Emerging from my bedroom and into the living room, I found Dave listening to the weather forecast. I missed the gist of the forecast, but turning off the radio Dave nodded approvingly at the conditions and we would be on our way.

Soon enough we were down at the dock, pushing off and easing into Washington Harbor. After having to turn around yesterday under seemingly fine conditions, I was now worried whether we would get out today. It was Monday though, and there were still four more opportunities to get out to the Rock of Ages Lighthouse.

Back at the dock I was given a quick lesson in tying knots and conducting a safe passage. This caused me to worry about not screwing up throughout this first crossing, and as a result, my camera stayed in my backpack. (These pictures come from our second trip out to the lighthouse.)

While things were glassy on this second trip, there were foot-high waves and present winds on the first trip. Our saving grace was that the wind was from a direction that works with the dock and the layout of the Rock of Ages, which meant that wind wouldn't really affect us. We just needed to make it to the leeward side of the small island.

We continued along on our 13km/8mi boat trip without hesitation. And without hesitation, I didn't have much time to take it all in. We were approaching this lonely, massive lighthouse extremely fast, the distant sight growing until it became a daunting peak in our immediate vicinity. And as we came closer and closer, I felt small and fragile in our little boat approaching this lighthouse that was as tall as a 10-story building.

Landing at the Rock of Ages is complicated by the fact that the cement dock was halved by a winter storm a few years back. This left the dock just about the length of our boat, so as we approached, Heather hopped off and worked on holding the ropes and tying the knots. I was left to hold the boat against the dock as best as I could, while Dave flipped between accelerating and reversing the engine, working to keep the boat in the tiny space between the dock, lighthouse crib and the rock island to our right.

One of the other times, I remember going a bit off course and abandoning our landing, suddenly hunkering down as Dave reversed the boat out of the rocky, shallow path where it was headed. Inching forward on a second attempt, we were able to scramble and complete our jobs to get the boat secured, with just as much excitement as our first visit.

You might think that through pursuing lighthouses and landing on various dock-free shores in Newfoundland, that I may be used to tying up a boat or working with knots. That's not the case though, as every time the Newfoundlander or Labradorian has been in charge and did everything himself.

Therefore I was really focused on not screwing anything up, while also trying to remember the knots I was just told. This made for a great contradiction of the high energy and focused landing; and the point where the boat's engine was cut and we were out safely, standing on the dock of this quiet isle.

There was nothing to offload on this first trip - Heather & Dave had been here working for a couple of weeks already - so I was free to wander across the cement wall and onto the actual Rock of Ages immediately.

If we rewind a couple of months here, I couldn't believe it when I read about this volunteer opportunity, and now I equally couldn't believe it that I was finally standing here. I'd e-mailed about volunteering back in January, so this was a long time coming.

(I also got very lucky to get the last volunteer spot. They took many more volunteers in 2017, but during this 2016 year there were only 4 spots. Hat tip to Shellay for telling me to get on it & send that initial email.)

This was surreal. The Rock of Ages is located 5 miles (8km) off of Isle Royale, a tiny speck of a rock in the vastness of Lake Superior. As much as I imagined being out here, I wasn't ready for the magnitude of the lighthouse, the separation from all other land, or the isolation from only hearing a light breeze and gentle, lapping waves.

I went as far as I could go out on the rocks here, then looked back at the towering structure. It was hard to crane my camera to get the whole thing in the frame, as the Rock of Ages island is smaller than many housing lots in Southwestern Ontario. (You can also imagine that the Rock lost some square footage when they built a giant lighthouse upon it, haha.)

The Rock of Ages island slanted up from the south to the north, with a 15-ft drop to my right. Dave told me about previous visits where they came out here in decent winds, but since those winds were from the north, everything was perfectly fine. Spray from the waves was actually going over these rocks occasionally, but the boat and their departure was protected by the lighthouse and the Rock of Ages itself.

(He also told me about lightkeepers out here in the 1960s, who would put on the marine survival suits, tie themselves off to the dock, then jump into the waves of Lake Superior during summer and autumn storms all for fun. I was terrified by the idea of trusting a rope that much.)

A steep, steel staircase reached from the rock up to the caisson (the crib or base), with a birds nest and abandoned eggs right at the top of the stairs. It was interesting to see that whatever gull or cormorant made this nest, that they had built it using bits of plastic and also a high school football team-branded lanyard (in addition to sticks).

I felt so far removed from society out here, that my brain struggled with the idea of travelling from here to the nearest high school football facility.

