ADG Interviews Isle Royale and Keweenaw Parks Association!
As artists and wilderness explorers, our passion is to venture into the 63 American National Parks, photograph and document the wonder of these natural places, and share our enthusiasm for the parks and other natural wonders by creating original, high-quality poster art for our 63 Illustrated National Parks Collection. In our travels, we’ve also developed an immense appreciation for national monuments, which inspired the American National Monuments and Natural Wonders collection.
The national parks, monuments, historic sites, memorials, recreation areas, forests, and other BLM lands were created to preserve America’s natural beauty and cultural history, with each protected site representing a significant chapter in the great American story. Because we at Anderson Design Group believe strongly in preserving the parks and natural and historic spaces for future generations to enjoy, we’re always looking for opportunities to support the conservancies, foundations, natural history associations, and friend groups that protect these invaluable places.
ADG and Isle Royale National Park
Isle Royale National Park holds a special place in our hearts, as does the Keweenaw Peninsula. Our team has been to Isle Royale multiple times (see this article's photos of ADG's Isle Royale National Park art in the park!) We’ve also featured Isle Royale in our book Wilderness & Wonder: An Illustrated Guide to the National Parks. And we’ve featured Keweenaw National Historical Park in our book Beyond the National Parks.
To raise awareness for the important educational, conservation, fundraising, youth involvement, and preservation activities taking place in a lesser-known yet no less beautiful national parks located in the Great Lakes Region, we took some time this week to sit down with Adrienne Detanico, Executive Director of Isle Royale and Keweenaw Parks Association, the official nonprofit partner for Isle Royale National Park and Keweenaw National Historical Park.
Read on to learn how this group preserves and protects natural wonder, rich biodiversity, and cultural history in this Michigan paradise.
An Interview with Isle Royale and Keweenaw Parks Association
ADG: How would you describe your group? If you have an elevator pitch for what your group does, what would that be?
Adrienne: We are the non-profit cooperating association of Isle Royale National Park and Keweenaw National Historical Park, and we support both parks through direct financial aid, in-kind support, and the creation and publication of educational items. As the organization that supplies interpretive products to our four Visitor Center book stores (Calumet, Houghton, Rock Harbor, and Windigo/Ozaagateng) we help every visitor take a piece of their adventure home, while using those proceeds to support OUR parks financially.
Isle Royale and Keweenaw Parks Association (IRKPA), in partnership with the National Park Service, promotes an understanding of, appreciation for, and enjoyment of Isle Royale National Park and Keweenaw National Historical Park. By educating the public about these parks, we help to protect and preserve them for future generations.
(Pictured Below: Explaining stope mining, Delaware mine, courtesy of Steve Trynoski).
ADG: Your team is doing great work! A big part of the National Parks is the educational side of visitor experiences, and friend groups are often deeply invested in helping educate folks about the importance of the parks. Can you tell us a bit about that and why education is an important part of a park experience?
Adrienne: Our organization serves two very different parks, but with a unifying history and geography between them. On the one hand, Isle Royale National Park (ISRO) is a remote island wilderness, which requires visitors to come to terms with their impact on the land as they recreate. People come to see wolves and moose, but we also hope that there is limited interaction with the wildlife on the island (which includes curious foxes, persistent red squirrels, and opportunistic gray jays, among others wildlife).
While ISRO is now considered a “pristine” wilderness, we also help people discover that the island has been and still is a home to many people and has been impacted by human use: commercial fishing operations; extraction of lumber and copper; and most recently, tourism. Most importantly, the waters surrounding the island and the island itself are a significant part of Anishinaabe heritage, and the island is the traditional cultural property and ancestral land of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe). In Ojibwe, the island is called Minong, or Good Place.
At Keweenaw National Historical Park (KEWE), people are confronted with the story of copper mining, a lens with which to view the entire American experience: patterns of immigration; the search for opportunities; human ingenuity; industrial growth and decay. KEWE is a unique park in that the proportion of federally owned land is minuscule compared to the land owned by 22 Heritage Site partners that make up the park, ranging from old military forts to mines to homesteads and museums and lots in between!
The landscape stitches these places together, two mirror image ridges of the volcanic activity that form either side of the western Lake Superior Basin.
ADG: Two incredible places indeed! Now let’s get some of your backstory. How did your friend group get its start? What’s the story behind the birth of your group?
Adrienne: In the late 1950s, several ISRO park employees and seasonal park residents (along with family and friends) recognized the need to educate visitors about the natural history of the island. As a way to keep each other informed of happenings during the long off-season (approximately November to April), a newsletter, The Wolf’s Eye, was published (and still is being published by yours truly). This endeavor grew into a publishing arm that provided information about the flora and fauna of the Island, as well as the hiking trails and water routes, maps, and stories of the island. Hence, the Isle Royale Natural History Association was formed, and established as a 501(c)(3) in 1963.
