Exploring the UP

For anyone who isn’t from Michigan when you look at the title “Exploring the UP” you are probably wondering to yourself what does that mean? Isn’t up a direction? Yes in fact it is a direction, but to Michiganders it is more than a direction, it’s a place. A place also known as the Upper Peninsula, “yooper land”, or “The 906” (which is the area code for the whole up). People who live in the up are called “yoopers”, where as people from the lower peninsula are “trolls”, this is because they live below the bridge.  From lower Michigan, the gateway to this beautiful place is known as the Mackinac bridge, or “Big Mack” for short. From there another 5 hours of driving northwest will bring you to the Keweenaw. Which is the small peninsula on the top of the Upper Peninsula. This is the beautiful place where my friends and I do all of our climbing.

Climbers are an interesting breed, they like to boast about their experience and climbing story’s, but when asked where these story’s take place, they will try to dodge the question. They will tell you all about the well-known spots, and how you should check them out. However since everyone knows about those spots, they are frequently visited, and you will run into other climbers. However our solution was to this problem, was to consult topographical maps. We looked for ridges, and places on the map where the lines where extremely close, normally denoting a steep cliff or hill. Then we would go to these places, and explore. We looked for rock quality, and took a great deal of time studying the rock to determine if it was safe to climb. The major problem we would run into, were loose rocks and or crumbly rocks. This is very unsafe, and doesn’t allow you to get good anchor points or handholds when climbing. After we determined if the rock face was climbable, we would mark it on our map in green for good or red to denote that this face was a no go.

We also spent a good amount of time searching for good Ice climbing. We also looked at maps, but this time we would look for rivers, and google earth to find water falls. Then like before we would explore these places in person. Sometimes we found that these places we two small or not worth climbing, however sometimes we found gold. Our favorite spot happened to be a small waterfall that came out underneath a snowmobile bridge. As far as we know this is not a spot that anyone else knows about, and we visited this spot many times. Never did we run into any other climbers, and that made that spot perfect. Since we were under a snow mobile bridge we could anchor directly to the bridge, which is called top roping. Giving us maximum safety, if for some reason the wall were to break then we would still be hanging from the bridge. This spot is just a great example of what you can come across when you are exploring the Upper Peninsula.