RABBIT ISLAND, Mich. — The list of people who own their own islands is small. Exclude royals and Richard Branson, and it is smaller still. Rob Gorski became an unlikely member of the club three years ago, when he bought a 91-acre island off the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan after spotting it on Craigslist.

Gorski, 34, lives in New York and works in New Jersey as an emergency room doctor. He spent boyhood summers visiting his grandfather who lived in the Keweenaw, a remote semi-wilderness on Lake Superior dotted with old copper mining towns. Gorski had eventually planned to buy a few acres of woodlands there and build a cabin. But after seeing the ad, his thoughts kept returning to the island, he said, and to the “awe-inspiring feeling that it could potentially be owned.”

So in August 2009, he found himself on a fishing boat with a real estate agent named Forbes McDonald, speeding toward a forested outcropping 4 miles off Rabbit Bay. Labeled on maps as Traverse Island, it lacked dockage; the men kayaked ashore.

Gorski spent an hour walking around, finding only elemental stillness. As he later put it: “It’s trees. It’s rock. It’s water. It’s birds. It’s fish. It’s sky. It’s nothing else.”

Still, Gorski, who spent a college summer working in Alaska, was taken with the raw nature, and with the island’s proximity to his family’s roots. “I got back to the boat and said, ‘Forbes, I think we should talk about this.’”

Six months of negotiations and capital-raising followed, and in early 2010, Gorski bought the island for $140,000. He worked with a local land trust to put a conservation easement on the property so it could never be developed and teamed up with Andrew Ranville, an artist and the brother of a college friend, to start an artists’ colony on the island.

He gave it a new name, too. Remembering that his late grandfather had nicknamed the land after the nearest bay, Gorski became the owner of Rabbit Island.

“It feels like you’re alone, in the middle of nowhere, truly away from everything,” he said. “You’re on this rock like a lighthouse keeper. It’s a great feeling.”

An artists’ haven

One afternoon last month, Gorski was docked in the narrow harbor of Rabbit Bay, gassing up his boat, a 17-foot Boston Whaler Montauk that he bought used online after discovering that a rowboat was perilously unfit for Lake Superior. From here, the island looked like a band of green on the glassy blue water.

As he has for the last three summers, Gorski had taken three weeks off from his ER job to work on the island and to host a handful of residents. Nine creative types were already camping in tents, while more arrivals, including a forager and a singer-songwriter from Bozeman, Mont., were due in the coming days.

Most of them had come through the Rabbit Island website, but the application process was fluid, and residents set their own timetables and paid most of their own way. (Some of that will change next year, when there will be three paid residencies, provided in part by the DeVos Art Museum in Marquette, Mich.)

Last summer, Sara Maynard, a 28-year-old artist and long-distance lake swimmer from Oklahoma City, read about the island and reached out. “I asked Rob about the application process, and he said, ‘Love it. Come out,’” Maynard recalled.

Maynard, who had returned this summer, was waiting on a flat rock beach when Gorski guided the boat in. The whitish mist he had identified as a storm in the distance on the trip over had arrived, and it was pouring. They secured the boat to a rope-and-chain mooring, then bounded up rock steps into the camp.

When the rain stopped, the other residents emerged from wherever they had taken shelter. They were a professionally diverse group: David Drennen, a 28-year-old musician who had come with his friend, Maynard; Kelly Geary, a 35-year-old chef who sells jams and chutneys under the label Sweet Deliverance; Ben Moon, a 38-year-old filmmaker and photographer with clients like Patagonia; Moon’s 25-year-old assistant, Page Stephenson; Ben Lavely, the 29-year-old chief operating officer of Best Made Co., which sells axes and other manly gear to city slickers at its New York boutique; and Emilie Lee, a 32-year-old plein-air painter.

A recovered rock-climbing bum, Lee met Gorski last spring, when she contributed artwork to a Rabbit Island benefit he organized, and the two have since begun dating. In a twist of fate, her family owns an island, too: Hat Island, on the North Channel in Canada.

Around 7 o’clock, Gorski and Lee, along with Geary and the two Bens (whom everyone had, for convenience’s sake, nicknamed Best Made Ben and Patagonia Ben), sped off in the boat to catch dinner. For the last two days, the residents had feasted on fresh fish brought over by a Rabbit Bay local, Scott Hannula. Gorski’s fishing expedition was not as fruitful; he returned empty-handed.

