From the old iron-ore port of Two Harbors on a July afternoon, Lake Superior looked like blue glass, placid under a bright sky. But the sensation was eerie when I walked out on the long breakwater. Hot, low sun baked one side of me, while the other side — where the sun couldn’t reach — was chilled by an ominous cold, far colder than mere shade: the breath of the lake.
The average water temperature in Superior is 40 degrees. “If you capsize in that water, survival’s about 20 minutes,” Alene Aho, owner of my bed-and-breakfast, noted cheerfully. “Then hypothermia cuts in.”
My room had a portable heater ready to plug in and a thick comforter piled at the foot of the bed. It’s July, I kept reminding myself. But these precautions were necessary, thanks to a quirk of Superior geography.
There really are two harbors here, one on each side of a tongue of land where the town perches. The farther out on that tongue you are, the more you fall under the lake’s spell.
“The lake can drop our temperature so fast,” said Aho, of the Bryan House B&B. The big bungalow was built in 1901 as a summer home by a family whose winter home was — no kidding — barely three blocks away. There really is that much difference. Locals call it “the lake effect.”
Beginning in Duluth, Minn., the North Shore of Lake Superior stretches roughly 300 miles northeastward, crossing the Canadian border about halfway and not turning southward again until it levels out just past Nipigon, Ontario.
The whole distance is a photogenic array of towering pines, cobblestone beaches, tiny fishing villages, old mining towns like Two Harbors, rippling streams and vast expanses of lake water — serene as a pond and blue to the horizon, or Atlantic gray and wild enough to smash ships to splinters.
I spent a week last summer exploring the North Shore, and I could have spent far longer, had I elected to fish or camp along the way. Circumnavigating the entire Great Lake would have been an even longer undertaking: 1,300 miles.
From Two Harbors, I drove to Gooseberry Falls State Park, partly to enjoy the quadruple-tiered cascades that are one of the North Shore’s most popular sights, partly to pick up information like this:
Lake Superior “contains half the water in the Great Lakes. Its 3 quadrillion gallons (that’s 3 followed by 15 zeros) would cover all of Canada, the United States, Mexico and South America with one foot of water. . . . No other lake can match its vast area of 31,280 square miles. From tip to tip, it measures nearly 350 miles and at its widest point 160 miles.”
Only Siberia’s Lake Baikal holds more fresh water, I knew, but that’s because it’s deeper, not bigger. I have seen Baikal, and it doesn’t come close to Superior for beauty or power.
A few miles farther north is another landmark, Split Rock Lighthouse, a silent witness to the true nature of this inland ocean. For 60 years, until modern technology outdated it, lighthouses like this were essential for protecting ships. Even so, Lake Superior claims 350 major wrecks. The most famous occurred in 1975, when the ore boat Edmund Fitzgerald was lost with all hands in a November storm.
“It is like an ocean,” one local assured me. “That lake can turn in a minute.”
It turned on me on the way north to Grand Marais. Fog formed so fast after a cloudburst that when I drove in, I thought my eyes were tired. There were rooftops. There were white masts. But the ground floors and the boats and the surface of the water were missing. In their places, a layer of cotton.
This shore town has two lives: summer and the rest of the year. Its permanent population — about 1,200 in winter — nearly doubles in the short warm months, when snowbirds return from Texas and Arizona and California and set up their trailers and RVs in the city campground on the south edge of town.
Mary and Vernon Lindskog are typical retirees. He’s a Grand Marais native; she was the daughter of “summer people” who came north each spring for her mother’s hay fever. The air was cleaner here — still is.
Back then, just before World War II, Grand Marais “was much smaller — about 500 people,” Mary said over iced tea on the deck beside their RV.
“The town didn’t have a stop sign,” her husband put in. “It didn’t have many streets.”
“Commercial fishing and logging — that was the big thing,” Mary continued . “Little by little, people heard about the good fishing up on the inland lakes, and it became a resort town.”
It’s still pretty authentic, though. Even the Angry Trout, Grand Marais’ upscale seafood restaurant, serves some intensely down-home items — fine walleye, of course, but also this oddly appealing Northern dessert: a shot of warm maple syrup for a dollar. Yes, you just drink it.
Nearby, in a little frame house at the corner of Broadway and Wisconsin, you can get the “World’s Best Donuts.” They’ve been an institution in Grand Marais since 1969 — or rather the woman who makes them has been: Merieta Altrichter, age 75, known to all as Mom.
“I needed something to do,” she said, explaining her business offhandedly. “We didn’t have a bakery at that time. I figured it would be something the town could use.”
Like a lot of things on the North Shore, this is a family operation, with daughters, granddaughters and even a few great-grands working there during the season (from just before Memorial Day to mid-October. Look for the “4th Generation” nametags this summer).
