresh salads) while marigolds repel nematodes, tomato hornworms, and bean, cucumber, and asparagus beetles. Peppers thrive alongside carrots, onions, parsnips, and peas, and tomatoes flourish near basil, bush bean, chive, lettuce, and cucumber.

Notes from the Field: Summer Growth Spurt The Saturday Evening Post

The evening sun tinged the smoke a reddish-gray as it curled up from Gary’s steel mills. Indiana corn fields, ragged with last year’s stubble and damp with winter runoff, awaited spring planting. In eastern Ohio, night came on and the land went black. Blinking red crossing gates, the sodium lamps of main streets, and the window glow of farmhouses streamed past the window. 
Intermodal freight trains—double stacked with scores of shipping 
containers—rushed by the opposite way. After Toledo, I went back to my coach seat, wrapped myself in a sports coat, and slept to Pittsburgh, the bump and sway of the rails a familiar balm.

In the previous year, I’d ridden 26,000 miles on Amtrak trains, 
researching a book on the future of passenger rail. This coach seat to 
New York was a freebie earned from 
all the miles racked up on my Amtrak 
Rewards card. I could have flown, 
as most Americans do on business trips, but I wanted “train time”: the 
opportunity to unwind, read news
papers, write on my laptop, and zone out on the landscape.

Only 2 percent of Americans have ridden an intercity passenger train, 
not a surprising statistic considering the median age of the population is 
37 and American railroads gave up 
passenger trains in 1971, when Amtrak was created by Congress. Since that time, Amtrak has provided only a 
bare-bones national network, so for most Americans, a train isn’t a travel option. Finally, that may be changing.

Railroads and passenger trains are poised to expand in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. The $4-per-gallon gas crisis in 2008; the meltdown of the domestic auto industry; jammed and crumbling highways; stressed airports; a renewed focus on infrastructure 
improvements; the drive for a greener, more efficient economy; and the awarding of billions in federal stimulus dollars for high-speed trains all bode well for rail transportation. Even the big freight railroads, who own nearly all the nation’s rail infrastructure, have signaled a new cooperative attitude 
regarding passenger trains. They know that when the Great Recession is over, business will bloom again, and they’ll need government help to expand the infrastructure—not just for passenger trains, but for the intermodal trains that are surely taking market share from the trucking industry.

Warren Buffett, perhaps the country’s most respected investor and one with an expansive time horizon, sees American railroads as an industry 
with a bright future. Last fall, he and his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, plunked down $26.7 billion to acquire Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), the nation’s second biggest railroad. It already owned about one-third of the company’s stock.

Buffet, the so-called Oracle of Omaha who promotes value investing, called the purchase “a huge bet on that company. It’s an all-in 
wager on the economic future of the United States.”

A rail renaissance is underway. “Last century was the 
automotive century. I think 
the 21st is fixing to be the 
railroad century,” says Gil 
Carmichael, a former federal railroad administrator and the founder of the Intermodal Transportation Institute at the University of Denver.

Making it happen will 
require investment. Since the 1960s, the nation has lost nearly half of its rail infrastructure 
as railroads consolidated, 
removed tracks, and abandoned whole routes. Still, 150,000 miles remain, and these tracks run from city center to city center.

Carmichael and others are promoting Interstate II, or the Steel Interstate, a plan to double and triple track 20,000 to 30,000 miles of existing freight right of way. The tracks would be grade 
separated—meaning intersecting roads would run under or over rather than across the tracks. Intermodal freights could run 90 mph, passenger trains up to 125 mph, and heavy coal and grain trains could go their own slow speed. Initially, power would come from 
diesel locomotives, but eventually the corridors could be electrified, getting juice from greener sources, such as wind, solar, and biomass plants. 
Nuclear power is back in the mix, too.

“No leap in technology is needed to electrify trains. We know how to do that. The right of ways are already in place—we just need to expand them,” Carmichael tells me. “Putting billions into a rail corridor program would 
create jobs and build for the future.”

