There aren’t too many perfect days in Sault Ste. Marie.

The second-biggest city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, it’s almost always too cold or too gray. In winter, which seems to last an average of eight or nine months, there is too much ice on Lake Superior, too much snow on the ground. Even in summer, which seems to last an average of eight or nine days, chilly winds blow in from the water. If the wind miraculously abates, the black flies and mosquitoes will have their way with your flesh. More often than not, it’s better to be indoors.

This is why there are so many bars in “the Soo” as everyone there calls Sault Ste. Marie (population 14,000 and shrinking), 13 of them within three blocks of one another in a downtown cluster known as the BARmuda Triangle: shot-and-a-beer joints, college bars, places where the Jagermeister and cinnamon whiskey flow and snowmobile trails lead right up to the door. It’s hard to get a suntan in the Soo, but it’s easy to get a drink.

Which is what I was doing when I first encountered Randy Kluck on one of those rare perfect days a couple of years ago. The lingering late-summer sun was silhouetting giant ore freighters as they moved slowly through the Soo Locks, heading from one Great Lake to another. But Kluck was inside, holding court from a corner bar stool at Moloney’s Alley Irish Pub, avoiding the evening sunlight that was poking through the windows on Portage Street. He was bearded, burly and talking to anyone who’d listen about this book he had written with his son Kevin, a 30-year-old graduate of Lake Superior State, the local institution of higher learning from which most of those Jagermeister drinkers come. Randy was doing all the talking. Kevin, slightly embarrassed, was trying not to laugh.

“Take a look at this,” Randy Kluck said, using a line he had obviously used before. “This is the most important travel guide you’ll ever read.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong. What Randy and Kevin had written — and it became clear later that Kevin had done most of the work — was “Yooper Bars,” a self-published guide to the drinking establishments of the Upper Peninsula, where people think of themselves as Yoopers (U.P.ers, get it?) and people who live beneath the Mackinac Bridge, in that mitten part of Michigan, are referred to, affectionately, as Trolls.

There are, for reasons previously mentioned, a lot of bars in the Upper Peninsula, hundreds of them, some of them little more than fishing shacks with whiskey and whitefish for sale, many of them making almost as much money from Friday fish fries as they do from pouring shots. Randy and Kevin, somewhat ambitiously, decided to visit them all.

They didn’t quite make it, but they came awfully close.

It took them the better part of a year to go from the easternmost bar in the U.P. (Chuck’s Place on Drummond Island) to the westernmost (the Midway Bar in Ironwood), 364 miles away. Not that they drove a straight line. They crisscrossed the U.P., up and down, back and forth, sometimes driving 400 miles in a day, hitting seven or eight bars and having at least one drink in each and every one. (“I probably put on 30 pounds,” Randy said.) They went from Grand Marais to Escanaba, Copper City to Iron Mountain, Houghton to Ishpeming, Marquette to Menominee.

“Conservatively,” Kevin Kluck would tell me later, when Randy wasn’t around, “I’d say we drove about 47,000 miles that year. There were days we’d leave the Soo at noon and not get back home until dawn.”

Randy, who had been a salesman all his life, told me that day how, secretly, he had always dreamed of being a writer.

“I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway,” he told me. “This might be as close as I get.”

Randy and Kevin, father and son, the salesman and the college graduate with no visible job prospects, persuaded the owners of 109 bars to pay a small fee (“Don’t think of it as a bribe,” Randy told me, “think of it as an ad.”) to appear in the book, which is sold on Amazon. Every bar got two glossy pages, photos of their patrons laughing and drinking in front of walls adorned with hockey sticks, fishing lures, nautical paraphernalia and assorted antlers.

You can tell, just thumbing through the book, what a blast they had, Randy and Kevin, the father telling tales and drinking whiskey, the son taking pictures and writing down names, trying to get things right. They went together to the Trout Lake Tavern and Red’z Wolf Inn, Cattails Cove and the Wooden Nickel, Shute’s Saloon and the Thirsty Whale. They drank too much and ate too much and drove too far through the forests late at night. They’d never spent so much time together. They’d never had so much fun.

I decided last year that I’d ask them whether they might want to re-create the trip, part of it anyway, for a story; this story. Not the whole trip, of course, not 109 bars. Maybe just a long weekend’s worth, a few hundred miles, a sampling of bars they had liked the most. I’d meet them in the Soo, at Moloney’s, and we’d take off from there.

“That’s a great idea,” Kevin told me when I finally got him on the phone. “But — this is hard for me to say — Randy passed away. Last summer.”

Randy Kluck died in Saginaw in June 2013, a year after I’d met him, two years after he and Kevin had finished “Yooper Bars.” By then he was divorced, his children grown, his great novel left unwritten. He was 59 years old.

Kevin, now 33, had moved downstate to Muskegon. He’d gotten married and was still looking for a steady job. He had not been back to the U.P. since his father died. His voice was still shaky when he talked about Randy’s death (and Randy is what he called him), the loss still real and raw. Which is why his next proposal caught me by surprise.

“We should do it,” Kevin said. “We should take a couple of days and hit as many of those bars as we can. You and me. Randy would love the idea.”

So that’s what we did, early last fall. Kevin and I met up at Moloney’s, where it turns out he used to be a cook, and we hit the BARmuda Triangle: the Merchant’s, the Alpha, the Satisfied Frog. We would have hit the Wicked Sister (with its special burger, the Drunken Cow), but it was closed for remodeling.

We drove from town to town, bar to bar, alternating who would drink and who would drive. Bartenders hugged Kevin as soon as he walked in. None of them knew that Randy had died. All of them went silent when they heard.

“Randy would come into those bars and everyone would light up,” Kevin would say later, on a long late-night drive back to the Soo. “I didn’t want to tell them he was dead. I was too sad to tell anyone.”

The ugly truth was that Randy Kluck, who drank too much in too many places for too many years, died from cancer but also from liver disease. The doctors told Kevin and the rest of the family that Randy had been sick for a very long time. Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t.

It’s hard not to wonder if Randy, who had spent too many years away from home, an unreliable husband and father for most of his family’s life, knew he was dying before he took off with his son for that yearlong final ride. The book, initially, was Kevin’s idea. But Randy was the one who kept it going, who wouldn’t let him stop.

I think Randy knew. I think all those tall-tale nights in those middle-of-nowhere bars, those fish fries and bad jokes and small-town bacchanals were his final gift to his son.

“I think it had meaning for both of us beyond the book,” Kevin said, back at Moloney’s, just us at the bar, after everyone else had gone. “It was always about having the experience with him as much as it was about the book.”

Kevin teared up. Not a lot. But enough.