DETROIT — The campgrounds at Isle Royale National Park can get so crowded campers have to share sites with strangers, trek further into the wilderness to pitch their tent or pile into designated "overflow" sites with other visitors to the prized island park in Lake Superior.
"We're still seeing some campgrounds that are overfull, and that's not something that people expect when they come to a wilderness to camp," said Liz Valencia, Isle Royale project manager for interpretation, education and cultural resources.
To manage the influx, staff are considering requiring camping reservations for the first time at the Upper Peninsula park. Campers would have to register their camping plans in advance rather than nab sites on a first-come, first-serve basis.
An increase in visitors to Isle Royale National Park has park officials considering changes to camping policies and other initiatives.
That's one of the possible changes that could follow the park staff's effort to write a plan for Isle Royale's roughly 132,000 acres of wilderness area.
In October, the park kicked off a months-long process of developing a Wilderness Stewardship Plan that will outline how they should treat the park in order to preserve its character for coming generations while making sure visitors enjoy their stay in the backcountry. Park staff are collecting comments from the public by mail at Superintendent, Isle Royale National Park, Wilderness Stewardship Plan, 800 East Lakeshore Drive, Houghton, Michigan 49931-1896, or online at https://parkplanning.nps.gov/ISROWilderness.
The park staff drafted a wilderness stewardship plan in 2011 that never was adopted, Valencia said. She encouraged people who commented last time to weigh in again.
The possible range of changes at Isle Royale could be zero, essentially not changing management of the park at all, or could include measures aimed at improving visitor access like building new trails, campgrounds or campsites, or measures aimed at "improving solitude" such as reducing the number of campsites, removing structures and allowing winter public use.
Strategies for managing crowds
Like Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which charged an entry fee for the first time this year, visitation at Isle Royale has increased in recent summers. Numbers started ticking up from between 15,000 and 19,000 annual visitors from 2000-2015 to roughly 25,000 a year since 2016. In 2021, the latest annual data available, there were 25,844 visitors.
The park doesn't regulate the number of people that can be on the island at once or set limits on trails or popular sites, Valencia said. Capacity limits on the ferries and sea plane contracted to bring people to and from the island help control the number of visitors.
Taking campsite reservations — one of the possibilities raised in the National Park Service's notice of intent to develop a wilderness plan and environmental impact statement — could help the park staff manage how and when people visit the island, Valencia said. That proposal could be part of the wilderness plan, Valencia said.
Capacity limits on the ferries contracted to bring people to and from the Isle Royale National Park help control the number of visitors.
Limiting the size of groups that are allowed to visit the island for day trips to popular island sites like Hidden Lake or Lookout Louise also could help. That is another possibility for the stewardship plan.
The park staff also has proposed increasing the size of group camping to 12 people instead of 10.
"It's only two more people, and it would provide a little bit more of an opportunity for larger sized groups," Valencia said. "Most of the campgrounds we have that have group sites right now could accommodate 12 instead of 10."
Much of what the Park Service will decide has to do with cabins that are within the park's wilderness zone, an area that includes roughly 99% of the island. Those cabins were built by private owners before the island became a national park. When that happened, the government purchased the properties and gave owners a "life lease" so they could continue using their family cabins within the park, Valencia said. Families have maintained the cabins since.
Valencia said those life leases have expired, although some relatives of the cabins' original owners want to maintain access to the family cabins.
Possible treatment of those cabins could include preserving them, stabilizing them or demolishing them, according to the National Park Service's notice of intent to develop an environmental impact statement to go along with the updated wilderness plan.
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