Region 10:

Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train

For many first-time visitors to the Upper Peninsula arriving from below the Bridge, Munising is the first place where they see Lake Superior. But it's not just the world's largest lake that marks the new visual scene here. After miles of flat, swampy terrain to the east, a very different-looking Upper Peninsula emerges, the reflection of a change from the younger bedrock (less than 500 million years old) to progressively older bedrock as one moves west. (The oldest part of the U.P. of all, which stretches southward from around Marquette, is over 3 billion years old.)

James Marvin Phelps

Enjoy an exceptionally beautiful hike of several miles to see Spray Falls empty into Lake Superior.

Much of this region in Alger County and neighboring Schoolcraft County is made up of four distinct components of public land: the vast west end of the Hiawatha National Forest, the 70,000-acre Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, swath of state forest land with campgrounds south of it, and a portion of the Seney National Wildlife. Most of this public land, after being logged over, eventually reverted to government ownership, often for nonpayment of taxes.

One of the U.P.'s finest restaurants, the Brownstone Inn, sits all alone on M-28 between Marquette and Munising.

Today the area south of Munising and Au Train and southeast to Manistique is mostly national forest land, studded with small resorts, national forest campgrounds, and lakes and rivers with excellent public access. Much of this part of the national forest is wetland.

Photography by James Marvin Phelps

One of the Midwest's choicest beaches in summer, Sand Point can also be hauntingly beautiful in winter. It's only 4 miles from Munising.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, the Munising area's tourism magnet, is far from the area's only visitor attraction. The Munising /Pictured Rocks area has 16 waterfalls you can visit. West of Munising, a beautiful shoreline stretch of M-28 through Au Train (pronounced "aw train") to Marquette passes right by big pines and sandy beaches, largely open to the public.

Cautionary note: As beautiful as the lakeshore here is, in winter this same stretch is notorious for sudden snow squalls and whiteouts. Many winter motorists favor the longer, safer route from Munising to Marquette via M-94 and U.S. 141, passing through Chatham and surrounding farm country.

The Au Train Basin is part of the low-lying area of many lakes and streams extending south of Munising and Au Train all the way down to Rapid River and Manistique on Lake Michigan. Long ago this entire basin once drained into the Gulf of Mexico.

Well before European settlement, going back to the Algonquian Noquet tribe, one of the U.P.'s most important trails connected Lakes Michigan and Superior by following the Au Train Basin and the Whitefish River within it. Today the Forest Service has reconstructed it as the Grand Island-Bay de Noc Trail.

Several trails on public land are destinations for cross-country skiers and mountain bikers. Get directions and maps at the Pictured Rocks/Hiawatha National Forest Visitor Center. The 10.7k Munising Cross-Country Ski Trail between Munising Falls and Sand Point is part of the national lakeshore. ("Should not be missed," says Dennis Hansen, author/cartographer for the massive Trail Atlas of Michigan: Nature, Mountain Biking, Hiking Cross Country Skiing.

Miles of welcoming, often empty Lake Superior beach stretch along M-28 east of Marquette.

The artfully laid out Valley Spur Ski Trails are another destination. Ungroomed trail networks are on Grand Island and two trails in the Hiawatha National Forest south of Munising: the 11.7k Bruno's Run and the 12k McKeever Hills Ski Trails. One consideration: winter storms come up with unusual uddenness here. Skiers should always be informed about weather fronts.

In this region there are a dozen small farm towns within a triangle only 15 miles on each side: from Chatham to Skandia along M-94, and from Skandia to Trenary along U.S. 41, with Traunik in between. Many of these farming communities were historically ethnic. Swedes arrived as homesteaders on cutover land in what would become the Chatham and Limestone area, followed by French-Canadians. Carlshend, Skandia, and Sundell were Swedish, too. Traunik was Slovenian. And Finns were, eventually, everywhere. Trenary, incidentally, was an older town with a mix of peoples, settled first by native-born Americans from elsewhere in the Middle West, and not particularly Finnish.

The original farm families were largely headed by men who worked in the woods and saved enough to buy small parcels of cutover land from the lumber companies. Here timber had been shipped out by rail on the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic (later the Soo Line). When the timber had all been taken out, the lumber companies removed the rail spurs going to their lumber camps and sold what land they could. Extended immigrant families, sometimes six or more adult siblings, looked for good, high ground and bought land next to their relatives and friends.

What did they raise? One man from Traunik laughs, "The crops they really grew were children. They were diversified subsistence farms — a few pigs and chickens, some potatoes and big gardens. They did alright during the Depression because they didn't buy much besides flour. The emphasis, if any, was on dairy. There was no milk truck collecting milk. They milked maybe seven cows, maybe ten, and sold the cream to creameries. These were pretty primitive operations. The men would work in the woods and come home weekends." Much of the farm work fell to women and children.

Today Chatham has a good homestyle restaurant in an unusual limestone hotel, and Trenary is home to the Trenary Outhouse Classic (see "Events" in "To find out more") and the regionally famous Trenary Home Bakery, makers of the widely available "Trenary Toast" —cinnamon toast (korpu in Finnish). The general store in Traunik has reopened as Lily's, a creative coffeehouse/natural foods grocery/gift shop with Michigan wines and beers, organic chocolates, and free trade items like Vietnamese lanterns. Today some of those 80-acre parcels, without many trees, have been bought and used by mushers to give their sled dogs workouts.

In winter the roadbed of the onetime Soo Line through this area becomes the U.P.'s major east-west snowmobile highway—a huge annoyance to local people who live in the towns the train once connected, but a boon for Munising motels and restaurants in a region whose prime summer tourism season (from July 4 weekend to the beginning of school) is pitifully short.

The county name "Alger," incidentally, memorializes lumberman Russell Alger, Civil War general, Michigan governor, briefly McKinley's Secretary of War, and from 1902 to 1907 a U.S. senator. Alger, active in logging his namesake county, was only one of many Michigan lumbermen who mixed "pine and politics." Three other lumber barons also became governors. One was the grandfather of Billy Durant, who put General Motors together. Lumber money enabled Detroit and Flint automakers to grow bigger faster, from 1905 to 1910, than their many rivals elsewhere.

Major area employers today, aside from tourism and related agencies, are Kimberly-Clark, operators of Munising's landmark paper mill since 1955, the Michigan Department of Corrections, and the Kewadin Casino in Christmas, owned by the Sault Tribe. The area has two prisons, Alger Maximum Security Prison (courted by economic development leaders in the 1990s), and the Cusino Correctional Facility outside Shingleton.

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For everything from finding Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train picnic spots & fishing guides to renting kayaks click here.

PICTURED ROCKS/MUNISING/AU TRAIN: THE TOP ATTRACTIONS (to locate, see MAP)