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The Circle Tour of Lake Superior is one of the world's most scenic drives, 1,300 miles of non-stop scenery and attractions.
There's a staggering number of things to do and see around Lake Superior. But if you have only a week's vacation, you can see
the highlights on this nine-day, eight-night Circle Tour.
Drive clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on what festivals or events you want to catch; see Planning a Circle Tour. For an overview, see Circling Superior.
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.
The sky was clear, the wind was still and Lake Superior was as placid as a lily pond.
It was a miracle that wouldn't last. That's why it was torture for the dozen of us to sit through a long kayak safety course on the sandy beach of Bayfield, Wis., forming a ''human knot'' to foster cooperation in case of disaster and listening to trip leader Hovas Schall's horror stories about the big, mercurial lake.
''Kayakers play a game with the weather, and the weather always wins,'' she said darkly. "Sea kayaking is a dangerous sport.''
A century ago, in the Apostle Islands, only seven puny shafts of light stood between sailors and catastrophe.
Lake Superior has been called the most dangerous body of water in the world, an inland teakettle in which any tempest can be deadly. Storms gather fury over 200 miles of open water, and heaven help mariners caught between wind and rock — heaven, or a lighthouse keeper with sharp eyes.
During a ferocious storm in September 1905, Outer Island lighthouse keeper John Irvine saw a lifeboat leave the foundering schooner Pretoria and then capsize offshore; five men drowned, but the 60-year-old keeper was able to pull the remaining five ashore.
In Bayfield, Wis., the apple has mushroomed.
In 1961, the apple was the object of a small village festival. Today, it draws 60,000 people to a fall blowout featuring all things apple — fritters, sundaes, dumplings, pies and apple-cheeked children.
On northern Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, Apple Festival is nearly as revered as motherhood.
Around the Great Lakes, love for lighthouses is unlimited. Often called "America's castles,'' lighthouses are symbols of a more adventurous era, and tourists find them irresistible.
"They work their way up the coast seeing all the lighthouses,'' says Ronda Werner of Michigan's Tawas Point Light. "They bring their lighthouse book and want stamps in their passports, and they're all decked out in their lighthouse shirts and their little lighthouse earrings. It's wonderful so many people have this much passion for our lighthouses.''
Now, the state parks and friends associations who care for them have found a way to harness all this passion: They're turning tourists into volunteer keepers. Every year, the 1869 Tawas Point Light on Michigan's Lake Huron coast takes applications for keepers to live on a sandy spit often called "the Cape Cod of the Midwest.''
In the vacation town of Bayfield, action shifts to the woods in winter.
In summer, everyone gravitates to Lake Superior and its cruise launches, sailboats, ferries and kayaks. But when it snows, the locomotion is on inland trails.
And it does snow. Gales over the big lake deliver plenty for skiers, snowmobilers and mushers.
Along the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, everyone waits for a big freeze.
Only when temperatures stay low for a long time will the edges of Lake Superior freeze enough for people to walk out to the mainland ice caves, whose beauty is renowned. Even when ice is sufficiently solid, wind may suddenly split it, and snow may block the access drive. So when park rangers say it’s okay to go — well, then you’d better go.
I’d been calling the ice-cave hot line for weeks one year when, finally, I heard the magic words: “Conditions do allow access to the mainland sea caves.’’ But a foot of snow fell that weekend, and I couldn’t get going until March 1.
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,
Many people turn lighthouses into a hobby. In summer, they travel from beacon to beacon, photographing them and collecting stamps in their U.S. Lighthouse Society passports until they've got 60 and can move onto the next passport and, eventually, the "Platinum Circle'' patch awarded after 240 lighthouse visits.
It's not easy to get to every lighthouse, however. Many are on islands or inaccessible by car, so aficionados are quick to sign up for the special boat trips offered during lighthouse festivals.
Below are some of the cruises that will take visitors to lights in the western Great Lakes in 2009. On many, places go
quickly.
