Form your link:
“During this thousand-year period of mining, some of the miners must have explored the continent to the west, as evidenced by strangely large skeletons in a lot of places, such as the red-haired giants who came by boat to Lovelock Cave on Lake Lahontan (Nevada), that were found in 1924 with fishnets and duck decoys (Ref.77).”
The red haired giants is an interesting question. I have been to Lovelock Cave on numerous occasions. Unfortunately there are no artifacts remaining or any traces of the original discovery in the 1920s at the cave. There are rumored to be skeletons sequestered by court order in the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. I have investigated this and have not been able to get a comment from Museum leadership. Also, the timeline from the Piautes is not definitive and does not lend itself to traditional research. There is also a faction of the Paiute tribe that do not want the old ways discussed or talked about and have actually outlawed (in tribal terms) discussing the ancient history with Europeans.
Two things of note. The Piautes are by heredity a short people. I believe this comes from a life they were having sparse resources and natural selection picked the ones that required less resources to survive. So any other humans of what would be considered normal size in Europe during this timeframe would appear to be giants to the Piautes. It should also be noted that Bronze Age humans were short by our standards today.
I am planning to spend some time this Summer further investigating this story.
Oh I forgot one other thing. Lake Lahontan the author is talking about disappeared about 9,000 years ago. So the timeline doesn’t fit.
Gavin Menzies has a book out about supposed Minoan copper mining and shipping out of Lake Superior, others had pioneered the topic of transoceanic bronze age copper trade somewhat in excess of 50 years ago (I first encountered it over 40 years ago, and it had been around for a while).
Menzies' view is that the Chicago River was still flowing west and into the Mississippi because isostatic rebound hadn't yet created the elevation that separates the Chicago River (which flows into Lake Michigan, unless the whole town flushes at the same time) from the Illinois River (tributary of the Mighty Mississip) making navigation at least theoretically possible from the Gulf of Mexico all the way into the Great Lakes.
I don't think he's correct about the era in which A) the isostatic rebound hadn't yet resulted in the geography seen today, or B) the era in which the Minoans were operating, in any case.
There's a marked difference in elevation (21 feet) between the surface of Lakes Superior and Huron -- but that's today of course, and the modern Soo Locks (at Sault Ste Marie, pron. "Sue Saint Marie") transfer traffic to the tune of 86 million tons a year. Portaging or even just transporting cargo obviously went on, because *someone* (either PreColumbian tribes, or someone else) obviously did mine copper in the Upper Peniinsula and on Isle Royale, and the copper has shown up elsewhere in archaeological contexts in North America, and I believe also in Central America. Commerce has been one of those universal human activities for a long, long time.
The more likely route -- the St Lawrence River, which would be found by Atlantic-transiting navigators -- is, uh, interrupted by Niagara Falls. Again, portaging is an option, but obviously heading upriver into the interior of Ontario still works today, and the divide between the watersheds isn't particularly broad. The Varangians managed a riverine trade route requiring a couple of portages, but nevertheless running between the Baltic and Black Seas.
BTW, I think I got the link to the Haaretz article about this shipwreck off the Gavin Menzies group on Facebook. I'm not a giant fan or fanboy of Menzies -- I like his data set which is always huge (occasionally some of the data is a bit sketchy, IMHO), but his conclusions remind me of that old saying, that when your own tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.