Lake Michigan Road Trip: Day 5

Day 5

Start: St. Ignace, MI
Finish: Marquette, MI
Miles: 360
States: Pure Michigan 

With the storm passing through yesterday, day 5 started out super muggy and foggy. The first stop didn't really need to be a stop but I ended up getting a couple of cool shots of the Cut River Bridge at a roadside park. If I recall, the bridge is 147 ft above the river which dumps into Lake Michigan.

 

  A shot from the trail below.

I thought the next stop was going to be a hole in the wall but it turned out to be quite busy for how small of a state park it was. Kitch-iti-ipi in Palms Book State park is a naturally fed freshwater spring and was something I came across while searching google maps for places to visit. You hopped on this wooden raft and were ferried about 100 ft out to the center of the spring where you could look down 45 ft to the bottom.

Below is a view from the center of the raft. The spring was stocked with lake trout that had once lived on a fish farm and are now spending the last 2-3 years of their lives here in "retirement."

It's hard to tell from the picture but the cloudy area in the bottom left is one of the spots where the water comes up at an overall rate of 10,000 gallons per minute. The spring never freezes and it's 45 degrees year round. The video I recorded was too big to upload but here is a cooler video of the spring using a GoPro. About halfway through shows the water coming up from the bottom of the spring. This video was posted in 2015 which must have been before they started stocking the spring with fish.

Don't worry, here is a video of just the fish.

I wasn't planning on making the next two stops but the lady managing how many people got on the raft suggested they were worth the drive. First up was Tahquamenon Falls State Park and since I had a day pass to all state parks, it seemed like a no brainer. The park was broken up into 2 areas, the upper and lower falls. The upper falls came first and was a quick 5 minute walk from the parking lot.

I was informed that the lower falls was a lot busier and they did not lie. It was a 3 mile drive to the lot which was full and cars were backed up to the main road so I kept on driving. I've been to Niagara Falls so not too many water falls are going to beat that. 

The next stop was Whitefish Point which gave me my first views of Gitche-gami along the way (props to you if you get that reference). This place is home to the oldest operating lighthouse on Lake Superior and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum which is best known for housing the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was recovered in 1995.

I would have liked to visit the museum as I'm all about history but there were too many people and I had one more stop on the list for the day. 

That stop was Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. This was a place to really spend a whole day or two but I did not have the time so I found a beach to drive up to that offered views of the cliffs in each direction. There was also a spot to check out a small water fall on the way.

Plenty of places offered boat tours of the cliffs and kayaking which would have been fun but you'd be better off bringing your own kayak and spending a whole day going up and down the coast.

I ended the day by making my way to Marquette which is home to Northern Michigan University if you didn't know. 

Upcoming: Presque Isle Park, Sugarloaf Mountain, and Copper Harbor.