Bayfield

We came into Bayfield down a long hill that suddenly opened onto Lake Superior, blue and enormous and cold-looking even in July, with the Apostle Islands scattered offshore like something out of a folk tale. The town itself is barely a few blocks — Victorian houses climbing the hillside, a harbor lined with sailboats and the ferry to Madeline Island, a Main Street of galleries and fish shacks. Lia, who grew up near an ocean, kept forgetting this was a lake and not the sea; the horizon simply refused to look like a lake horizon should.

Sailing the Apostle Islands

The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is the reason most people find Bayfield, and we spent a full day on a boat tour weaving between the twenty-two forested islands, ducking into sea caves at Devils Island where waves have carved sandstone into arches and grottos over thousands of years. Lia leaned over the rail trying to photograph the layered red-and-tan striping in the cliffs, the same sandstone that built much of Chicago and Milwaukee a century ago, quarried right from these shores. In winter, when the lake freezes solid enough, visitors can walk out to these same caves across the ice — a version of the trip we promised each other we’d come back for.

Orchards and the Big Top

Back on land, the hills above Bayfield are covered in apple orchards, part of a fruit-growing microclimate created by the lake’s moderating effect on temperature. We spent an afternoon picking apples at a family orchard, buying jars of apple butter and a bag of cider doughnuts we finished before reaching the car, and caught an evening show at the Big Top Chautauqua, a canvas-tented amphitheater on a bluff outside town that has hosted touring folk and roots musicians for decades. Walking out afterward under a genuinely dark, star-heavy sky, with the lake breathing somewhere below us in the dark, felt like the whole trip distilled into one evening.

Getting There

Bayfield sits at the very tip of Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula, about an hour northeast of Duluth, Minnesota, and its regional airport, or roughly four and a half hours north of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the nearest major hub. There’s no train service; the drive up Highway 13 hugging the lakeshore is part of the appeal, especially in fall when the maples turn alongside the orchards. Once in town, Bayfield itself is entirely walkable, though a car is necessary for reaching the orchards and the marina where Apostle Islands boat tours depart.