A new tradition, though it has old roots, is the North House Folk School on the waterfront. The night I stopped in, boat-builder Mark Hansen, a bearded, gently spoken man, was whittling a rib for a six-foot model of an Algonquin birchbark canoe and discussing the lake.
“Freshwater is a heavier water than salt,” Hansen said. “You don’t have the buoyancy. There’s a difference in the fetch of the waves. They’re closer together, and they’re steeper in fresh.”
A former social worker, Hansen has lived on the North Shore for 20 years, drawn by clean air and the availability of boat-building timber. Two years ago last fall, he helped start the school, patterned after the Danish folk schools of the 19th Century. Now, there are nearly 100 courses in the summer, 70 in fall and winter, on everything from spinning wool to sailing.
“People are looking for more meaningful vacations, . . . are looking for something that can give them purpose,” Hansen explained.
Beyond Grand Marais, the population gets skimpier and the shore gets wilder, so by the time you reach the restored fur-trading post that is Grand Portage National Monument, just before the Canadian border, it feels like the ends of the Earth.
This is one of two historic sites on the North Shore devoted to the North West Co., the British fur-trading outfit that dominated these waters 200 years ago. The other is Canada’s Old Ft. William, a bit farther north, in the suburbs of Thunder Bay, Ontario.
The Canadian fort is a frontier Williamsburg, extensive and meticulously restored. When the English traders at Grand Portage realized they were on American soil, they moved across the border and re-established their base near this spot in 1803.
In summer, Old Ft. William is alive with costumed interpreters — rowdy voyageurs, blacksmiths, canoe builders — and everything is accurate down to the pitch on the canoe seams and the trade blankets in the warehouses.
This was the largest fur post in the world then and “probably still is,” a young interpreter told me with pride. “All this,” he said, indicating the 42 sturdy log buildings that rose around us, “is so that European gentlemen can wear beaver felt top hats.”
At the crest of Lake Superior, I hurried through the small town of Nipigon, Ontario, heading for my turn-around point, the village that people all along the North Shore had told me to aim for: tiny Rossport in its nest of islands.
There are so many that it takes 7 miles of motoring to get to the open lake, Gilbert Gerow told me. He was a third-generation commercial fisherman here, until the lampreys came up the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s and combined with overfishing to decimate the industry.
Now 85, Gerow fishes only for pleasure. He no longer has to fight the lake.
“Oh, Lake Superior is wicked,” he said of his early life. “Them days, we didn’t have all the technology. All we had was a compass. But when you’re young, you’re not afraid of anything. I wouldn’t go out there now for any money. I had enough of storms.”
At its summer peak, Rossport has 147 people, give or take a couple, and though it should be prime kayaking country — indeed, there’s a kayak outfitter in town — Rossport is largely undiscovered.
Well after midnight, in my otherwise quiet bed-and-breakfast in Rossport, the howl of a Canadian Pacific night freight shocked me awake. Long after it barreled through the village, I could hear it in the distance, screaming its warnings into the dark, around curve after curve of lake shore. But what kept me at the window for the next hour wasn’t the train. It was the curtains of green and white light that shimmered across the night sky.
At first I thought it was some kind of smoke. Then truth dawned, delighting me. This wasn’t winter; I wasn’t on the Arctic Circle. But this was the aurora. This was the northern lights. And this was perfect.
IF YOU GO
INFORMATION
Minnesota Office of Tourism: 800-657-3700 from outside Minnesota.
Duluth Convention and Visitors Bureau: 800-438-5884.
TraveLinx Ontario: 800-668-2746; www.travelinx.com.
North of Superior Tourism, for regional travel within Ontario: 800-265-3951.
Grand Marais Chamber of Commerce: 218-387-1400; www.grandmaraismn.com.
North House Folk School: 218-387-9762; www.northhouse.org; e-mail info@northhouse.org.
Two Harbors: There’s terrific hiking along the Superior Hiking Trail on the high ground above Lake Superior. You can camp trailside or hike between North Shore bed-and-breakfasts. Call the trail association at 218-834-2700 in Two Harbors; www.shta.org.
Two Harbors Chamber of Commerce: 800-777-7384. Also in Two Harbors is the Bryan House bed-and-breakfast: 800-950-4797.
Willows Bed and Breakfast, Rossport, Ontario: The 807-824-3389.
Old Fort William, Thunder Bay, Ontario: 807-473-2344; www.oldfortwilliam.on.ca.
The William A. Irvin, a real ore boat-turned-museum, is docked in Duluth’s Canal Park: 218-722-7876. It reopens for the season in early May.
For an in-depth look at Great Lakes shipping and history, visit the Lake Superior Maritime Visitors Center, overlooking the ship canal at the foot of the aerial lift bridge in Duluth: 218-727-2497. Run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it is open year-round Friday, Saturday and Sunday and daily in summer. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., extended to 9 p.m. in summer.
