Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore extends for 42 miles along the shore and covers 73,236 acres. The park offers spectacular scenery of the hilly shoreline between Munising and Grand Marais in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and is famous for its natural archways, waterfalls, sand dunes, lakes, forest, and sandstone cliffs extending up to 200 feet above Lake Superior, which over the eons have been naturally sculptured into shallow caves, arches, formations that resemble castle turrets, human profiles, as well as other forms.



(BTW -- Lake Superior is the deepest, coldest, and most pristine of all the Great Lakes, and has the largest surface area -- 32,000 square miles -- of any freshwater lake in the world and the third largest volume of fresh water. Its shoreline extends nearly 2800 miles.)

The name "Pictured Rocks" is due to the pictures that seem to appear on the rocks from the multicolored sandstone and mineral stains on the rock surface. The cliffs are composed of Cambrian Sandstone, dating back about 500 million years. The stains on the sandstone are caused by water running down the cliffs filled with oxides of copper, manganese, iron, and organic minerals.

After the lumbering era ended around 1910, many of the parcels of land making up the current Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore reverted to the state of Michigan for unpaid property taxes. Eager for federal help and recognition, the state cooperated with the federal government in the region's redevelopment and Congress enacted a law in 1966 to declare 42 miles of the shoreline the nation's first National Lakeshore.



A magnificent 44 mile backpacking trail, now a part of the North Country Trail, travels the entire top of the bluff. In 1996, I backed its complete length and have information and photos of the trek here. After the backpack trip, I wanted to see what I had been traveling atop since you never see the cliffs from up there, so I took the boat cruise and enjoyed it so much, we did it again this week, 13 years later. It is still a spectacular cruise and I recommend it highly. Here's where to get cruise information.


As we enjoyed the boat cruise, we saw over a dozen kayakers cavorting in the waves, studying the rock cliffs close-up, and paddling through the arches.



Mineral seepage creates the colors. Red and orange are copper, green and blue are iron, black is manganese, and white is lime.



No pictographs (rock paintings) or petroglyphs (rock etchings) have been discovered within the Lakeshore’s 42 miles of Lake Superior shoreline. Because the Lakeshore’s friable sandstone bedrock is relatively soft and large collapses of rock occur annually, they surmise that it is unlikely that any rock paintings that may have been done in the past have survived, so all the designs on the cliffs are natural.