Apostle Islands

Why should it be a National Park?

Twenty-one islands sit off the northern tip of Wisconsin in Lake Superior, close enough to reach by kayak and far enough that most Americans have never heard of them. The Apostle Islands are made of red sandstone, and the lake has spent ten thousand years carving that sandstone into arches, chambers, and sea caves that run back into the cliffs. In summer visitors paddle into them. In a hard winter, when the lake freezes solid, people walk across miles of ice to reach caves hung with columns of frozen spray, lit blue from the inside.

No other unit of the National Park System has more lighthouses. Nine light stations stand on these islands, built to guide ore boats and lumber schooners through water that has wrecked hundreds of ships. Before any of that, and still today, this was Ojibwe country. The Red Cliff and Bad River Bands of Lake Superior Chippewa hold treaty rights across these waters, and Madeline Island, the largest of the group and the one island left outside the lakeshore, remains the spiritual center of the Ojibwe people.

The islands were logged, quarried, and farmed before they were protected, and the recovery is part of what makes them worth seeing. Old-growth remnants survive on Outer and Devils Islands. Black bears swim the channels between islands. More than 240 bird species pass through. Congress designated roughly eighty percent of the land as the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness in 2004, named for the Wisconsin senator who fought for the lakeshore and later founded Earth Day.

Wisconsin has no National Park. A bill to make the Apostle Islands the state's first cleared the House Natural Resources Committee in February 2026, and it would change nothing on the ground: same boundaries, same federal ownership, same hunting on Sand Island, which the bill sets aside as a preserve. That is also the objection. The Red Cliff Band and the city of Bayfield have opposed it, arguing the consultation was inadequate and that a new name mainly brings more visitors to a place already straining under them. Whether a designation that changes no acreage is worth the crowds it invites is the question the Apostle Islands now puts to the country.