…In the morning the cabins were new to us. It was as if we had awakened in a different place altogether. Rain streamed down the windows, and the waters of Agate Harbor were gray and wind-streaked and bordered by rock formations capped with golden tamarack and black spruce. Beyond the mouth of the bay, in the open lake, rollers broke white against reefs. Farther out, and as far as we could see to the horizon, the lake flashed with whitecaps.

We stood before the window sipping from mugs of coffee and watching the weather change: Now it was spitting sleet. Now wet flakes hurled silently against the glass, melted, and slid to the sill. Now the sun came out and the drenched earth gleamed. Now clouds cut across the sun, and snow-pellets rattled on the ground. It was volatile out there, and we were glad to be inside, next to a heater, with a coffee-pot on the stove and a stack of books on the table.

Later we put on our raingear and went outside to explore. Sunlight sprayed through cracks in the clouds, and the cold air tasted like iron. We followed a path from the front of the cabin around outcroppings of rock and between cushions of ankle-deep moss to a natural stone patio overlooking the lake. There a wooden bench, weathered to gray and covered with a scruff of lichen, was well along on its journey back to the earth. We could see no other cabins and no other evidence of humans whatsoever, so it was easy to imagine that this rock-cleft shoreline had changed little since the glaciers departed. For ten thousand years these same waves had broken against these same rocks. This same icy rain had fallen.

Here and everywhere else we went on the Keweenaw, we became engrossed in rocks. Most of the beaches around the peninsula are in coves scalloped between headlands of bedrock and are heaped with stones of every dimension, from pebbles to boulders. Waves have sorted them by size, the smallest near the water and the largest shoved farther up the beach. They have been water-shaped into every variety of round: plates, saucers, biscuits, buns, softballs, bowling balls, and cobbles. Some are oval and some nearly but never perfectly spherical and many are flat enough to stack unsteadily until they topple.

If we found a stone we liked that was nearly round or egg-shaped and fit comfortably in our hands, we carried it with us as we walked. At first we would be reluctant to give it up, but eventually it became a burden. We would heave it toward the lake and watched it plunge into the water with almost no splash and a sound like a gulp. If the waves were small we collected skippers and whipped them across the surface. Aaron found a good one and skipped it, counting, “One, two, twenty, ninety-nine, two-hundred—a new world record!” And we looked for agates, but our luck was poor. Lake Superior agates, with their translucent red banding, are famous among rock collectors around the world. The first day, in three hours of searching, Aaron found a single pea-sized specimen with one side chipped off to reveal a vivid patch of red-and-white bands. Gail and I found none. We consulted geological field guides and a locally-published guide to agate hunting, but for the first few days we were not really sure what we were looking for…

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…That afternoon, as on most afternoons, when dusk was starting to settle into the woods, we drove up the steep and sinuous road to the summit of Brockway Mountain to try for a glimpse of sunset and a cell-phone connection.

Brockway is a mountain in name only, barely a thousand feet above Lake Superior, and only about 1,600 feet above sea level. But it is the highest point on the peninsula and so exposed to the weather that the oak, aspen, birch, and spruce trees ringing its summit are stunted, their gnarled branches arthritic, their trunks stubby and twisted. At the prospect, where the road circles a weather station and the parking lot is lined with a crenellated wall of quarried stone, we stood and looked inland at mountainous ridges where the earth’s crust tilts toward the center of the Keweenaw. The woods on the hillsides, stripped of their leaves, appeared faintly purple, with veins of green conifers running through them and a few patches of aspens unfurling down the slopes like strips of gold carpeting. Donut-shaped Bailey Lake, with a wooded island at its center, lay cupped in the valley below. We turned and saw the woods drop below us in an accelerating arc past the bay where our cabin sat, to the lighthouse at Eagle Harbor blinking white then red then white. Everywhere else was open lake. Fifty miles away we could see Isle Royale and its archipelago rising in hazy bumps just above the horizon.

We got a few bars and separated—Aaron to the wall at the crest, Gail and I to the lee side of the car, all of us with our backs to the wind—and listened to our messages and returned calls. We shouted into the air and felt ourselves part of  a continuum. At various times people must have stood on this same mountaintop and signaled with smoke, flags, beacons, and bonfires.

Snow squalls crept across the lake. Each was shaped like an inverted thunderhead, or like a giant boot about to stomp the water. Even from twenty miles away we could see the snow-streaks beneath them, bending with the wind. Overhead, a few southbound birds shot past, trying to keep ahead of winter. The Keweenaw is a bird funnel, especially in the spring, when thousands of raptors concentrate above Brockway, circling on thermals as they wait for a south wind to carry them across the lake to Canada.

Grains of snow flung past in the wind, and gusts made the wind generator on top of the boarded-up gift shop accelerate into furious storms of kinetic energy. We could see the wind flurrying the lake many miles out. The lid of clouds cracked open low in the west and a burst of sunlight streamed through. For a minute or two everything around us flared in brilliant rose and scarlet, then the sun dropped beyond the horizon and darkness fell.

That was the moment, the very moment, when the season of falling fell into winter.

(Excerpted from The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes, by Jerry Dennis. University of Michigan Press, 2011)