The opening trip to South Fox Island is never a gentle one.
Volunteers with the Fox Island Lighthouse Association have spent the past few weeks reopening the remote light station for the season, and the early work has been anything but relaxing.
The first crews out had to set up the water system, drop and clear seven dead trees, haul brush, mow, spray for poison ivy and figure out which tools survived the winter — all before the real restoration could begin.
“The opening trip is a tremendous amount of work,” said Cathy Allchin of the Fox Island Lighthouse Association.
The station sits on the southern tip of South Fox Island, roughly 17 to 25 miles off the Leelanau shore in northern Lake Michigan, north of the Manitous and south of Beaver Island.
Its original brick tower was first lit in 1867, and the seven surviving structures — restored and maintained entirely by volunteers since the mid-2000s — earned the site a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.
Getting the buildings ready for summer is a familiar ritual that never quite gets easier. A second team followed the openers with a deep clean of the lighthouse and the assistant keeper’s quarters, washing windows and airing out the rooms.
“It’s like opening a summer cottage, only you’ve got a lot of buildings,” Allchin said.
The association has volunteer teams scheduled almost continuously from early June through the first week of September. Allchin said the group could still use more hands, as several volunteers have canceled.
The work is dictated by the lake. Crews typically plan to work hard the moment they land, because weather can change the schedule without warning. The first team this season planned to stay until Saturday but had to evacuate Thursday — and had they missed that window, they would have been stranded until the following Monday.
“You work like hell the first three days because you don’t know if you’re getting off on the fourth,” Allchin said.
The summer project list is long. Volunteers are continuing work on the lantern room and replicating the vent ball that topped the original 1867 tower. There’s painting, scraping and lead remediation underway in the assistant keeper’s quarters and parts of the lighthouse to keep the spaces safe for volunteers. The group also plans to replace boards damaged over the years using true-cut lumber that was hauled out last season and left to dry in the boathouse, which will then get a fresh coat of paint. A new lean-to is going up as well, and Tom McBride built a volunteer shower this spring — with hopes of adding hot water down the line.
Larger jobs loom further out, including a new roof on the assistant keeper’s quarters and a reconstruction of the porches that is still awaiting approval.
All of that hauling has the association eyeing its biggest wish-list item: a UTV side-byside, ideally electric so it can charge off the station’s solar panels. For now, crews move material with a lawnmower and wagon that is being run ragged.
“We really, really need it out there,” Allchin said. “We use the lawnmower with the wagon to haul everything … we’re going to wear out that lawnmower.”
Donations can be made through the association’s website at southfoxlighthouse.org, and Allchin said anyone with a vehicle to donate — and an interest in a substantial tax write-off — can reach the group through the site.
The island offers its own running storyline, too. This year’s crews found fewer mice but more snakes, none of them venomous. Big deer leave handsized prints on the southern end, where firearms are prohibited; hunting is allowed only on the northern third of the island. The relationship with the private landowners who hold the rest of South Fox remains friendly, Allchin said, with occasional walk-down visits and building tours.
A large America 250 flag now flies over the station for the nation’s semiquincentennial.
A KEEPER’S THREE WEEKS ON THE ISLAND While crews rotate on and off the island week to week, photographer Sandra White is settling in for the long haul — a three-week stay that she says beats the usual one-week turnaround.
“I think it’s better than just coming one week and leaving because you’re so tired, getting here and then you have to go home,” said White, who drives four and a half to five hours from South Rockwood to reach the boat.
Nearly two weeks into the trip, White had already logged plenty of hours on the landscaping she’s known for — brush hogging, weed whipping with the group’s new brush cutters, trimming trees and burning the brush piles left behind by the first team. Earlier this week, she cleared a stand of low branches that opened up a wider view of the lake from the lighthouse.
White is the volunteer behind the association’s “Diary of a Lighthouse Keeper” updates, which journal the day-to-day rhythm of life on the station that is available on Facebook by searching “Diary of a Lighthouse Keeper.”
She’s volunteered at lighthouses for years but has chosen to put her energy into this one.
“I like to enhance the landscaping so you can see the lake, people can see the lighthouse,” she said. “Other places you’re working in a gift shop … here it’s really hands-on.”
Her main job this season is bringing out new volunteers, with help from longtime board member Karen Wells in sizing up what each newcomer can do. The association posted its open weeks at the start of the year — four weeks were set aside for new volunteers, with another stretch beginning July 25 — and the response has been encouraging. The goal, White said, is simple: get more people out to the island, give them a real experience and turn them into regulars who come back year after year.
“We want to get more people that can have an experience out here, tell their friends and start coming back year after year,” she said. “We’d like to be here every week throughout the summer.”
That juggling act runs down to the wire. Teams are capped at six volunteers, but when two or three drop out, a crew can shrink to three. White said the group may bump the cap to seven next year, since the quarters can sleep that many.
The early returns on new recruits have been good. The first newcomer this season was a 74-year-old woman from Grand Haven, a veteran lighthouse volunteer who took on the job of cleaning every building.
A couple people currently on the island with White are Boy Scout leaders from Indiana, and the group is already talking about bringing their troop out for a camp next year — possibly with an Eagle Scout project attached.
Visitors continue to find their way out, too. Six came ashore Saturday, including a couple who liked it enough to phone friends just 45 minutes away and tell them to make the trip. When the water is calm and volunteers are on-site, White said, anyone who lands gets a tour of the whole station.
For those who want to see it firsthand, charter trips to the island can be arranged through the Fox island Lighthouse Association.
“It’s a different season every time we go out,” Allchin said.
