Pictured Rocks
Interesting facts
- In 1658 the fur trader Pierre-Esprit Radisson paddled past the cliffs and noted that his Native companions left an offering of tobacco for the spirit of the rocks.
- The geologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who saw the cliffs in 1820, ranked their views among the grandest in nature.
- Around 1850 developers planned a tourist resort named Grand Island City beside the cliffs, near the site of present-day Munising.
- After logging ended around 1910, much of the land now in the lakeshore passed to the state of Michigan because owners stopped paying property taxes.
- The 2006 collapse of the inner turret of Miners Castle was first reported by fishermen out on the lake, who called it in by mobile phone.
- The Grand Sable Dunes are perched dunes: lake sand blown up a steep glacial bank now rests on top of it, on a slope of about 35 degrees.
- In the late 19th century loggers built a wooden slide to send timber from the top of the Grand Sable Banks down to Lake Superior.
- Au Sable Light, built in 1874, guards a sandstone reef that runs nearly a mile into the lake and lies only about 6 feet below the surface in places.
- Long winters and seeping meltwater freeze into more than 50 named ice formations along the cliffs, which draw ice climbers from far beyond Michigan.
- Wrecks of ships caught on this shelterless coast lie offshore in the Alger Underwater Preserve, a protected area popular with divers.
Why it is worth it
For some 13 miles along the south shore of Lake Superior, sandstone cliffs up to about 200 feet high drop straight into clear green water, their faces streaked with red, orange, yellow, black and blue-green. The colours are painted by groundwater: as it seeps out of the rock it leaves stains of iron (reds and oranges), limonite (yellows and browns), manganese (black) and copper (greens and blues). Waves and ice have carved the base of the wall into caves, arches and free-standing towers that look like ruined castle turrets.
The cliffs are built of three layers. At the bottom lies the mottled red Jacobsville sandstone of Precambrian age; above it the Munising Formation, Cambrian sandstone about 500 million years old that forms most of the coloured face; and on top a cap of harder Ordovician sandstone of the Au Train Formation, which protects the softer rock below and keeps the cliffs vertical. Where streams reach the edge they spill over the Munising sandstone in waterfalls, among them the seasonal Bridalveil Falls. Among the best-known formations are Miners Castle, a turreted headland of crumbly cross-bedded sandstone whose inner turret collapsed on 13 April 2006, and Chapel Rock, a Cambrian sandstone pillar carved by the high waters of a post-glacial lake some 3,800 years ago. An arch once joined it to the shore until it fell in the 1940s; the old white pine on its summit survives because its main root still stretches across the gap to the mainland.
The cliffs are the centrepiece of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, established on 15 October 1966 as the first national lakeshore in the United States. The protected strip runs 42 miles from Munising to Grand Marais and also includes the Grand Sable Dunes, which rise about 275 feet above the lake, and the Au Sable Light station of 1874. A section of the long-distance North Country Trail follows the clifftop for the full length of the lakeshore.
Getting there
The cliffs begin just northeast of Munising, the western gateway to the lakeshore; the city of Marquette is about 70 km away. The nearest airport is Marquette Sawyer Regional Airport (MQT), about 73 km away. Highway M-28 reaches Munising, and County Road H-58 runs along the back of the lakeshore to Grand Marais.
On these lists
46.53333, -86.48833per Wikidata