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Along Michigan's Pictured Rocks, there's no such thing as a bad view.
White sandstone cliffs line nearly 40 miles of national lakeshore, the nation's first when it was created in 1966. Named for the colorful swishes and whorls painted by mineral-laden water oozing through cracks, Pictured Rocks draws tourists from around the world.
This part of Michigan is inconveniently distant for tourists from big cities; Detroit is closer to Charleston, W.V., than Munising. But it may be just distant enough. Munising, 45 minutes east of Marquette, is an unremarkable town, but it sits in a remarkable setting that would be mobbed if it were any closer.
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 2008. On many, places go
quickly.
The snow appeared on cue, just as Wisconsin faded into the Upper Peninsula. One minute there was a dusting, and the next a whole layer, white and inviting.
It seemed too perfect, as if there must be snowguns hidden behind the "Welcome to Michigan'' sign. But there was snow beyond that, too, right up to the doors of the three ski resorts that line U.S. 2 just inside the state line.
That's why they call this Big Snow Country. Winds from the west whip across Lake Superior, picking up warmth and moisture, and dump it as snow — more than 17 feet annually, on average — when they hit the cold inland air of the U.P.
Ah, the smell of Coppertone in spring.
Leaning back on a chairlift, basking in sun bounced off acres of snow, my friend Shar and I were getting quite a tan — on St. Patrick’s Day.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with its towering stacks of snow, is a good place for skiers to be in the spring. As of March 6, there were 17 inches on the ground, and the Ironwood area has had 127 inches this season. That's not so much, though; by this time last year, it had had 164 inches. The average is more than 200 inches, courtesy of winds out of the Canadian Rockies, which, when they hit land after whipping across Lake Superior, dump enough to make the western U.P. one of the snowiest spots in the nation.
In Sault Ste. Marie, tourists find out what floats their boats.
For most, it’s watching serious machinery moving through the Soo Locks. What really floats a boat, however, is 22 million gallons of water, which is what it takes to lift a boat through the Poe Lock, a liquid escalator between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.
It’s a June evening at the Soo Locks, and the Earl W. Oglebay is coming from Silver Bay with a load of taconite. A camera aimed toward Lake Superior catches the 630-foot boat in the distance and projects it onto a TV monitor in the Visitors Center, where boat-watchers have started to gather.
If one trip around a great lake is good, then two must be even better.
I had a great time circling Lake Superior, and I’ve always wanted to do it again. But for me, something new always trumps something old. I’d never been around Lake Michigan, and I’d been thinking about its attractions: The Mackinac Bridge. Gigantic sand dunes. A car ferry across the lake. And other stuff you won’t see on Lake Superior, bless its icy heart.
Lake Michigan isn’t the biggest lake, or the deepest. Its shores aren’t the most dramatic. But they can be the most dangerous — they’re lined by sandy shoals, which can snag a ship as surely as rock.
Just up north, there’s a vast wilderness of lakes, virgin forest and wild rivers lined by waterfalls and rapids.
It isn’t like other north-woods forests — not as they are in this century, anyway. It’s a wilderness unto itself, and though it’s no farther than the state parks farther up Minnesota’s North Shore, it seems a world away.
It feels a world away, too.
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.''
One Great Lake east of Superior, there’s another North Shore.
It doesn’t have any craggy points or sheer palisades, and there are no agates waiting to be found. It has no waterfalls, and not a scrap of basalt; in fact, there’s nothing volcanic about it.
But this north shore, on the leeward side of Lake Michigan, has something Minnesota's beautiful North Shore on Lake Superior doesn’t have: Sand, lots and lots of sand.
On the western tip of the Upper Peninsula, snow comes as regularly as mail.
Gusts of wind make the deliveries, picking up moisture and warmth over Lake Superior and then dumping it as snow when they hit the cold inland air around Ironwood and Bessemer.
The two ski towns are only four hours from the Twin Cities, but they look more like the North Pole in comparison. They've had 132 inches of snow so far this year, actually a disappointment considering that 150 inches had fallen by this time last year.
On Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, distance is both curse and blessing.
Jutting deep into Lake Superior, it's far from big cities — for Detroit residents, Nashville and Washington, D.C., are closer than the Keweenaw (pronounced KEY-win-awe). It was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon," statesman Patrick Henry told Congress after early mining attempts were abandoned in 1771.
But its deposits of pure copper were the world's largest, and in 1843, a copper rush brought in workers from dozens of nations. By 1913, 60,000 people lived in Calumet, extracting millions of pounds of copper for Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. But a failed strike that year soured life for workers, and declining demand, low prices and another strike ended the mining era for good in 1968.
When it rains on Isle Royale, you just have to soak it up.
Moisture comes with the territory in Lake Superior's northern reaches. No one comes here for the weather, despite early advertising that called it a "Summertime 'Bermuda' Paradise."
Bermuda it's not. But paradise? It depends on how you look at it.