In 1992, KEWE was established on the Keweenaw Peninsula. As the official park headquarters for ISRO is in Houghton, MI, a mere 18 miles from Calumet, one of the units of KEWE, it made sense for the Natural History Association to bring KEWE into the fold. We changed our name to Isle Royale & Keweenaw Parks Association in the mid-2010s and have been serving both parks since.
(Pictured Below: Fort Wilkins State Park courtesy of Steve Trynoski).
ADG: What types of projects does your group work on/fund each year? What are some of the projects you're most proud of?
Adrienne: We provide direct financial assistance to both parks through Aid-to-Parks requests. Our mainstay projects are providing funding and logistical support for printing of the park planning newspapers (The Greenstone and The Keweenaw Guide) and area guides. We also fund purchases for family and youth interpretative programming, provide partial funding for interpretative rangers and training, and fund some scientific research (like the biennial beaver census this year). We also have supported a commissioned art project for the last 3 years, working with artist Kasey Koski to use metal statues to put people back on the landscape of the Keweenaw. We are also excited to support Artist-in-Residence and Emerging Artists programs on ISRO.
A particular point of pride for me is the work to develop and/or publish titles that are unique to the parks’ mission. For example, for KEWE, we publish and print the Downtown Calumet and Industrial Calumet walking tour guides, and a full scale publication called Missing in the Copper Country. This book shows where prominent Copper Country buildings used to be and what is there currently; we were able to support the work of Ranger Lynette Webber to make this book available to the public. For ISRO, we worked to get the Diary of an Isle Royale Schoolteacher republished and it has been a popular addition to our library. We are currently in the process of reprinting Fishes of Isle Royale and a large format underwater shipwreck photography volume.
ADG: Incredible work. Each park is very, very unique. And each one has different needs from its communities, people who visit, and the friend groups that help support it. What does your park need most? (Can be more than one thing).
Adrienne: We work with an incredible team at both parks who are able, seemingly, to pull off the impossible. But it is not magic that makes it all happen: it’s hard work, creativity, and a commitment to the purpose. Because our parks are very different, the needs are very different.
For ISRO, as a remote wilderness park, not everyone who wants to visit will be able to set foot on the island due to our short season, transportation logistics, and general nature of the island. Our current visitor center is functional, but serves mostly as an office space and ferry terminal for the Ranger III. Plans are in the works for an upgrade to our facility when the Ranger IV is finished (our current passenger/freight ferry is a wonderful boat, but it was built in 1958, and while she has served us well, an update is needed and in the works). My dream would be to bring the island to the people in some fashion, with excellent interpretive facilities, educational opportunities, and hands on demonstrations so that people could still feel like they experienced a little bit of the island without having to leave the mainland.
For KEWE, I love watching people discover that there is more to our park system than the 63 National Parks. There are 433 total properties in the system, and they all have an important story to tell and land and histories to preserve. All of our parks need our support and commitment, an excitement that we as a country and community have chosen to preserve these areas and hold them for the future. To tell the story of copper there are many other locations that could be brought into the Heritage Site program. While funding is a known constraint, these Heritage sites are often run by volunteers and community members. Building capacity for KEWE would mean having a reliable cohort of volunteers and professionals who are committed to the long-term and are working to train the next generation of stewards to take their place. It is often pure luck and grit that anyone has been able to preserve these historical places (buildings and locations, some dating back to the 1840s). In most cases, it was the community that had the foresight to start the process, and the park system provided the safety nets and technical expertise to expand.
(Pictured Below: Legacy cabin, Tobin Harbor, Isle Royale courtesy of Steve Trynoski).
ADG: Given the extensive list of projects your group is working on, how do you enlist the help of the community in these projects? Do you organize volunteers? Do you have other avenues for funding your projects beyond friend group memberships?
Adrienne: I am the new-ish executive director of IRKPA (took the job in April 2025), and I have only just started to wrap my head around ways to engage the community in our projects. I think we have a lot of work to do.
We are starting to engage more volunteers for community events, as well as recruit more members to our organization’s governance. Again, there is more we can do!
An exciting part of living here in this small community is that everyone is in it together. We are lucky to have a community foundation, where we established an endowment to preserve the financial health of IRKPA. We are also working with the Copper Shores Community Health Foundation on our Giving Tuesday campaign, which allows us to amplify our fundraising efforts and raise funds with dozens of our other area nonprofits.
I am eager for new ideas on how to attract and keep volunteers! The world runs on volunteer and community efforts!
