Kitch-iti-kipi
Interesting facts
- Despite the enormous flow, exactly where the groundwater feeding the spring comes from has still not been pinned down.
- Besides lake, brown and brook trout, yellow perch and other fish move in and out of the pool through its link with Indian Lake.
- When John Bellaire found the spring in the 1920s, loggers were using the surrounding land as a dumping ground.
- The land company that sold the spring insisted not only on the park's name but also on a ban on camping.
- Other names attached to the spring include Great Water and Bubbling Spring, and some tellings call it Sound of Thunder, though the pool is quite silent.
- According to one legend, a young chieftain named Kitch-iti-kipi drowned here trying to prove his love to a maiden, and the spring took his name.
- According to another legend, parents came to the pool to find names for their newborn children in the sounds of the rippling water.
- In 2020 Carole Lynn Hare, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, published a short book retelling the legend of the spring.
Why it is worth it
Kitch-iti-kipi looks like a piece of tropical lagoon dropped into the conifer swamps of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The oval pool, about 300 by 175 feet and some 40 feet deep, is so clear that sunken tree trunks crusted with minerals and large trout drifting over the bottom can be seen as if through glass. The water has an emerald-green tint and never changes temperature: it stays at about 45 °F (7 °C) in winter and summer alike.
This is the largest natural freshwater spring in Michigan. More than 10,000 US gallons of water per minute rise through fissures in the underlying limestone, stirring up small fountains of sand on the floor of the pool and creating a constantly shifting pattern of light and movement. Geologically the basin is a kind of sinkhole: the upper layer of limestone dissolved and collapsed into a cavity carved by groundwater, and the spring now drains into nearby Indian Lake. The name is Ojibwe and is generally translated as "big cold spring"; the site is also known simply as the Big Spring or, more poetically, as the Mirror of Heaven.
The modern history of the spring begins in the 1920s, when John I. Bellaire, a shopkeeper from Manistique, found it choked with fallen trees in a logged-over wilderness. He persuaded Frank Palms of the Palms Book Land Company to sell the spring and 90 acres to the State of Michigan for $10, on condition that it remain a public park bearing the company's name. Palms Book State Park was created in 1926 and has since grown to several hundred acres. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built a hand-operated observation raft that is pulled across the pool on a cable, allowing visitors to look straight down into the spring; it was renewed in 2003. Several romantic "Native legends" told about the spring are said to have been invented by Bellaire himself to publicise it.
Getting there
The spring lies in Palms Book State Park in Schoolcraft County, about 12 km north-west of the city of Manistique; Marquette is about 100 km away. Highway M-149 runs north from US Highway 2 at Thompson to the park. The nearest airport is Delta County Airport (ESC) in Escanaba, about 63 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kitch-iti-kipi, located within Palms Book State Park, is Michigan's largest natural freshwater spring. The name means "big cold spring" in the Ojibwe language. It is also sometimes referred to as the Big Spring. Kitch-iti-kipi, or "Mirror of Heaven" as it is referred to today, was originally given that name by the Ojibwe.
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