July 2023

Twelvemile Beach, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore lies along Lake Superior roughly between Munising and Grand Marais. What a place! You have cliffs, beaches, huge sand dunes, incredible trails, waterfalls, and even a lighthouse. It stands out as one of the most varied and unique bits of gorgeous scenery I’ve ever encountered.

To get there, you take H-58 out of Munising and go west. You’ll see signs for the various stops along the way. The more popular stops are the closest, places like Miner’s Castle, Mosquito, and Chapel Beach. I like to go a little farther along. It’s a longer drive, but you have fewer people in the summer at Little Beaver or Hurricane River.

I have one of those secret, out of the way spots where I access my favorite stretch of beach at Pictured Rocks. Twelvemile Beach is exactly what the name says, twelve miles of really nice beachfront. As popular as Pictured Rocks is, you can always find a spot here where people are only little dots in the distance. If you see any at all.

The beach here is soft sand, pebbles, or larger rocks at different intervals, which only adds to the already lovely environment. And the water is pristine. In sunlight, the different depths turn different colors of turquoise and blue. But beware. If you get a good north wind, you can get impressive waves. There’s a reason the lake is dotted with shipwrecks. It is very much like an inland sea.

I enjoy my walks along the beach. In places, small creeks and streams wend their way from the forest and through the sand to empty out into the lake. They change course, so they’ve always carved some new channel into the beach every time I’m out. I’m also a rock hound, and Lake Superior’s geological history means there are always a variety of cool rocks to be found. It’s illegal to take rocks from the National Lakeshore, so if you want to keep what you find, you have to go toward Grand Marais.

Lake Superior produces a ton of yellow and red jasper, quartz, pretty agates, granite, tiger iron, and many more. I see a lot of people looking for Petoskey stones, but those are only found on certain stretches of Lake Michigan. You can, however, find nice pieces of fossilized coral.