No matter. Best Made Ben ruggedly split firewood with one of several axes he had brought with him, an activity he continued throughout his stay, as if starring in a live-action commercial. And Geary, the chef, and Maynard used a Coleman stove and the campfire to cook a meal of roasted potatoes with chimichurri sauce, kale salad, bratwurst and leftover smoked fish. Dinner was served by candlelight at a long pine table, built that afternoon by Drennen and Best Made Ben.

The residency, as Gorski put it, is “a mix between a salon and summer camp,” and a traveler’s instant bond had formed among the group. As they ate, residents recapped the events of their day, and Gorski entertained them with a tale of his first “scrub-in,” which included the arresting line, “Hey, Gorski, want to cut a woman’s leg off?”

A penchant for the wild

As remarkable as it is that Gorski owns Rabbit Island, perhaps more surprising is what he has chosen to do with it. His mother, Phyllis Gorski, a semiretired pharmacist who grew up nearby, admitted that if it were hers, “I’d want to build a place for the family and our grandchildren.”

Still, she was not surprised that her son had turned it into a protected artists’ retreat. “He’s been full of adventure since he was little,” she said.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, Gorski said, he hated the way the land was “cut up and divided,” and preferred wilderness areas where he could hike and camp. “There was a point where I said, I can be a fishing guide or a park ranger for the rest of my life,” he recalled.

But now, he said, he is happy living in the city and views Rabbit Island as an escape (he often goes alone in the offseason) and a platform for his ideas about land conservation and thoughtful development. Basically, he has created a miniature national park and made himself its steward.

He could not have found more virgin territory: aside from the remnants of a late 19th-century fishing shack, and ashes from the locals who have long come here to cook out and swim, the island bears no sign of human habitation. Even the previous owners, a wealthy couple from Utica, Mich., who invested in land in the Upper Peninsula, never set foot on the island.

Gorski has tried to keep development minimal and considered. This summer he has been building a second lean-to 100 or so yards from the main camp, which he plans to equip with a traditional Finnish sauna. But it was “a big compromise that we imported lumber” by boat, he fretted, rather than felling native trees.

Ranville, as Gorski is quick to point out, has been instrumental in all of this. Shortly after Gorski bought the island, the two men got to talking and decided to create a retreat for artists, using a Kickstarter campaign. Ranville, who lives in London, has spent a number of two-month stretches here over the last few years, clearing paths, documenting the island’s wildlife and working on his art.

Island bustle

But for all the efforts to make the island a Walden-like escape, modern realities have a way of intruding. Among the visiting artists, Brooklyn was heavily represented demographically; Portland was a close second. There was so much Patagonia clothing on display, the campsite looked like a catalog shoot. And the focus seemed to be as much on the battery life and reception of Apple devices as on creative projects.

At one point, Lee grew frustrated trying to upload a photo of a double rainbow to Instagram. Drennen, who had established himself as the group’s joker, shook his head mock-ruefully and said, smirking, “So many ’gramable moments.”

In an effort to minimize the social (and social media) distractions, and to preserve the goal of “complete isolation and contemplation,” Gorski tries to keep the island’s population to a half-dozen or so people at a time and cast a wide net for visitors. As he said, “It was never about being a bunch of hipsters coming out to high-five each other on an island.”

Though nothing has been as complicated as the dinner for 21 Gorski held last year on the rock beach, the logistics this summer have been unwieldy at times. For a while, every day brought arrivals and departures, and Gorski was constantly occupied with running visitors back and forth across the lake. “I think next summer I’ll tell people they have to travel on set days,” he muttered at one point.

With all the comings and goings, and the attendant distractions, the island scarcely felt removed from the mainland. To complicate matters, Lake Superior was sometimes too rough to cross, stranding visitors on either shore, and Gorski’s parents had been called on to house artists in their cabin on the peninsula.

Rugged isolation

One morning, Gorski and Lee took the boat to the mainland and drove to the airport. They were picking up Charlotte Sullivan, 29, another Brooklynite, who works at the Queens County Farm Museum, and dropping off Geary, who was leaving to attend a wedding on Cow Island in Maine. Soon, the weather had turned, and Gorski raced to get back to the boat before the lake became unruly.

He just made it. As he crossed the lake, high waves pounded against the bow and the temperature seemed to drop by the minute. By nightfall, it was 46 degrees (unusual even in this part of the country), and the lake had become so choppy that the boat had to be moved to the calmer side of the island to keep it from sinking.

For dinner, Maynard cooked beef-and-vegetable stew, and everyone huddled in the dark, bundled against the cold.

Gorski sat at the head of the table, looking pleased. In that moment, Rabbit Island, and the 11 people on it, felt completely removed from the world.