Author: Bob Schwab
When I visited this area in summer 2002, I found out about the juvenile correction center. There was a sign at the gate that said "Visitor's Day, " so I drove right in, but the guy at the visitor's center wasn't amused when I told him what I wanted to do (I obviously wasn't there to visit with the youth). He told me to wait in my car and to lock my car doors (with my wife and myself inside) while he called his boss. Some of the boys were playing basketball nearby, and others were being drilled (marching). He came out a few minutes later and said he would be glad to accompany me to the highpoint on the property (an old air force radar installation). We drove up to the top, and again he insisted that I lock my car even though we only walked a few hundred feet away. Apparently the youths have tried to hide in people's cars to escape, and they're also suspicious of strange adults lurking around. (I guess some parents have tried to "spring" their kid from the place in the past.) He told me that this was an ideal place for their "school": it's isolated, and on a peninsula with only one bridge back to the mainland, easy to watch for escapees down at the bridge in Houghton. The view from the top is quite good of Keweenaw Bay, and you can see the ski hill off to the east (Mt Bohemia) with the biggest vertical drop in Michigan (almost 900 feet). The other three HP spots in the county are uneventful hikes into the woods to nondescript bumps or rises. Two of them are just a mile and a half west of the school. I suspect at one time, Mt Horace Greeley probably was the highest area in the county, but the ground was leveled to build the radar site, so now I think you need to visit all four areas to claim this county.