Pictured Rocks
"The cliffs don't look painted until you're close enough to see the iron seeping out — then they look like geology dreamed up by a surrealist."
I’d seen plenty of photographs of Pictured Rocks before I went, and I still wasn’t prepared. The photographs show colourful cliffs above a lake, which is roughly accurate in the same way that saying a Rothko painting contains rectangles is accurate. What no photograph conveys is the scale: the cliffs rise up to two hundred feet above Lake Superior, and you experience them from water level, from a boat moving slowly along their base, your neck craning back as your eyes try to take in bands of orange, rust, teal, black, and white that seep and bleed and streak down the sandstone in patterns that look intentional — some mineral intelligence expressing itself in iron and copper and manganese. The boat captain told me that in heavy rain the colours intensify, the pigments running into fresh streams that stain the lake itself around the cliff base. I filed that information away and found myself wanting to come back in a rainstorm.
Munising is the gateway town, and it has the utilitarian feel of a place that grew up servicing the mining and logging industries and pivoted to tourism without any particular fuss. There’s good whitefish at several restaurants near the harbor, and the local pasty shops — those Finnish-Cornish hand pies that fed the miners — are still operating with recipes that probably haven’t changed much since the copper boom. I ate one in the parking lot of the visitor center while a seagull waited at a calculated distance, and the thing was genuinely good: dense pastry, beef and rutabaga, a satisfying weight in the hand that made complete sense for people who used to work twelve-hour shifts underground. The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore extends forty-two miles along the Superior coast, and the boat tour covers the main cliff sections, but the hiking trails are how you earn the less-photographed views — the interior waterfalls, the forest ridges above the cliffs, the places where the trail comes close enough to the edge that the lake appears suddenly below you, impossibly blue.
The waterfall corridor inland is worth the detour. Miners Falls, Munising Falls, and Spray Falls — the last one visible only from the water, dropping directly into Lake Superior from a cliff face — each have their own character, their own sound. After the falls I drove east through Seney and the vast, flat marshland of the Upper Peninsula interior, country that feels as remote as anything in the continental United States, and ended up in Newberry eating pie in a diner where the waitress called everyone “hon” without apparent effort, and the Superior Hiking Trail map was spread on the table next to someone’s coffee mug, and I felt, not for the first time in the Upper Peninsula, that I had landed somewhere the rest of the country had simply forgotten to arrive at yet.
When to go: Boat tours run late May through mid-October; early September offers summer warmth with noticeably thinner crowds. The Superior Trail hiking season follows the same window. Fall colour along the cliffs in early October is spectacular, but the boat tours wind down then — plan for the last operating week to catch both.