Split Rock Lighthouse Weblog update

Lee Radzak writes about bikers in his latest update to the Split Rock Lighthouse weblog. I was on the job as a historic site interpreter/tour guide at Split Rock much of the time during this peak visitation season. Lee is my manager. Lee's view of bikers is positive, but different than mine. He encourages bikers to see the lighthouse. I follow the procedures for ensuring that visitors have a good experience.

Bikers coming to Split Rock are as numerous as German tourists. Split Rock is a "must see in America" in German travel literature. Bikers at Split Rock were the subject of a Travel Channel program a couple of years ago.

During the Hell's Angels rally week in the Carleton/Duluth area, Lee had the interpreter staff double up in the Lighthouse and the Head Keeper's Dwelling. It's not a bad idea on peak visitation days anyway. Problems arise in the lighthouse if more than 20 people try to get into the lens room on their own, without a tour guide to move them along. Claustrophobia from squeezing that many bodies into a space designed for three workers, and panic on the spiral staircase blocking movement up or down, happens sometimes.

Visitors who pay $8 admission just to be there, get upset when we block the door to the lighthouse when the tower is full. According to a summary posted from 1999, the lens room fills with people every seven minutes for eight hours during a peak season day, with or without a tour guide.

Visitors get to see more at Split Rock than at some historic lighthouses. Many of the sites I've visited limit the number of people to six or twelve in the lens room. Some lighthouses have the lens room blocked off, and one at a time, visitors peer up through a manhole through a plexiglass barrier. Some lens rooms have a modern acrylic aircraft beacon, rather than the original Fresnel equipment, which may be on display somewhere else. The original equipment has been in place at Split Rock for 99 years. Some lighthouses allow visitors to go on the deck outside the lantern room, only a few at a time. At Split Rock we don't, because the outer railing is only up to your knees, no safety barrier. I wouldn't do the keeper's daily cleanup on that deck without a safety belt attached to the window handholds.

Having an interpreter stationed in the lens room or in the Keeper's Dwelling for more than 1 1/2 hours at a time on a peak day is not good. If an interpreter is present, crowds in the lens room expect a presentation, even though they chose to tour on their own. One day I had regularly scheduled tour groups of 32 and 36 visitors in the lens room. Normally I don't experience claustrophobia in the tower, but with those two groups my heartbeat raced, and it took several minutes after they left to regain normal breathing.

The goal for a scheduled tour group, either in the Lighthouse or the Keeper's Dwelling, is to have the group in the door and out the door in seven minutes. There is not much time for an interpretive presentation after moving 25 or more people up and down the spiral staircase in the tower, or somehow positioning the group between the dining room and parlor in the keeper's house.

If you know the principles of operations research, you probably have ideas about how to move crowds through a building. I've seen examples at the Edison Ford Winter Estates in Fort Meyers, FL., and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home in Oak Park, IL, where time-stamped tickets queue the groups at intervals throughout the day. If we could do that every fifteen minutes at Split Rock, less than half the current number of visitors would get up the tower on a peak day.

Those time-stamped visits we've made occupied a good part of a day, and we had to find something else to do for hours before our assigned time. Visitors to the North Shore have many more things to see, and we encourage them to go beyond Split Rock, as far as Grand Portage if they have time; that's a two hour drive from Split Rock. Many visitors are not willing to come back later. You could spend a half day walking the trails in the adjacent Split Rock State Park, but not everyone is a hiker.

More bikers were present last week than during the Hell's Angels rally. As Lee mentions in the weblog, many were following the Circle Route, about 1700 miles around Lake Superior. I answered many questions about how long a drive it is from Split Rock to Bayfield, WI. (About 3 hours). South Shore residents may not be pleased that I recommended the Wisconsin Highway 13 route that hugs the shoreline east of Superior, rather than the faster, high volume traffic route, U.S. Highway 2 to Ashland, and then north on Highway 13.

Here's the link to the weblog.

http://discussions.mnhs.org/splitrock/2009/08/16/lighthouses-and-motorcycles/