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To know Thunder Bay is to love Thunder Bay.
Lake Superior's largest town is hard to get to know, though, in part because it was two towns until 1970. No downtown pops out of the landscape; people driving through see only the flat sprawl of Fort William, then the hillier sprawl of Port Arthur.
But Thunder Bay's surroundings are spectacular: Mount McKay on the south, Kakabeka Falls to the west and Ouimet and Eagle canyons to the north.
All kinds of paths cross in the Wisconsin village of Trempealeau.
Canoes and cormorants, tugboats and trains, bicyclists and blues fans all are drawn toward this Mississippi River town. It’s just a little burg, but it’s smack in the middle of Mother Nature’s playground.
Perrot State Park starts at the end of Trempealeau’s First Street, with hiking trails that give vistors spectacular views of far-off Winona, the river valley and a hill French explorers called La Montagne Qui Trempe a l'Eau, or "the mountain that soaks in the water.'' To the north are the sloughs of Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge, crossroads for birds and springboard for bicyclists.
There’s only one place in the Midwest where potholes are a tourist attraction instead of a nuisance.
Standing at the bottom of the 35-foot-deep Bake Oven, touching walls as smooth as vinyl, it’s easy to imagine the scene 10,000 years ago, when sheets of water from a melting glacier roared past Taylors Falls, into what now is the St. Croix River Valley. They came with such fury that whirlpools laced with sand and gravel drilled cylindrical holes into solid rock — potholes, the world’s deepest.
On the Minnesota side of the river, that fury must have had apocalyptic proportions. Behind Angle Rock, where the river takes a hard right, there’s an otherworldly place of giant slabs and cavities. Here, so many potholes formed that they merged into what now is called the Devil’s Parlor. The Bake Oven, where one pothole bored into another, is nearby, along with the Lily Pond, the Hourglass and the 67-foot Bottomless Pit.
Copper Harbor, Mich., never has had an easy existence.
Indians and explorers always knew there was copper sitting along the Keweenaw Peninsula. But the desolation of the area made mining difficult; the earliest expedition, sent by London investors in 1771, gave up in disgust on an area Patrick Henry told Congress was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon.''
Lower Michigan had to be persuaded to take the Keweenaw and the rest of the Upper Peninsula in 1836, when it was applying for statehood. One opponent complained that the area, separated from Detroit by Lake Michigan and nearly 600 miles, was nothing but "20,000 square miles of howling wilderness.''
So you've done Galena — the shopping, the wine-tasting, the trolley tours, the historic houses.
What now?
This mining town in northwest Illinois boomed, went bust and came back as a boutique town for urban weekenders. Now, it's returning to nature.
In St. Croix Falls, Wis., all paths lead to enlightenment.
Hiking on the 1,000-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, bicycling the 48-mile Gandy Dancer State Trail or paddling on the 252-mile St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, people follow a path that was cut by a 600-foot-high wall of ice and traversed by woodland nomads, fur traders and railway laborers.
Visitors can soak up lore galore about ancient and natural history. But the real revelation here is St. Croix Falls, the unassuming river village that's at the start of it all.
In the 1920s, when the first resorts appeared along this remote, 57-mile highway that dead-ends near the Canadian border, guests had to have a certain sense of adventure.
The Gunflint Trail first was blazed by the Ojibwe, then used by fur traders, trappers and loggers. It was still a zigzagging roller-coaster through the woods when vacationers began to come. The first visitors in spring often had to patch the single phone line, which moose tended to snag and drag. Gasoline lanterns in their cabins often became plugged, and bears sometimes made appearances near cabins.
Still, they had it easy. After the guests left, resort owners faced a long winter of splitting wood for fuel, getting around by dog sled, harvesting ice and trapping for food and clothing.
For a hamlet out in nowhere, Lanesboro is picturesquely blessed.
It’s hemmed in by tall limestone bluffs, circled by a spring-fed trout stream and bisected by one of the nation’s best bicycle trails. Eagles, herons and egrets cruise along the scenic river just to the north, alongside canoeists and kayakers.
Nineteenth-century brick storefronts line downtown, which won a Great American Main Street award from the National Trust for
Historical Preservation in 1998; Lanesboro still is the only Minnesota town that has earned the honor.
On a summer day on Chequamegon Bay, there are few sights more enchanting than the sailboats bobbing around Bayfield.
With the Blessing of the Fleet in June, the tourist season kicks into high gear. Ferries chug nonstop between Bayfield and Madeline Island. Excursion boats head for the other Apostles. Sailboat captains take out novices and teach them how to hoist a jib.
Once, these waters were full of cargo boats, ferrying brownstone and lumber and herring to cities in the East. Bayfield hummed with industry, and town fathers hoped it would become another Chicago.
It would be natural, for a tourist, to arrive in Sturgeon Bay and just keep going. It would also be a mistake.
The rest of Door County has all the tourist trappings. But Sturgeon Bay has appeal of its own.
"Most people want to go farther up on Door County, for all the shops and such," says Bill Munroe, a volunteer at the Door County Maritime Museum. "But this is a working town. We like it down here. We like it very much."
In Ashland, Wis., the ghosts of the past appear in living color.
Once, these lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks and lieutenants lived only in the history books. Now, they're painted onto Ashland's walls, where they serve as backdrop to shoppers, college students and tourists going about their business downtown.
The first mural, painted for Wisconsin's sesquicentennial in 1998 by local artists Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen, featured the snowshoe-clad figure of pioneer Asaph Whittlesey as well as editor Sam Fifield, Ojibwe Chief Buffalo and other characters from the town's early days.
To most people, Superior, Wis., is nothing more than a series of traffic lights to endure on the fast track to the Apostle Islands or Upper Peninsula.
It's sprawling, ugly and utterly devoid of interest.
Or is it?
In Ely, one picture is worth a thousand tourists.
Who could ignore the call of its photogenic expanses of sky-blue water and rocky islands amid spruce forest? Who isn't drawn to a shimmering image of the northern lights, or of a moose and calf browsing in a patch of wild calla lilies? To see Ely is to want to be there, enveloped by tranquility.
The scenery has been around for a long time, ever since glaciers carried off the soil and left a stony, stripped-down landscape
that, to many, is the essence of the north woods.
Around Ely, beauty is stripped down to essentials.
There's little but water, stone, spruce and sky in the northern Minnesota wilderness, what conservationist Sigurd Olson called "the naked grandeur." Still, it enthralls visitors from all over the world.
In winter, snow, ice and silence settle over the forests and lakes, and stars plaster the inky night sky. For many, Ely's pull is even stronger then.
Over the centuries, waves of history have buffeted Madeline Island and given it as many variations as a Lake Superior agate.
This wooded island off Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, the largest of the 22 Apostle Islands, exerts a magnetic pull.
The Ojibwe came from the east, led to "food that grows on water'' — wild rice — by a cowrie shell in the sky, according to their origin mythology,