That is huge for Stony Point, but a day like this isn’t too uncommon in the winter:
Alex Gray gets barreled at 2:03 and 3:12.
Great Lakes: Freezes, Lake Effect, and Cooling
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Alex Gray gets barreled at 2:03 and 3:12.
That's incredible. I thought proper waves were confined to oceans with long wind fetch. Just proves how big those lakes are.
Edit. I just looked up Stony Point. I assume these conditions happen with sustained fresh north easterly winds?
I'm not a surfer, but my understanding is the best conditions result from sustained north-north-east winds at Stoney Point (just realized I misspelled it in my post above).
That "Surfing Lake Superior" clip is nuts with what look like perfect pipelines.
It's said that the most difficult sporting feat is to hit a MLB-level baseball (the hand/eye coordination necessary to connect on a 100 mph fastball, to say nothing of curveballs, knuckleballs, sliders, etc.); however, surfing has to be up there. I can't imagine being able to execute some of those moves.
It's said that the most difficult sporting feat is to hit a MLB-level baseball (the hand/eye coordination necessary to connect on a 100 mph fastball, to say nothing of curveballs, knuckleballs, sliders, etc.); however, surfing has to be up there. I can't imagine being able to execute some of those moves.
Those moves are sort of like an elite mogul skier. Big wave surfing seems a close analogy to the extreme skiers ripping 50 degree lines in Alaska.
There are tons of recreational surfers in SoCal and Australia who are analogous to the skiers who post here.
Is the learning curve more difficult? Yes. One of my high school classmates said you need about 100 sessions to become competent. Adam said it took him about 50 when he went to college in San Diego. The curve was faster for him because he was already an expert skier.
Garry Klassen and Larry Schick (grew up in Laguna Beach) are the people I know best with very high skill levels at both skiing and surfing. Those people will tell you that surfing and powder skiing are similarly addictive.
Sbooker may have some insights here too.
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jasoncapecod
Well-known member
I don't surf , but i did windsurf at competent level...i could do a laydown jibe... when you are hooked in and back in the straps..warm flat water , it might be the best feeling ever!!! i imagine surfing is similar. i got goosey writing this
I often think about the gulf between average people’s ability to play a sport and the elite sportspeople. I agree surfing might be difficult but high jump is the one that blows my mind. (I am short though so that might play on my thinking).
Getting in that cold water is very impressive in itself.
I don’t surf now and never reached a really competent level back in the day because I didn’t do it enough. Then work took over my life between the age of about 20 and 38 so I did very little leisure stuff aside from irregular offshore fishing. When I started taking time off we somehow got into snow skiing. It wasn’t a conscious thing but it was a pastime that was more family friendly than most sports. We could all do it together…..
Not becoming a regular surfer is a bit of a regret of mine.
ChrisC
Well-known member
Has anyone (here) been to Mt. Bohemia in winter?
This graph is fantastic: it's either all or nothing with freezing over!
This graph is fantastic: it's either all or nothing with freezing over!
Yes, but not since 2014 and I have not posted about it since 2011: https://www.firsttracksonline.com/boards/threads/a-little-bohemia.9389/
A clip from the end of November:
Ah yes, the gales of November!
ChrisC
Well-known member
No, the headline should be: "Hiking for a week on remote Isle Royale NP without a map—what could go wrong?"
I have some perspective here since I visited Isle Royale and Voyageurs National Park a couple of years ago while working to complete all the National Parks in the continental U.S. (I’ve skipped the remote parks in Alaska and American Samoa, as the cost-benefit ratio didn't seem worth it).
This story sounds like a fundamental planning failure—a classic single point of failure—rather than an unreasonable objective for an Isle Royale hike. He clearly neglected the basics, making this outcome highly predictable.
His biggest mistake was relying solely on the AllTrails app and having no backup when he lost his satellite phone. How do you head out for a week without a paper map and compass? He could have easily carried a separate satellite communicator attached to his body.
The hiker mentioned, "I studied for a year... I thought it would be similar to Pictured Rocks, and that just wasn’t the case." That’s wild, especially considering the park provides free maps at the ferry station and detailed versions are readily available for purchase.
Furthermore, moving seven hours away from his last known transmission location was a massive error. It's the classic "lost-hiker" mistake: keep moving rather than staying put. As an engineer, he surely understood that his last recorded location was the only logical place for search and rescue to look for his device or his trail. Abandoning that area made a difficult situation exponentially worse.
A West Coast comparison is visiting Channel Islands National Park, CA - specifically Santa Cruz Island.
Free map below - much larger foldout.
ChrisC
Well-known member
It’s incredible that Lake Superior was still 38°F during my mid-to-late June visit. I stayed one night at Windigo on the Minnesota side; nighttime temperatures were in the 50s, while daytime highs reached the 70s. However, during the ferry crossing, it was a chilly 30s to low 40s out on the lake.
I was hoping to find some old-growth forest, but unfortunately, none remains at Isle Royale or Voyageurs National Parks. I suppose that makes sense given the heavy logging at the turn of the century, and the fact that Voyageurs is a relatively newer park established in the 1970s.
I'm quite unfamiliar with Minnesota and Michigan's north country, but it was a beautiful region to explore.
So many lighthouses around Lake Superior. Similar to the New England coast, and just as treacherous.
I semi-invited myself into the wheelhouse to review Lake Superior navigation -- and document a June 21st water temp of 37.9F
I was hoping to find some old-growth forest, but unfortunately, none remains at Isle Royale or Voyageurs National Parks. I suppose that makes sense given the heavy logging at the turn of the century, and the fact that Voyageurs is a relatively newer park established in the 1970s.
