Embedded Files
Updated 7/17/19
Our campsite in L’Anse Michigan was hard to find, but well worth the effort. Google navigated us to a road alongside Lake Superior, and when we finally realized we were lost and called the campground, the staff explained there wasn’t really an address but guided us through finding the park entrance (on another road entirely). Our site at the L’Anse Township Park was astonishingly beautiful, with rolling, well-tended grassy lawns and shade trees and sparkling Lake Superior right across another quiet road. We were lucky to have crisp and sunny days, campfire-perfect evenings cooling to the high 50s, and light in the sky until 10 p.m. One of those evenings we headed out to kayak (Ramona and Pippi) and paddleboard (Dorian) after 6 p.m., and Dorian loved not having to worry about sharks or leeches as he played around and dangled his legs in the warmer-than-expected water.
From L’Anse, we drove an hour and a half to Copper Harbor, Michigan’s northernmost community, and took an easy walk/clamber out to the end of Hunter’s Point, a narrow strip that shields Copper Harbor from Lake Superior storms. This area is ostensibly the best spot in the lower 48 to see northern lights, although at this time of year we’d get eaten by mosquitoes if we tried.
This area of the Upper Peninsula is so beautiful, with miles and miles of shoreline….I’d start to fantasize about having a little cabin here….before remembering WINTER, and reading that the 2018/19 winter produced a record 400+ inches of snow last season. That’s over 33 feet of snow. Enough said, right?
On our last day in L’Anse we hiked the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness Area of the Ottawa National Forest, accessed at the Canyon Falls roadside park. You can take a short, easy walk from the parking lot to the small but pretty waterfall, or continue as we did along a somewhat rugged trail yielding gorgeous views of the… well… gorge, with tumbling watercourses and large pools where the intrepid jumped from 25 foot cliffsides.
I can’t leave off without mentioning our search for pasties throughout the Upper Peninsula. To clarify, these are pronounced PASS-tees (rhymes with nasty), and are a local aka “Yooper” delicacy, not whatever you might have been thinking (see NPR article on the interesting history of pasties here). You’ll have no problem finding traditional beef and pork pasties, but we were looking for fish pasties which we saw advertised in St. Ignace but couldn’t find afterward.
Darn.
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