7/19 Sault Ste Marie

Everyone had such a good time at the reunion it was decided to also hold the next one in the Soo (2017).  That was a bit of a surprise because it’s so much farther for everyone except the Michigan and Wisconsin members of the family.  We’re already thinking of places we want to go on the way to and from the next one.

The reunions are very short, officially only Friday and Saturday although a few people come earlier. We were the only ones who stayed until Monday morning. On Saturday after the boat tour of the Soo Locks several of us went to the cemetery where one set of Jim’s great-grandparents are buried but, in spite of having many people looking, we weren’t able to find them. Sunday Jim and I went back and were able to find a number of Aube family grave markers as well as the one for his great-grandmother which had such deteriorated engraving after 104 years it was very difficult to read. 

Sunday afternoon we went through the Soo Locks visitor center and watched one of the big ore carriers go through the locks. 

Seeing the ship nose into the lock which is only five feet wider than the ship is interesting at first, but it goes extremely slowly (for obvious reasons) so after 30 minutes of hardly anything happening you begin to feel like you’re watching paint dry.  We gave up on it before it got out of the locks into the St. Mary’s River. Back in the visitor center we watched a 30 minute video, read most of the information boards, and the ship was just leaving the lock area as we came out.  If we had hurried just a little bit we would have beaten it to our campground a couple of miles down the river.

One of the giant ore carriers going by our campground on the St. Mary's River.

An aerial view of the Soo Locks with Canada on the right and Lake Superior in the background.  The two locks on the right are no longer used.  The bridge is the International Bridge between Soo, Michigan, and Soo, Ontario (which is five times the size of its Michigan sister city).  The two on the left are in use 24/7 for 42 weeks a year.  For 10 weeks in the winter they’re closed for maintenance.  There’s no charge to use the locks which are operated by the Corps of Engineers. 

The McArthur Lock (on the far left) is 800 feet long and 80 feet wide.  The second from left is the much bigger Poe Lock, 1200 feet long and 110 feet wide.  It was built to accommodate the “Lakers” which are just over 1000 feet long and 105 feet wide.  They’re too big to go through the canal around Niagara Falls so can never leave the Great Lakes which is why they’re called Lakers. The locks operate by gravity with over 22 million gallons of water moving through the Poe Lock every time a ship goes through.

The locks were built to bypass the 21-foot drop of the Falls of St. Mary (Sault Ste Marie in French).  Prior to the locks being built everything had to be portaged around the falls as the Indians had been doing forever. Cargo would be off-loaded at one end, transported around the falls and re-loaded on a ship at the other end, thus the name “Portage Avenue” in the Soo.  A steamship was portaged around the falls before the locks were built, taking seven weeks to be pulled over rolling logs up Portage Avenue. 

These locks are among the busiest in the world with an estimated value of over $500 billion in iron ore alone moving through the locks each year.  The locks are so vital to shipping they were considered a prime target during WWII and were very heavily guarded.