"Then after many glorious days, we will travel to the Isles of Contentment on the shores of Giche-Gumi, by the shining big sea water."
- Aldo Leopold
in a letter to his brother Frederic, 1906
Aldo Leopold Festival Tour:
Friday, May 29, 2026
Most people know Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac — the book that gave American conservation its conscience. Fewer know that the land ethic he spent his life articulating was shaped, in no small part, right here.
Leopold began visiting the Les Cheneaux Islands as a toddler, before his family bought their own cottage on Marquette Island. He returned every summer through his teen years — roaming freely, mapping trails, cataloguing every bird he could find, rowing, sailing, and paddling these channels.
He came back one final time as a young man — newly married to Estelle, still recovering from a near-fatal illness contracted while working for the US Forest Service in the Southwest. These islands were where he returned to recover himself. His eventual move to Wisconsin in 1924 — back to the upper Midwest, back to the north country — feels less like coincidence than a compass finding its bearing.
You can trace a direct line from a boy paddling Hessel Bay to the man who wrote "When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
Woods & Waters offers an Aldo Leopold kayak tour that follows that line — paddling the Les Cheneaux Club shoreline on Marquette Island, passing Aldo's sister's cottage still looking over the water, and spending time where it all began. There is more to this story than most people realize. The water is a good place to tell it.
This tour runs annually during the Aldo Leopold Festival, held the week immediately following Memorial Day — you can book now for this year's date. Outside of the festival, the Aldo Leopold tour is available by request as either a Little Dipper or Bigger Dipper length experience.
You don't need to know Leopold to take this tour. But you'll want to know him by the time you're done.