The Great Lakes are this summer's best-kept secret
They offer turquoise bays, remote islands, 11,000 miles of shoreline, and are within a day’s drive of about 35 million Americans. So where are all the crowds?
Ancient glaciers left behind five gleaming lakes along America’s northern border. Together, the Great Lakes hold a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water, touching eight states and a Canadian province with 11,000 miles of wave-sculpted shoreline, shape-shifting sand dunes, and not a cruise ship in sight. More than 35 million people live within a day’s drive and yet, even on sunny summer days, you can find more herons than beach umbrellas.
Thousands of years before the first settlers, tourists, and industry arrived, the Anishinaabe called these waters the Five Freshwater Seas. For millennia, theirs and other Indigenous nations have shared these places as living entities—familial relatives—in a relationship that shaped the land and culture around them.
Lake Superior
Lake Superior is the largest, coldest, and deepest of the Great Lakes and does an award-winning impersonation of an ocean. From the shipping port city of Duluth, Highway 61 traces basalt cliffs and rock-cobbled beaches along the lake’s North Shore to the Canadian border. The highway connects eight state parks like a string of pearls, with the big lake on one side and boreal forest on the other. Lively waterfalls, the Superior Hiking Trail, and billion-year-old Sawtooth Mountains highlight the route north to Grand Marais, a harbor town of artists and anglers, and gateway to the Boundary Waters. About 60 nautical miles offshore is Isle Royale National Park, America’s most remote park, a precious place with rugged wilderness hiking and home to one of the world’s longest-running wolf-moose research studies. Accessible only by ferry or float plane, this wild island sees fewer than 25,000 visitors a year. Yellowstone gets that in a weekend.
(Escape the crowds at the lower 48’s most remote national park)
On the Wisconsin side, ancient glacial drama fragmented Bayfield Peninsula’s nose into an assemblage of stunning islands. Twenty-two emerald gems make up today’s Apostle Islands, hosting six lighthouses, secluded campsites, and dense woodlands. Along the mainland, the National Lakeshore features labyrinthine sea caves scalloped by centuries of Superior’s mischievous tide and then folded and fluted like melting caramel.
This is also Ojibwe country, where the traditional wild rice harvest reflects a worldview of the lake’s true spirit. Hop the ferry from Bayfield’s charming waterfront to Madeline Island or head uphill to orchards of apples and berries sweetening among lake winds. Don’t miss the Bayfield Apple Festival in early October.
Farther along Lake Superior’s southern shore, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula shines bright at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, where nature shows off with a compilation of waterfalls, sand dunes, and the marquee sandstone cliffs colorfully painted by groundwater-borne minerals. South of the U.P., Wisconsin’s “thumb” hosts Door County, a 70-mile peninsula known as the “Cape Cod of the Midwest.” The Door is dotted with enchanting harbor towns, five state parks, historic lighthouses, and a mid-May bonanza of cherry blossoms.
(Door County, Wisconsin, is a road-tripper’s dream, hidden in plain sight)
A step back in time
Across Lake Michigan’s northern reaches, sand migrates in slow motion at another national lakeshore. Sleeping Bear Dunes boasts 35 miles of beach shoreline and a 450-foot dune with dazzling lake views (earned after a quad-busting climb). Wine enthusiasts flock to nearby Traverse City, the Cherry Capital of the World, for vino that gives Burgundy a run for its money. A short drive northeast takes you to Torch Lake, where it feels like you’ve wandered far closer to the equator. The Ojibwe knew this lake as waaswaaganing, the place of torches, named for fishing at night by torchlight. Glowing with turquoise water born of limestone marl, visual logic suggests Michigan’s largest inland lake belongs somewhere in the Caribbean. But it’s all right here—without the crowds.
From Mackinaw City, the mighty five-mile Mackinac Bridge, the longest in the western hemisphere, connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas. At the northern end, Mackinac Island is an idyll of life at slower speeds. Car-free for over a century, moving around is done on foot, bicycle, or horse-drawn carriage—the best ways to experience Victorian shops, parks and indulge in the island’s world-renowned fudge, handcrafted here since 1887.
Above Mackinac, hulking freighters queue at the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, the same corridor navigated by Indigenous traders for 2,000 years. Today, their descendants co-manage fisheries in efforts to restore lake sturgeon and whitefish, and monitor intrusions of invasive species.
Shipwrecks and lighthouses
On Lake Huron’s Michigan side in Alpena, ribs and hulls of dozens of shipwrecks lie preserved in the cold waters of Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Above the surface at Besser Museum, time stands still at the Katherine V, a 1928 wooden fishing tug and last of its kind remaining, fished by the prominent Vogelheim family since the hardy skiff first worked the waves. Across Lake Huron on the Ontario side, Pinery Provincial Park was created to protect extraordinary biodiversity, including rare oak savannah forests, a kayak-friendly channel through rolling sand dunes, and some of the world’s most beautiful sunsets.
On Lake Erie, the shallowest Great Lake, Marblehead Lighthouse, the Great Lakes’ oldest continuously operating light, has watched over mariners since 1822. Nearby, Presque Isle State Park sees over 300 species of migratory birds every year, and Lake Ontario’s Sandbanks Provincial Park safeguards the world’s largest freshwater sand dune system.
Looking to the future
They look healthy on the surface, but the Great Lakes are not immune to climate change. Ice cover has declined in recent decades, and temperature extremes have more than doubled since the late 1990s. Don Wuebbles, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Illinois, notes critical points of concern.
“The last couple of years we’ve had very little water going into the basin, and evaporation is increasing with the increase in temperatures. Those two elements have to be in balance.” Among a host of other issues, warmer waters spell trouble for whitefish, a key regional species. “They want to move farther north, but [invasive] mussels are affecting their food supply to the point we may lose whitefish from the region. The Great Lakes have changed and are going to change a lot more.”
Ultimately, the question for everyone who shows up at the lakes with a kayak or a cooler is what we owe back to the water and how we’ll carry it forward.
(Is this Michigan city the most Finnish place in the U.S.?)
