Charlevoix

We timed our arrival in Charlevoix badly, or perhaps perfectly — pulling up to the drawbridge on US-31 just as the warning bells rang and the span began to rise for a line of sailboats threading through from Round Lake to Lake Michigan. A dozen cars idled patiently while masts glided past at eye level, and nobody honked. That easy tolerance for interruption, we’d learn, is basically the town’s operating philosophy. Charlevoix sits on a narrow spit of land between Lake Michigan, Round Lake, and Lake Charlevoix, and the water dictates everything, including, apparently, traffic.

Mushroom houses and Earl Young’s fairy-tale architecture

Charlevoix’s strangest attraction is architectural: a cluster of homes built between the 1920s and 1950s by self-taught local architect Earl Young, designed with curved cedar-shake roofs, undulating stone walls built from boulders he hauled himself, and windows shaped like something out of a storybook. Locals call them the mushroom houses, and Lia and I spent a slow afternoon walking the residential streets near the harbor picking them out, half expecting a door to creak open onto a hobbit’s kitchen. Young never trained formally as an architect, yet his roughly thirty surviving structures give Charlevoix a visual identity found nowhere else on the Great Lakes.

Round Lake and the channel

The heart of town is the short, busy channel connecting Round Lake’s protected harbor to the open water of Lake Michigan. We walked the boardwalk past yachts, fishing charters, and the historic Beaver Island boat dock, where a car ferry still carries passengers out to Beaver Island, a remote community with its own strange history as the site of a nineteenth-century Mormon kingdom under self-proclaimed King James Strang. Downtown Charlevoix’s Bridge Street rises gently from the water, lined with ice cream shops and boutiques that fill with a distinctly Up North energy every July during Venetian Festival, when the harbor fills with lit-up, decorated boats.

The dunes and Lake Michigan beaches

A short walk from downtown, Charlevoix’s public beach opens directly onto Lake Michigan, and we spent our last evening there watching the sun drop into water that, at this scale, refuses to look like anything but an ocean. Freighters occasionally cross the horizon on their way to or from the Straits of Mackinac, and locals swim well into September, when the lake has finally warmed enough to bear it. It’s easy to lose track of the fact that this is fresh water at all — the color shifts from turquoise in the shallows to a deep, cold blue that could fool anyone.

Getting There

Charlevoix is about a five-hour drive north from Detroit, or ninety minutes from Traverse City, via US-31. Charlevoix Municipal Airport handles small private aircraft, but most travelers fly into Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) in Traverse City and drive north. There’s no train service to the region, so a car is necessary, particularly for reaching the Beaver Island ferry dock and the surrounding lakeshore.