Oak Island is not the kind of Apostle Islands stop most visitors casually stumble into, and according to outdoorsman Gordon Crum, that is a major part of why it remains one of the wildest places left in the Midwest.
In a recent Grim Granite video, Crum traveled to Oak Island, one of 21 islands in Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, to explore why this roughly eight-square-mile patch of Lake Superior wilderness has become known for an unusually high density of black bears.
Crum said the island is so bear-heavy that the National Park Service once had to restrict human access because of bear activity, a detail that sounds almost exaggerated until the history of the place begins to come into view.
Oak Island, he explained, is not just “overrun” because bears happened to like it. It became bear country because of geography, old-growth forest, limited human traffic, Ojibwe stewardship, logging history, and a conservation decision that protected the island before development could fully reshape it.
A Remote Island Most Visitors Never Reach
Crum described Oak Island as a place many Apostle Islands visitors never see, even if they spend time in the national lakeshore.
Most people, he said, kayak the mainland sea caves, visit the lighthouses, take the ferry to Madeline Island, or see only the more accessible parts of the area before heading home.
Oak Island is different. It sits about four miles off the Bayfield Peninsula, and getting there requires either paddling across open Lake Superior water or hiring a water taxi.
That barrier alone keeps visitation low, and in wilderness terms, that matters.
At about 5,100 acres, Crum said Oak Island is the second-largest island in the national lakeshore, but unlike many of the other Apostle Islands, its interior was not stripped bare during the logging era. Its old-growth forest still includes large yellow birch and sugar maple, with trunks several feet wide and a canopy that took centuries to form.
Crum argued that this forest is the foundation of the entire story. The bears, the density, the feeling of wildness, and the unusual ecology all start with the trees that survived.
That is an important point, because Oak Island’s bear population is not just a wildlife curiosity. It is also a measure of what happens when a landscape retains enough structure, food, and cover to support animals at a level that would be difficult elsewhere.
Why Oak Island Has So Many Bears
According to Crum, Wisconsin has roughly 24,000 black bears, mostly concentrated in the northern third of the state, where cut-over forests, river corridors, and second-growth brush provide strong habitat.
But Oak Island stands out even by northern Wisconsin standards.
Crum said the island is believed to have about two to three black bears per square mile, an estimate based on trail cameras, researcher observations, and reports from the small number of campers and kayakers who make it there.
He noted that the National Park Service does not run a formal bear census on the islands, but the available picture has been consistent: Oak Island “punches well beyond its weight in bears.”
The reason, Crum explained, comes down to three factors: food, cover, and the absence of people.
The food begins in the old-growth forest. Crum said Oak Island’s layered ecosystem produces dense berry patches in early summer, including serviceberries, juneberries, and wild strawberries, while fall brings beech and oak mast, the nuts and acorns bears depend on as they build fat for winter.
For bears, those late-season calories are not optional. Crum noted that from roughly August to October, black bears are intensely focused on eating enough to survive five or six months in a den, and Oak Island provides reliable food year after year.
The cover is just as important. Crum described old-growth blowdowns and the root masses of fallen yellow birch as natural den sites, saying bears on Oak Island often do not need to dig dens because “the forest builds them.”
That kind of habitat is difficult to reproduce quickly. It takes time, fallen timber, mature trees, and decades of low disturbance.
When Bears And Campers Collided
Crum said Oak Island has only a small number of primitive National Park Service campsites, with permits required and no major facilities, but the low level of visitation did not mean people and bears never came into conflict.
At some point, he explained, bears and campers began having problems.
The reason was not mysterious. Bears with little exposure to humans do not necessarily fear them in the same way mainland bears might, especially bears that grow up near roads, campgrounds, trailheads, or other places where people are common.
Crum described island bears as “naive” in that sense, and he added that a naive bear can become a bold bear.
When campers arrived with food, and when some were careless with it, the bears investigated. If they found food, they were rewarded, and they came back.
That pattern is familiar to wildlife managers everywhere. Food-conditioned bears can become more persistent, more dangerous, and more difficult to keep away from campsites, and once that behavior takes hold, it can be bad for both humans and bears.
Crum said the National Park Service eventually had to restrict access to Oak Island, and while the closure was not permanent, it was serious enough to make the point clear: in a genuinely wild place, the human visitor is the variable.
