Rock Island State Park
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Rock Island State Park is the island at the far northeastern tip of Door County, and it might be the least accessible state park that I’ve been to so far: you take a ferry to Washington Island, drive across it, and take a second, passenger-only ferry over to Rock Island, where no cars are allowed. The Icelandic-born inventor Chester Thordarson owned the island from 1910 until the 1960s, when the state bought it from his family, and he built the great stone boathouse that still meets the ferry, with a hall of tall arched windows above its boat slip. The island is also the site of the first lighthouse in Wisconsin, built in 1836. I spent the early afternoon of July 19, 2022, there, under a sky of high, broken clouds. I walked the trails through the woods and the open meadows along the shore, and back past an iron urn on an old stone foundation looking out over the bay to the boathouse.
Photos from Rock Island State Park
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The boat slip inside the boathouse.
An iron urn above the shore.
A small stone building along the trail.