Special Mention – Not Lost, But Found
A few weeks ago, Neil Rumney of Rhinelander, Wisconsin sent an email to the Ontonagon Area Schools asking if the email address he had found for me (Ken Raisanen) was still active. Soon after I replied to this message, a second email arrived from his daughter Hannah, a forestry student at UW-Stevens Point. The photo she attached to the email showed her standing near a stone cairn Ontonagon Area Schools students had put together on the hill where eighth graders would gather for lunch on their yearly orienteering hike..
This hike to a hill northwest of the Lake of the Clouds parking lot at the Porcupine Mountain Wilderness Area took place each spring for 25 years. To find what we called ‘the lunch hill’, groups of students (accompanied by an adult and a couple of high school helpers) would plot compass bearings on topographic maps of the area. This large wild area is bordered by the Escarpment Trail on the south and the Lake Superior Trail on the north which served as ‘safety borders’ if any group became disoriented. The students had to rely on the map and compass skills they learned in the classroom to get them to their final destination and back.
The lunch hill was covered with various sized slabs of broken rock so we decided to make a natural monument by simply having each student add a rock to the pile. This is a pile of native stone and after a couple of decades, it grew large enough that anyone who came upon it would recognize that it was not a natural phenomenon. The last year Ken Raisanen and Dave Lincezski took students on this hike (the spring of 2018), they left a small, waterproof time capsule in the base of the cairn. The container held a note asking anyone who found the cairn to make contact with the school. It was kind of like a message in a bottle that was left on land instead of being tossed into the big lake to be found. When leaving the hill, both Dave and I wondered how long it would take for this to be found (or even if it would ever be discovered).
When Neil and Hannah Rumney made contact, we got an answer to that question – it lay undisturbed for seven years and five months. The Rumney’s have been hiking the Porkies since the early 1990s and on this occasion, they had been going cross country looking for an old trail when they came upon the lunch hill. For making an effort to get back to us, we sent them each a WOAS-FM tee shirt in exchange for a few more photos.
Photo: Hannah and Neil Rumney of Rhinelander on their October 2025 Porkies hike well off the beaten path. On a remote hill NW of the Lake of the Clouds, they discovered a cairn and a small waterproof container asking any finders to contact the Ontonagon Area Schools (which they promptly did).
Top Piece Video: For this special edition, we will retitle this Porcupine Mountain Way, from a 1973 Midnight Special featuring a version of Joe Walsh’s first solo band, Barnstorm, with his ever present buddy on the drums, Joe Vitale.