Lake Superior from the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in Marquette.
In our travels we've now seen all five of the great lakes. Before visiting the Upper Peninsula we had spent time along the shores of Lakes Ontario, Erie and Michigan. We caught a glimpse of Lake Huron as we crossed the Mackinac Bridge on our way to the Upper Peninsula. Not intentionally but we saved the biggest and arguably the best for last. It's hard to believe our time here in Munising is rapidly coming to an end. Sadly, in a few more days we won't have Munising Bay/Lake Superior to enjoy out our back door.
We've loved the sunrises, marveled at the changing leaves, been refreshed by the cooler temperatures, and absolutely amazed at how quickly the weather can change, change again, change again and again, all within a few minutes time. At night we stared up at what seemed to be thousands of stars on dark, clear nights. The Upper Peninsula is everything we had heard it was and so much more. We're already looking forward to coming back in the fall next year and we haven't even left.
A sunrise sampler from our back yard.
I've mentioned Lake Superior in most blogs but I've also been learning more about it during our stay so I could do a blog just on this massive body of water. It's certainly worth it!
The Native American Ojibwe referred to the lake as "gitchi-gami", meaning "great sea". You may have heard it referred to by this name in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Song of Hiawatha or in Gordon Lightfoot's song The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. I wasn't familiar with the poem, but I was familiar with the song that was released in 1976 about the shipwreck that occurred the previous year. The song has been playing on a continuous loop in my head for much of our stay!
A few of the many lighthouses on Lake Superior........most are no longer active.
French explorers who visited the region in the 17th century referred to it as "le lac superieur" (Lake Superior). At the time of their "discovery" they didn't name it Lake Superior because of it's size or depth. They named it Lake Superior because the area they explored was above Lake Huron.
At 31,700 square miles, Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world. It's approximately 350 miles long and 160 miles wide. If Lake Superior was a state it would be roughly the same size as the state of South Carolina. There are over 1,700 square miles of shoreline, meaning that if you drove non-stop around the perimeter of the lake at 60 mph, it would take almost 29 hours to complete the trip. On your loop around the lake you'd pass through parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ontario, Canada.
As impressive as it's size, it's depth is equally impressive. It's average depth is is 483 feet and at it's deepest point it's 1,333 feet deep. The lake contains over 10% of all the freshwater on earth. There's enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America with one foot of water.
It's big and deep, and as you would expect, the water is cold. The high surface temperature in the summer only gets to around 55. During the winter the majority of the lake is covered by ice. Occasionally the entire lake freezes over. The last time this happened was in 2014.
There are around 300 tributaries feeding water into the lake which then drains into Lake Huron by way of the St. Mary's River. While there is no tide activity on Lake Superior, there can be significant wave action on the lake. On several stormy days we've seen waves that looked in the 6-8 foot range, impressive but no where near the 28.8 foot wave recorded in 2017 near Marquette.
Tributaries include waterfalls, rivers and streams of all sizes.....
As I had mentioned previously, the weather in this area can change rapidly and very dramatically. This makes Lake Superior a very dangerous lake. More than 350 shipwrecks have been recorded on the lake, none more famous than the SS Edmund Fitzgerald which sank along with it's entire 29 person crew on November 10, 1975.
Beautiful, huge, cold, mysterious, deep, dangerous and so much more. It's safe to say there's plenty to see and do on the legendary big lake they call gitchi-gami!
