Thursday, October 13, 2022

Kayaking Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

One of the highlights of our October 2022 trip to Duluth, Minnesota's North Shore, and Apostle Islands National Lakeshore was kayaking Lake Superior in and near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

Our first of two kayaking trips on Lake Superior was this Meyers Beach kayaking tour and it ranks among our miost remarkable travel experiences with just the two of us and our guide. There were no other groups kayaking at the same time either (it was the first week of October) and we loved the leisurly kaying to, in, around, and through the remarkable sea caves. It was so quiet that we could listen to the waves against the walls of the caves and loved hearing the loud echoing sounds when water filled a gap in the cave wall and then emptied loudly and quickly.

Unfortunately, our GoPro's battery died very quickly and we weren't able to take any photographs of these magnificent sea caves.

On the other hand, I loved being able to fully take in the majesty of this experience without needing to worry about taking photographs. I was only able to get photographs of the beach from which we departed and returned to after the two hours plus of kayaking the sea caves.

It's an interesting coincidence that two of our favorite travel experiences involve kayaking without photographs to help remember the event (the other experience in this category was kayaking Vieques's Mosquito Bay in Puerto Rico). Fortunately, these experiences were so memorable that there is little need for the photographs!

The web page for this tour states, "Meyers Beach: Simply the Best" and adds the attention-grabbing (and true in our case) sub-title, "This is why you're here." I am also going to quote their web page here because it nicely summarizes the experience we had (note that I have received no renumeration or compensation for this trip or this endorsement, but post it because how impressed we were with what we saw, heard, and felt on this tour):

The Meyers Beach Sea Caves are without a doubt at the top of Wisconsin’s Bucket List of adventures. Paddle your kayak through numerous sea arches, caves, and secret passages, with views of the Greatest Lake there is-Superior. Your guide is a professional geologist and naturalist with 35 + years of working in and exploring the region. This Land was the domain of the Anishinabi (Chippewa) People for generations. Our mission is to share their story and wisdom of these and their powerful spiritual connection to the place they know and love.

Our second kayaking tour was the Red Cliff Caves/Shipwreck Tour.

We took our backup GoPro camera battery with us for our second kayaking tour on Lake Superior and so were able to take photographs this time. Our tour guide also took a few photographs as well.

The changing leaves in early October added to the beauty of this already beautiful setting.

The sea caves we saw on the Red Cliff Sea Caves Kayak Tour were not as large (height, width, or depth) as the ones we saw on the Meyers Beach Kayak tour, but it was still a peaceful and beautiful setting to enjoy.

Although the caves on this tour were fewer and significantly smaller than the ones on the Meyers Beach tour, we were still able to kayak into some of these much smaller caves.

This arch is also a highlight of this tour.

Kayaking on Lake Superior among the sea caves provided fascinating and beautiful experiences.

The first week of October 2022 worked out well for us because the weather was not hot, there were few other people (no one else on our Meyers Beach tour and only one other couple on the Red Cliff Sea Caves tour, and we had no other tour groups in sight on either tour The tour guide for the Meyers Beach tour said that there could be many people in his tour group and many tour groups in the summer.

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