That is also where the story becomes less romantic and more practical. A place full of bears is only impressive if visitors behave in a way that lets those bears remain wild.
How Bears Reached The Island
Crum said the question of how bears arrived on Oak Island has a straightforward answer: black bears are strong swimmers.
They have been documented crossing open water for miles, driven by food, territory, or the instinct to disperse into new habitat. Lake Superior is cold, even in August, when water temperatures may only reach around 50 degrees, but Crum said that kind of crossing is survivable for a bear, even if it is demanding.
Researchers studying the Apostle Islands have documented bears swimming between islands, sometimes across gaps of a mile or more.
Crum said the prevailing theory is that Oak Island’s population began generations ago when a small number of bears crossed from the mainland or from Madeline Island, found excellent habitat, and stayed.
Once that happened, especially for females, the population could become deeply tied to the island. Crum explained that a sow born on Oak Island may den there, raise cubs there, and die there.
Over generations, that produces what Crum called a population that is functionally isolated, behaviorally distinct, and remarkably dense compared with typical mainland Wisconsin bear country.
It is a reminder that wilderness is not always about enormous scale. Sometimes it is about the right combination of isolation, habitat, and time.
The Human History Beneath The Forest
Crum also made clear that Oak Island’s wildness did not begin with the bears.
Long before European contact, he said, the Apostle Islands were part of the Ojibwe world, including the Bad River and Red Cliff bands, whose descendants still live around the Bayfield Peninsula.
To the Ojibwe, Lake Superior, or Gichigami, was not simply a body of water. Crum described it as central to their cosmology, economy, and identity, while the islands served as fishing grounds, travel corridors, and places of spiritual significance.
He also pointed to the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe, which ceded land but preserved Ojibwe rights to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory. Those rights, he said, remain active today and have been central to major legal battles over natural resources in Wisconsin.
By the 1880s, industrial logging had reached the islands, with companies building camps, cutting through the winter, and floating logs south in the spring. Most of the Apostle Islands were heavily cut, but Oak Island was different.
Crum said the island’s rough interior terrain may have made logging less efficient, leaving enough of the forest standing that its interior never fully collapsed.
Over the next century, the forest edges grew back around that surviving core. The bears did not need to be reintroduced, Crum said; they just needed the forest to recover.
By the mid-20th century, the islands were wild again, but not yet fully protected. That changed with the creation of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in 1970, a conservation effort Crum credited largely to Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin governor turned U.S. senator who also founded Earth Day.
Crum noted that the Red Cliff Band was vocal during those negotiations, especially because early proposals could have displaced tribal members and limited access to lands their families had used for generations. The final plan, he said, incorporated tribal concerns, and Madeline Island was excluded from the national lakeshore at local request.
A Wilderness Built By History And Luck
Crum framed Oak Island as a place that could easily have turned out very differently.
If logging companies had reached deeper into the island’s interior, if the old-growth forest had been fully removed, or if development had arrived before federal protection, the bear density and wilderness character now associated with Oak Island might never have existed.
Instead, a chain of events left the island with old forest, reliable food, low human pressure, no roads, and enough protection for bears to make it their own.
Crum said he did not see an adult bear during his visit, but he found the absence almost more powerful than an encounter would have been. He described seeing tracks, claw marks, torn logs, and other signs that made the island feel occupied even when the animals stayed out of sight.
That kind of wildness is rare in the Midwest, especially in a region where forests have been logged, farms expanded, roads built, and human access steadily widened for generations.
Oak Island, in Crum’s telling, is not untouched, because no place with this much human history can honestly be called untouched. But it is unusually intact, and that makes it valuable.
The island’s bears are not an accident or a nuisance separate from the landscape. They are the result of it.
And for anyone who does make the trip, Crum’s message is clear enough: this is not a place humans control, but a place humans are allowed to visit carefully, with the understanding that the bears are not guests there.
They are home.
Raised in a small Arizona town, Kevin grew up surrounded by rugged desert landscapes and a family of hunters. His background in competitive shooting and firearms training has made him an authority on self-defense and gun safety. A certified firearms instructor, Kevin teaches others how to properly handle and maintain their weapons, whether for hunting, home defense, or survival situations. His writing focuses on responsible gun ownership, marksmanship, and the role of firearms in personal preparedness.