Some states are already ahead of the curve in this regard. In 2006, Amtrak and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spent $145 million to lay welded rail, put in concrete ties, straighten curves, erect an electrical 
infrastructure, and create a high-speed service on what’s known as the 
Keystone Corridor.

But nationwide, improving transportation infrastructure—whether it’s a 
rail line, a canal, an airport, or a highway—seldom comes quickly, cheaply, or without controversy. Congress created the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission to recommend where the country should concentrate its resources in 
the coming decades. At first, the 
commission wasn’t going to consider rail, reasoning there wasn’t enough data to compare it to highways.

Then, Frank Busalacchi, a commission member and head of Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation, formed a separate “passenger rail working group.” He gathered experts, held 
public hearings, and even got some commissioners to board a train. In its final report issued in early 2008, the commission called for spending $225 billion annually on infrastructure, 
including $8 billion to $9 billion each year on intercity rail.

“Those commissioners who thought trains were old fashioned got their eyes opened. When you look out 50 years with perhaps 100 million more 
citizens, it’s clear you cannot meet the transportation requirements of this country with just air travel and highways,” says Busalacchi. There has to be investment and a shift to more mass transportation by rail.

Without rail, the study estimated, the country will need nine new airports the size of Denver’s and a doubling of the current 49,000-mile interstate highway system.

At 5 a.m., the Capitol Limited dropped me and a handful of passengers in downtown Pittsburgh, where we had a two-and-half-hour wait 
before boarding the Pennsylvanian to New York. The station was chilly; food came from vending machines, and 
outside, the city was still asleep. I walked a few blocks but failed to find a restaurant for coffee and breakfast.

If I’d been in Germany or a dozen other First-World countries running 
national rail systems, my connecting train would have waited across the platform or arrived within minutes. The station would be busy with people, restaurants, and newsstands.

It used to be that way in America. We had grand terminals and the best rail system in the world, built in the 
19th and early 20th centuries by privately owned railroads that were subsidized by government through land grants, easements, legislation, and generous loans. Railroads made modern life 
possible and knitted together a disparate people and sprawling geography, said John Hankey, a historian and 
former curator of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum.

“Good transportation is that important. By nature, we ought to be five 
different countries. The reason we aren’t is the railroad,” he says.

But railroads also were monopolies, big corporations wielded by tycoons and Wall Streeters. Their errant ways and fearsome reputation lead to heavy government regulation. When automobiles and cheap oil came along, federal and state governments saw no need to help the private railroads. Instead, they poured billions into subsidizing roads.

The decline in train ridership was well underway by World War II, 
when military research and development in aviation—again funded by government—led to the emergence of commercial aviation. But the stake 
in the heart of the privately run 
passenger train was the interstate highway system. Those wide, concrete swaths with nary an intersection or stoplight beckoned us to hit the roads in tens of millions of gas guzzlers churned out by Detroit.

For the average American, cars 
versus trains became a simple process of substitution, even an expression of freedom. No longer captive to a big 
organization like the railroad, we could go where we wanted, when we wanted.

“We’re Americans. We don’t like to be restricted. We embraced the automobile. It would have been denying our nature not to,” Hankey says.

At the time, trains seemed passé, 
a relic of another age. Abandoned 
by passengers, their freight business 
decimated by trucking, railroads 
were in terrible shape. In 1970, the 
nation’s largest railroad company, 
the Penn Central, went bankrupt and shook the country’s financial system. Other railroads would follow unless government acted.

To avoid nationalizing the industry, Congress came up with Amtrak, an 
entity that would relieve the railroads of their passenger trains. In return, the railroads agreed to give Amtrak priority over their routes, but even today 
passenger trains frequently are shunted to sidings to make way for freights. Sometimes, it’s because there’s just one track and not enough room for all the traffic out there. No surprise then that Amtrak has a long history of poor time performance and marginal service on shared right of ways.

