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Of all the Great Lakes, Superior is the drama queen.
It's unpredictable and petulant, throwing tantrums that threaten to swallow any boat that ventures onto its waters. In 1975, it famously swallowed one that itself was called Queen of the Lakes.
Superior loves irony, it seems. The first recorded wreck, in 1816, was called the Invincible.
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.
The corner of Third Avenue and U.S. 2 in Grand Rapids doesn’t exactly look like the edge of the wilderness.
The Blandin Co. paper mill is across the highway, its flat roof studded by smokestacks that send plumes of white smoke into the air. Trucks rumble past, en route to North Dakota or Duluth.
But this is the beginning of the 47-mile Edge of the Wilderness scenic route, Minnesota’s first National Scenic Byway. Just 10 blocks from U.S. 2, it leaves the city center and begins to skirt McKinney Lake. Then it winds northward, past pristine forests, undeveloped lakes and the occasional quiet village.
Fish boils, cherry pie, chic shops and a nonstop stream of tourists.
Yes, that’s Door County, all right. But so is this:
Secluded beaches of fine white sand. Estuaries lined with herons. Hiking and bicycle trails winding through sun-dappled cedar forests.
Ten thousand years ago, the melting of Minnesota’s last glacier transformed a placid beach into a rugged coast.
It’s a 150-mile stretch of wild beauty, lined by piles of jagged black basalt, cobblestone beaches and the mouths of dozens of rivers, tumbling down from the old beaches of Glacial Lake Duluth. Seven state parks follow their winding gorges, marked by rapids and waterfalls, and the Superior Hiking Trail crosses them on its way from Duluth to the Canadian border.
This is Minnesota’s breathing space, to which tourists return like spawning salmon, year after year, or whenever we need to fill our lungs with brisk Lake Superior air. We can’t swim in the water — it’s about 40 degrees, even in summer — but we can look at the views and walk through the forests, and we do.
Sinclair Lewis was thinking about Otter Tail County when he chided Minnesotans for not knowing about their own "haunts of beauty.''
Few know that Otter Tail County has more lakes than any other county in Minnesota — 1,048 — or even that it has lakes at all. It also has the state's densest concentration of giant mascots and roadside sculpture, as well as two state parks, a picture-postcard mill and Inspiration Peak, the state's second-highest point after Eagle Mountain on the North Shore.
The rolling landscape was created by the back-and-forth scraping of glaciers from four ice ages, which left a glacial moraine of kames, piles of sand and gravel dropped by glacial meltwater, and kettles, created when block of ice fell off the glaciers, pressed into the earth, melted and filled up again as ponds and lakes.
Sure, winters can be rough here in wind-chill country. But why do we tough it out? For the big payoff of autumn, of course, with its crisp, sunny days and the luminous orange of the sugar maple, the scarlet of sumac, the golden popple and bronzed oak.
They don't have that in Florida and Arizona. But here, we've got it all: a bright palette of colors, harvest festivals and nifty little towns to explore.
Fall is the time to be out and about. In Minnesota, the state scenic byways are a good bet, as are Wisconsin's Rustic Roads. Here are seven other routes that will put you in the middle of the scenery. And if fall color doesn't materialize when you expect it to, don't worry: These drives are pretty great any time.
Around the world, people know Minnesota for its waters — source of the Mississippi, land of lakes.
But those are not the waters for which it's named. Those waters belong to a river whose cloudiness led the Dakota to call it "waters reflecting the skies" — the Minnesota.
It was more than a mile across at the end of the last ice age, when it drained glacial Lake Agassiz, the largest lake that ever existed. Today, it's small and sluggish, and farm runoff and erosion have increased its natural siltiness. But the Minnesota's broad valley, reaching from the South Dakota border to the Twin Cities, is beautiful.
On the northeast tip of Minnesota is a coastline of uncommon beauty, lined by sheer basalt cliffs, cobblestone beaches and the mouths of dozens of rivers rushing into Lake Superior through narrow, winding gorges.
This is where Minnesotans go to breathe.
Since 1924, when the first highway opened, the North Shore has been a refuge for city folk tired of congestion, for farmers tired of flat fields, for blue-collar workers tired of the grind. It didn't cost much to come up for a week, rent a little cabin and breathe deeply of air laced with the fragrance of cedar, pine and freshwater waves.
Exploring the Minnesota landscape on a scenic byway, you'd expect to see some singular features.
But Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway turns up a whole new face.
This is a burly part of the state, a scratchy-wool, buffalo-plaid kind of place that might seem Bunyanesque in nature but actually was the stomping grounds of a real-life legend, the shorter but tougher voyageur.
It's a hot Saturday in Duluth, and Canal Park is jam-packed.
A line of cars waits to cross the Aerial Lift Bridge; people want to get to the beach or the art fair on Park Point. Tourists mill around the marine museum, shops and restaurants. Young men in souped-up trucks slowly cruise along Canal Park Drive, and young girls in town for a soccer tournament rove the sidewalks in packs, trailed by their parents.
It seems as if every tourist and teenager in town is in Canal Park.
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.
In Wisconsin, people build whole trips around the roads less traveled.
Their destination? Nowhere. And on one of the state's lovely Rustic Roads, nowhere usually is enough.
Across the state, brown-and-yellow signs point to lightly traveled roads that preserve remnants of the past — piebald llamas (R-92, south of River Falls), an 1870 lighthouse (R-38 in Door County), Amish farms (R-56, south of Ontario).