Lake Superior

The numbers are hard to hold in your head. Lake Superior covers roughly the area of a small country, averages nearly five hundred feet deep, and reaches over thirteen hundred feet at its deepest point. The water is famously clear and famously cold, kept chilly year-round because such a huge, deep body of water warms slowly and never fully gives up its winter chill. That cold, clear water is part of why it looks so startlingly blue and green over the sandstone and cobble shallows.

All that water behaves like a sea. It generates its own fog banks and storms, and a hard northeast wind can raise waves big enough to break over breakwaters and pound the shoreline rock. The famous gales of November have sent ships to the bottom, and the lake has never given back the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. On a calm day it can be mirror-still and impossibly peaceful; a few hours later it can be a churning gray wall of surf. Watching it change is half the pleasure of standing on its shore.

Long before it appeared on any map, this was Gichigami to the Ojibwe, the great water at the center of their world, and the North Shore was a homeland and a highway of birchbark canoes. French voyageurs and the fur trade followed the same water routes, and Grand Marais, whose name means great marsh, took hold because its sheltered cove was one of the only good harbors on a coast of cliffs and reefs.

By the early twentieth century Grand Marais was the busy center of the North Shore commercial fishery, with dozens of licensed fishermen hauling herring and lake trout from the cold water. The lake could be deadly work, and the drownings of local fishermen helped lead to the building of a Coast Guard station here. That maritime past still shows in the harbor, the old lighthouse, and the fish houses, giving the town a salty, working-coast feel unusual for the middle of the continent.

The must-do walk in Grand Marais is Artist's Point, a low peninsula of bare, billion-year-old volcanic rock that reaches straight out into the lake from the edge of downtown. You can park almost at its base and then pick your way across the slabs and pocket coves to a small stand of gnarled cedars and the easternmost tip, where the town and the wooded hills line up behind you and the open lake fills the rest. It has drawn painters and photographers for generations, hence the name.

The shoreline here is also famous rock-hunting ground. Lake Superior agates formed more than a billion years ago in the same ancient lava flows that built this coast, and the waves have been sorting and polishing stones onto the cobble beaches ever since. Bring a keen eye and low expectations of a museum piece, and you may still come away with a pocket of banded agates and beautifully smoothed pebbles. Whether you are stone-hunting, watching the surf, or just sitting on the rocks with a coffee, Artist's Point is the place the lake feels closest.

The harbor, the beaches, and Artist's Point are all free and only steps from the middle of town, so meeting Lake Superior here takes no planning at all: park, walk to the water, and let the lake do the rest. Give yourself time to walk out to the point and along the breakwater to the lighthouse when conditions are calm, and to poke along the cobble for stones. The light off the water is beautiful in the early morning and the long northern evenings.

Respect the lake and it will reward you. The water is cold enough to be dangerous, and in a strong onshore wind the waves break with real force over the point and the breakwater, so give them a wide margin and keep children close. Grand Marais also sits at the mouth of the Gunflint Trail into the Boundary Waters country and on the route of the Superior Hiking Trail, so the harbor makes a natural home base for exploring the whole wild North Shore, with the great lake always just outside the door.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.