ADG: For you personally, why is establishing friend groups for each park so important? And why did you choose to get involved in this particular park? Would love to hear about your connection to it!
Adrienne: Each park has such particular and unique needs, and attracts varied groups of people. People travel far and wide to visit national parks but we also serve our local community.
Friends groups and cooperating associations get to work closely with our park partners to meet their needs. There is nothing like a face to face meeting with our partners to come up with solutions, as well as watching them work to see how we can be most effective for them. We exist to build capacity for our park, and it is an honor to do so.
I came to this job as an Isle Royale, Keweenaw and Northwoods fan. I had visited ISRO as a hiker and volunteer 12 times before I applied for and accepted the position of executive director. I cannot totally explain why this ecosystem drew me in, but once I came, I was hooked. It was no surprise to me that while Isle Royale is one of the least visited parks, it is the most revisited park! I also admit that I was like many visitors: rush up to the Northwoods, jump on a ferry, explore the park, rush home. Now that I live here, I am absolutely enamored with the stories and landscapes that are available on the Keweenaw, and have completely “nerded out” on mining history, both ancient and industrial, geology, and all the stories of the people who have lived here. More ISRO visitors need to cushion their timeline to allow for an exploration of the Heritage Sites, the KEWE Visitor Center and surrounding areas, and all the Keweenaw has to offer.
(Pictured Below: Friend Group at Isle Royale!)
ADG: Looking to the future, what are the short-term and long-term goals for your friend group? Where do you guys see yourselves in 5 years? What do you hope to be working on a decade from now?
Adrienne: My short-term goal is to improve our website experience, bring more of the park experience to social media followers, and increase our membership roster. Our retail sales manager and I are also working closely with KEWE to develop new merchandise that incorporate the plethora of objects that have been preserved by the KEWE archives.
My long-term goal for the organization is to revamp our strategic plan, recruit and develop Board members, have a roster of at least 25 reliable volunteers, and double our Aid-to-Parks capacity. I also want to evaluate our member communications to make sure it is engaging and useful.
I wish I could say I knew what I would want us to be working on in a decade, because that would imply stability and continuity. The last six years have reminded us that change is constant. In a decade, I hope IRKPA has the institutional and financial stability to be nimble and responsive to what our parks need in a changing landscape.
Pictured below: ADG Staff Writer Ren Brabenec (left) and collaborating artist Kenneth Crane (right) visit Isle Royale National Park!
ADG: What do you think about our poster art of the national parks? Any designs we should add to our series to continue representing Isle Royale National Park or Keweenaw National Historical Park?
Adrienne: I appreciate the poster/art that you have developed. I especially love the fox and have sent that postcard to many friends and family.
I do think there is more to the parks than the mammals, and I wish we could have images of the birds, fish, flowers and geology of ISRO.
And of course, I have to say it: let’s go beyond the 63! There are so many stunning landscapes outside the 63 National Parks that can be celebrated, and while “nature” is what most people associate with National Parks, “history” is just as important! We have all seen how quickly history can be obscured or erased when we aren’t paying attention. The aesthetic of the art you already use would really lend itself to historic landscapes and buildings, as well!
ADG: One last question, if there was one thing about your group or about national park conservation/restoration/education generally that you’d want the broader public to know, what would that be?
Adrienne: I will sound like a broken record here, but visit the lesser-known parks! One of the reasons I praise the passport books is that it makes people travel to places they may not have considered before, in order to get the cancellation stamp. While they are there, a whole new world opens to them. Context is so profound and you find that at our national parks, ALL our national parks, whether monument, preserve, reserve, recreation areas, lakeshores and seashores, national rivers and wild and scenic rivers, national trails, national parkways, national historic sites and historical parks, national battlefields and memorials, and other designations. These are all part of our national heritage as well as our parks – we own them, and they exist for us and our visitors. Let’s celebrate them all!
(Pictured Below: Friend Group at a Tabling Event).
ADG: We couldn’t agree more, Adrienne. Thanks for chatting with us today!
Adrienne: Thanks for having me!
The Importance of Supporting Non-Profits Committed to Protecting the National Parks
You can learn more about Isle Royale and Keweenaw Parks Association at their website. If you want to support their work, you can become a member or participate in a variety of donation options.
If you represent a natural history association, foundation, friend group, conservancy, or preservation association that works in any of the 63 American National Parks or the hundreds of national monuments and other NPS sites across the U.S., contact us today to set up an interview! Just email ren@andersondesigngroup.com.
In the meantime, we’ll get back to creating vintage poster art of the national parks. Let’s enjoy these beautiful, historic places and do our part to preserve them for future generations.
-Ren Brabenec
Anderson Design Group Staff Writer