Looking to the west, there was even less land, with only about 15 feet of rock beside the caisson, then a few more rocks out in the water.

Did I mention how much I loved this caisson? The interlocking brick, the metal chains keeping you safe enough, the ability to circle the tower while observing everything below and out to sea? The width with which to comfortably walk around? Even if a lighthouse were to go away and only leave the caisson, I could see still wanting to get dropped off to explore the old base.

Dave & Heather were up from the boat soon enough and the heavy door to the lighthouse was muscled open.

We started steadily climbing up the 6 floors right to the lantern room, in order to open the doors for airflow, and to put up Old Glory to signal that we were out here and work was being done. (This is what I took the daily flag raising to mean, I didn't exactly ask Dave. I simply thought it was charming and American, and came to like the daily tradition.)

A couple of the immense panes of glass were cracked and one was unfortunately missing altogether. I wondered why repairing the pane wasn't the first course of action to fend off rain and snow from getting into the lighthouse, but apparently the Coast Guard had come out here to fix it - they still have weather equipment and a flashing light here - but their fix didn't last the winter. This tall tower is lashed by legendary winter storms blowing over these seas & the plastic piece held by a few 2x4s was no match for the gales of November.

The matter is further complicated because it's the top pane of glass and you're talking about a lighthouse. It's not very simple to get someone out here, then also the window repairman would need to rig up ladders and safety ropes to the exterior.

I came to understand why that pane of glass remained missing.

The modern light looking back to Isle Royale.

The Rock of Ages lantern room was obviously built to hold something much bigger.

Made to order by the Parisian company Barbier, Benard et Turenne for $15 000, the above 9-foot tall, second-order Fresnel lens sat on a bed of mercury and made a rotation every 20 seconds. This would produce a light that was visible for 29 miles (47km), making the Rock of Ages one of the most powerful lighthouses on the Great Lakes.

This particular lens was transferred to Isle Royale National Park in 1985 after the automation of the Rock of Ages in 1978. The lens was removed from the Rock of Ages and is now on display at the Windigo Visitor Center.

A pair of shipwrecks highlighted the need for a lighthouse at the Rock of Ages. The first shipwreck, back in 1877, was the passenger steamship Cumberland, which ferried people between Owen Sound, Port Arthur (Thunder Bay) and Duluth. Making a crossing between Port Arthur and Duluth in July of that year, the Cumberland ran aground on the Rock of Ages so hard that it could not be freed by tugs. It would break up by August of 1877, settling on a southwestern shoal at about 30 to 50 feet below lake level.

The Cumberland wouldn't be enough to get a lighthouse built here, leading to the Chisholm wrecking on the same shoal in October of 1898. Leaving Ashland Wisconsin in search of another ship, the Chisholm was headed up to Washington Harbor when it ran aground at the Rock of Ages. Salvage attempts were made, but just 8 days later, the gales of November came early and the Chisholm broke apart almost directly on top of the Cumberland. (Divers who visit the site have it marked as Cumberland/Chisholm, with parts of the Chisholm's wooden hull commingled with the Cumberland wreck.)

Congress would finally allot money in 1906 for the construction of the Rock of Ages Lighthouse.

At Washington Harbor, an old work camp was leased from a failed mining company to use as a base for the daily back and forth between Isle Royale and the Rock of Ages. A ship loaded with tools and workmen left Detroit on May 21st, making it to Washington Harbor and the workcamp by May 27th.

The Rock of Ages itself is a rock much like an angled knife, not quite 100m (110yds) long, and about 20m (22yds) wide. At its highest, it reaches about 15 feet above Lake Superior. The lighthouse at the Rock of Ages was to be substantial and it would need a solid base.

Quarrymen blasted a section of this rock not quite at centre, making room for the concrete and metal caisson atop a flat section just above the lake level. Metal plates were then riveted together into two circles, with the gap between the inner & outer circle then filled with concrete.

With the caisson in place, the lighthouse was then built by constructing a metal skeleton that would then be surrounded by bricks, limestone and steel. Around the same time, a timber pier was built to create another platform, where a bunk house and lunch hall was built so workers could stay out at the Rock of Ages. This greatly increased how quickly the lighthouse could be built.

The Rock of Ages was finished by 1908 and the lens was installed by 1910. In September of 1910, the Rock of Ages was finally marked as a lighthouse, one that stood 130 feet above the water.

The Rock of Ages most memorable night would come with one last shipwreck in 1933.