I'm quite unfamiliar with Minnesota and Michigan's north country, but it was a beautiful region to explore.
So many lighthouses around Lake Superior. Similar to the New England coast, and just as treacherous.
I semi-invited myself into the wheelhouse to review Lake Superior navigation -- and document a June 21st water temp of 37.9F
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Have you posted trip reports somewhere? That's worth creating an AI map to plot all of your visits.
ChrisC
Well-known member
Have you posted trip reports somewhere? That's worth creating an AI map to plot all of your visits.
Lol
No.I’ve finally consolidated my disparate photo databases into the cloud, organizing them in both Google Photos and Apple iCloud. The NPs get names and "National Park" labels - that's it.
Unfortunately, I lack specific geotags for individual hikes or famous viewpoints, which makes curating a "Top 10" list for each park difficult. I’m currently shooting over 10,000 photos per year, and I've found that AI still struggles to synthesize coherent trip reports from such a massive, unfocused volume of images. I’ve burned through a significant amount of compute and tokens trying to get AI to select and edit the best shots, but the results have been consistently underwhelming.
Example: Rock of Ages Lighthouse... and so many more.
ChrisC
Well-known member
I get so bothered by media stories like:
"For 11 days, a lost hiker shouted for help. Then two kayakers appeared.
Craig Berg’s phone vanished in a swamp. As he sought help, he survived on freeze-dried food and “the most disgusting water that you could imagine.”
It is such a default to return to the storyline: Man vs. Nature, a story of survival. Or the death of an incredibly experienced and avid outdoorsman.
Reality: Stupidity kills. Poor planning creates chaos.
The issue: The media never makes any of the stories instructive about where the victim was to blame. Many of these situations were entirely preventable, or would not have cascaded to such an extent. Especially today - you cannot victim-shame or blame!
During my Community College Climbing course, our instructor/climbing guide pulled countless stories from Northwest Seattle and Portland papers, and we would identify what basic things went wrong.
Sure, a backup device - great! But what about a map?? The island is only 4 miles wide; if you could distinguish North-ish, you could make it to a ridge where the major hiking trails run - or a shore where ferries run multiple times per day. Assume one would know this if planning for a year. Note: you do have to plan well ahead in order to get ferry reservations.
Walking 3 miles off-trail (bushwhacking) typically takes 2 to 3 hours, assuming an average off-trail speed of 1 to 1.5 miles per hour.
"For 11 days, a lost hiker shouted for help. Then two kayakers appeared.
Craig Berg’s phone vanished in a swamp. As he sought help, he survived on freeze-dried food and “the most disgusting water that you could imagine.”
It is such a default to return to the storyline: Man vs. Nature, a story of survival. Or the death of an incredibly experienced and avid outdoorsman.
Reality: Stupidity kills. Poor planning creates chaos.
The issue: The media never makes any of the stories instructive about where the victim was to blame. Many of these situations were entirely preventable, or would not have cascaded to such an extent. Especially today - you cannot victim-shame or blame!
During my Community College Climbing course, our instructor/climbing guide pulled countless stories from Northwest Seattle and Portland papers, and we would identify what basic things went wrong.
Sure, a backup device - great! But what about a map?? The island is only 4 miles wide; if you could distinguish North-ish, you could make it to a ridge where the major hiking trails run - or a shore where ferries run multiple times per day. Assume one would know this if planning for a year. Note: you do have to plan well ahead in order to get ferry reservations.
Walking 3 miles off-trail (bushwhacking) typically takes 2 to 3 hours, assuming an average off-trail speed of 1 to 1.5 miles per hour.
The WP has become such a train wreck. I get the impression that it’s not necessarily the writer who’s at fault, but rather the editor who removes or rewrites key parts of stories.
Agreed. I try to take a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God attitude and not Monday morning quarterback other people's wilderness mishaps, but this story is a real head scratcher for me.
Yes.
I can't imagine ever heading into any sizeable wilderness without a well-protected paper map and compass and/or without knowing how to use the compass. GPS is great until you can't use your device for any reason. Also, in my experience, really learning to navigate the old-fashioned way makes one much more observant of the local geography even when not looking at the map.
We never carried any satellite communication device until 2019. IMHO, really knowing we would be on our own encouraged us to be very thorough about planning and to constantly take risk management into consideration. One important consideration for risk management is the likelihood of running into other people if you've got a problem. (For example, on a 150-mile 10 day loop in Ontario's Woodland Caribou Provincial Park in July 1997, my wife and I encountered just four other people. However, even in the most off-the-beaten-path parts of the BWCA, we rarely string together more that a day or two without encountering other groups.)
On the other hand, now that we do carry a satellite communication device, I keep it on my body in a shock-proof, waterproof case (which is ridiculously redundant, because the device itself is significantly water and shock resistant).
I have a really hard time understanding this statement. Pictured Rocks is on the South Shore of Lake Superior, off of the Canadian Shield, with a transitional forest ecosystem. Isle Royale is in the middle of the lake, on the southern fringes of the Shield, and its forest is fully boreal. In other words, the climate, the ecosystem, and most importantly the geology, and therefore the terrain, are radically different between Pictured Rocks and Isle Royale even though there is not too much distance between the two. Perhaps more importantly, Pictured Rocks gets well over 200K visitors over the summer whereas Isle Royale gets perhaps less than 10 percent of that.
This!