The problems really go back to the beginning, when Congress gave Amtrak two mandates—run a nationwide 
system and create efficiencies that would turn a profit. Amtrak has never made a profit, and in its 39-year history has lurched from one financial crisis to another. To stay solvent, it’s needed about a billion dollars a year in subsidy.

In terms of government dollars going into the transportation modes, that’s 
a drop in the bucket. But more importantly, profitability of passenger trains was a ridiculous notion to begin with, says William Withuhn, former curator of Transportation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

“We’ve been hearing since 1971 that if Amtrak was reformed, got new equipment, or got rid of certain trains and routes, it would make a profit. It’s all a crock,” he says. “Passenger trains do not make a profit. Neither do roads or airports. That’s not the purpose of transportation. It’s national cohesion; it’s about moving people where they need to be. The reason America doesn’t have a world-class passenger rail 
transportation system is because it hasn’t paid for it.”

When the Pennsylvanian left 
Pittsburgh shortly after dawn, it took nearly five hours to reach Harrisburg 
(2 hours longer than driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike), but finally I had breakfast and a couple of newspapers to read. And for the first time, I traveled over the famous Horseshoe curve near Altoona, which was built in the 1850s to climb the Alleghenies. At the state capital, the Pennsylvanian switched out its diesel for an electrical locomotive, shook off the doldrums and cranked up to 100 mph. It wasn’t like the TGV I’d ridden in France, but it was a fast train—a demonstration of what can happen with investment. Trains aren’t just rapid but regular on this corridor—14 times daily each way—and frequency is what builds ridership. It’s the mantra I heard from rail experts everywhere—dependable, frequent, and fast service on corridors 100 to 500 miles long 
(distances too close to fly and too 
inconvenient to drive) are the sweet spots for rail.

Like Pennsylvania, a few state DOTs subsidize Amtrak service between their major cities, even going as far to 
purchase their own trains 
because Amtrak is too cash strapped to provide equipment. Washington has put $100 million into the Amtrak Cascades corridor between Portland and Seattle. Wisconsin subsidizes the Hiawatha service between Milwaukee and Chicago and plans an 
extension to Madison. Illinois will soon have 110-mph-Amtrak service between Springfield and St. Louis.

California’s efforts dwarf all others. In the past 20 years, it has invested $2.2 billion in corridor trains and created a network of feeder buses and light rail that extends Amtrak 
service to 80 percent of its residents. In January 2010, it received $2 billion of stimulus money to begin building a 200-mph-train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Florida received $1.25 billion for a high-speed train from Tampa to Orlando. Both will run on new right of ways separate from Amtrak and the freight railroads. If these investments between the states and federal government continue, America may see its first true bullet train in 10 years and an Amtrak system that fulfills its promise. There may even be an Interstate II.

In Philadelphia, I switched to the Acela, currently America’s fastest train. Capable of 200 mph, the Acela averages just 80 mph on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, 
D.C., because of curves, a patchwork electrical system, and tunnels that go back to the Civil War. The corridor 
infrastructure needs billions in rehabilitation to make it truly high-speed.

Still, more than 100 trains move along it each day, and Amtrak captures half of the air/rail market between the big East Coast cities where trains never went entirely out of fashion.

My Acela crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, ran through the gritty streets of Trenton, and blew by the auto traffic on I-95. In the Meadowlands, the Manhattan skyline and a bright, full moon rose up on the horizon.

It took 22 hours to cover the 900 miles from Chicago. In the 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited did the same run from Chicago to New York in 16 hours. And it didn’t arrive at a charmless, utilitarian Penn Station complex, but at Pennsylvania Station, a gem of Beaux-Arts style 
architecture, and truly one of the great buildings of New York.

They tore it down in 1964 in the name of urban renewal, another 
casualty of a country that allowed its passenger rail system to go to seed.

As the preservationists said then of Pennsylvania Station—never again.

Waiting on a Train The Saturday Evening Post