At the onset of the Great Depression, George Cox learned of a passenger ferry that was for sale & decided to buy it. Sailing the ship up from Lake Michigan, Cox and his many guests and associates, stopped at Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula briefly before continuing on to Thunder Bay. The plan was to come close to Isle Royale, but after seeing the Rock of Ages lantern room above a low fogbank, the ship headed west in order to clear the rocky dangers.

Unfortunately they didn't go far enough west and the Cox struck the same shoal that felled the Chisholm and the Cumberland. Thankfully, this time was in calmer weather and all 125 passengers were able to get into lifeboats and have the Rock of Ages Keeper John Soldenski use his motor boat to pull them over to the lighthouse. As this all happened in the evening, the Coast Guard was unable to get out before nightfall to bring anyone ashore, so all 126 people crammed into the lighthouse to keep warm throughout the night (some people rotated going outside to relieve the overcrowding).

Back on my first day, one of the first things Dave did was give me the grand tour of the lighthouse. It was only later on that I asked if I could go down into the crib/caisson, seeing as he didn't include it in the original tour. Of course this was because it was empty, dark & dank; but when I can see a rarely-visited dank interior in a remote location? I'm going to jump at the opportunity!

I half wished I used my tripod to take a picture down there because I liked the space, but there really wasn't much to the sub-cellar or cellar. (These areas were used for storage (sub-cellar) and where there used to be the air tanks for the fog signal (cellar).)

On the first floor (shown above) was the engine room. The door that opened out to the caisson was on the left, with the staircase leading up into the rest of the lighthouse at centre.

The second floor used to be an office and had one of the cooler things in the whole lighthouse at one time: a little library tucked in behind the cast iron, spiral staircase. The plan, and the whole point of us being out here, is to renovate this lighthouse into a museum with each floor looking like it would have during the time of lightkeepers. I especially wanted to see this little library reconstructed.

After the second floor, there was the kitchen & living room (third floor), head lightkeeper and 1st assistant's quarters (fourth floor), 2nd and 3rd assistant's quarters (fifth floor), the watch room where a lightkeeper would always be on the lookout (sixth floor), and of course the lantern room atop it all (with a shorter "service room" between the watch room and the lantern room).

One of the most common questions I got after my time here was just what did I do for 3.5 days (28 hours) of volunteering at a lighthouse. Part of this mystery might come from people picturing me volunteering at a modest lighthouse like Woody Point or Leamington. Eventually this mystery was quelled by showing these people a picture of the Rock of Ages, since they didn't picture such a substantial structure.

And the size of this lighthouse was highlighted by the small area I covered in all of my time there. My job was confined to the staircase between the 4th (head keeper's) and 5th (2nd/3rd keeper's) floors, where I had a scraper and a hammer and my job was to remove the plaster coat that the Coast Guard sprayed over the entire interior of the lighthouse. This was rewarding and somewhat easy when plate-sized chunks of plaster would come off the wall, but it was irritating and exhausting when I could only chip off dime-sized pieces over and over again (the spots with thicker plaster came off much easier).

As Dave & Heather worked on a different staircase, I came to be quite proud of "my" staircase. In a later newsletter, there was a picture of it painted and looking great, and boy did that put a smile on my face. I want to see it again in person one day.

In addition to scraping plaster, there were odd jobs like sweeping, lowering trash bags on pulleys and taking up metal safety grates installed by the Coast Guard. Taking this floor down to the stone base was going to allow the group to install wood floors like the olden days.

My favourite part of every day was lunchtime, by a mile.

I'd imagined eating our lunch on the stuffy 3rd floor throughout my whole first morning of work at the Rock. This wasn't all that enticing, in the hot interior with windows that were either tiny, plaster-covered or grime-laden.

Dave & Heather do things a little better though, as we pulled off our masks and put down our tools to head upstairs and out on the catwalk for lunch. It was never extremely windy on any of these days, or we used the lighthouse to block the winds, so we simply sat up here, cooled off and relaxed; myself without a chair, but contently leaning my back against the tower with my tilted head leaning back as well.

I was having a hard time thinking of a better place to have lunch, not just at the lighthouse, but anywhere.

I didn't get cell service in Windigo or at the base of the Rock of Ages, but I would get it up here. That didn't matter though, as I couldn't let my phone distract me or take away from this. I would deal with texts a little bit, but I mostly put it away. It was just too sweet to be up here.

I ended up taking so many pictures on the catwalk during these lunches, simply on account of the gorgeous weather, the peacefulness and the special feeling of relaxing on this standalone pillar out in Lake Superior. There was also the colours and the depths you could see from up here, which you could see a bit from the ground floor caisson, but this extra height really accentuated how the Rock of Ages juts up out of nowhere 5 miles off of Isle Royale.

I also liked how a single seagull would usually be posted up on the flagpole off of the western side of the Rock.

Speaking of birds, one of the things I was excited about was the number of birds I thought I would see at the Rock of Ages.

The thing was, was that there really weren't that many. We'd scare off a few gulls from the one end as we'd arrive, and there was the odd songbird - literally 1 a day - but not much else. There were a couple shorebirds feeding along the rocks as we landed one day though.

And there were also swallows that made up for the bird deficit, these birds curving up and down around the lighthouse between breaks on the windowsills. They'd even come up towards the catwalk and about 10 feet from my face as I stood there, then abruptly carve and head back down.

For how much I wanted to see some obscure bird here at the Rock of Ages, the presence of these swallows was pleasing.

One thing I found amusing was when Dave mentioned a lighthouse in Oregon in the course of conversation and I knew it was Tillamook Rock. He then mentioned another American lighthouse in another conversation & I knew about that one too.

The reason I found this amusing was because I've never been able to talk shop about lighthouses with anyone before. And yes, one of you has already made fun of me for nerding out about this, so the rest of you can lay off, haha.

And so the week went, where we got a streak going and went out to the Rock on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday. Waking up quite early, making pancakes, working, then getting home and making some Kraft Dinner.

Where I had thought we were camping or wouldn't have a fridge, I couldn't bring anything elaborate - and there was also the fact that I only had the fancy gas station to buy food at back in Grand Portage. As Heather joked about my eating the same thing everyday, at least I was able to pick some thimbleberries to switch up my breakfast (the thimbleberries really improved the pancakes).

The other outstanding meal would come on Friday when two of the park rangers invited us over for a freshly caught, baked Lake Trout with corn on the cob and a thimbleberry cobbler. Sitting outside on a picnic table through a lovely evening with that delicious fish? That was also pretty amazing.

There was also the fact that every evening was exquisite with sweet, soft light on windless trees in perfect temperatures. After just our first day of working, Heather brought up how she usually goes for a swim off the dock after a day out at the lighthouse, but Dave stays behind as he doesn't do swimming in such cold water. The funny thing was that in the end I didn't even find the water all that cold! I guess swimming in North Atlantic waters off of Newfoundland will do that, haha.

(Dave told me about a week-long, winter backpacking trip he did into The Boundary Waters Wilderness area of Northern Minnesota. I'm totally fine not getting into a "who can stand the cold" contest with him, lol.)

On our second-to-last day we stopped off at Barnum Island, where one of the old cottages was now under control of the National Park and available for park tasks.

Initially there was some thought that we would set up out here and have a shorter trip and better view of the Rock of Ages, but things didn't work out in time.

It was fantastic to have our ranger's cabin back in Windigo, which meant refrigerated food and washed clothes everyday, but Barnum Island wasn't looking too bad either. We peeked into the original cabin and walked down to the shore where we'd get clean (instead of in a shower like Windigo), sizing up things for how they may be in the future.

(Aside: In the future I would also now know the general store in Windigo is well stocked. So many online reviews complain about the price and the lack of selection at the national park general store, but I found it pretty damn good in terms of meal items and the costs. I wouldn't be eating KD every night if I did this again.)

I'm pretty sure the next year they stayed at Barnum Island, changing it up from staying in an empty ranger cabin at Windigo.

Of course I didn't volunteer again in 2017, but I've really considered doing this again. I'm not one to return to places unless they were really special, but the Rock of Ages was that special. In addition, last year some of the volunteers were even able to spend the night out at the lighthouse for the first time, which is something I would be, uh, just a little bit interested in doing (understatement of the century).

The goal is to have the Rock of Ages ready for public visits by 2020, so I also have my own window if I hope to get back for another week of volunteering.

If only Thunder Bay wasn't so far away from Newfoundland, but I made it happen one time and I could do it again. And next time I could even shorten it up by begrudgingly not going to Minneapolis afterwards. (Spoiler alert!)

Our last trip out to the light was on Friday after we couldn't make it out on Thursday. It was a bit of a wrap-up day because Dave & Heather would be leaving the island tomorrow, with the volunteer season over and the two of them needing to get back to their jobs.

In the end our Friday visit would be cut short, as the winds picked up and we decided to call it a day around noon. It was a good thing I had my hundreds of balcony shots in the end as there would be no last lunch 130 ft above Superior. Instead we closed everything up and sealed the Rock of Ages until next year.

More to come (from Isle Royale & beyond)...