Miners Falls and Bridalveil Falls

This corner of the lakeshore hides two very different waterfalls. Follow the wooded path off Miners Castle Road and you reach Miners Falls, where the Miners River gathers itself and plunges about fifty feet over a ledge of hard sandstone into a rock basin. A stairway of some sixty steps carries you down to a viewing platform, and in spring the roar fills the whole ravine.

The second fall you cannot reach on foot at all. Bridalveil Falls spills straight over the face of the great Pictured Rocks cliffs and drops toward Lake Superior in a thin, swaying ribbon, capped by a hard sandstone lip that keeps it from cutting a gorge. Boat and kayak tours slide right beneath it, and passengers crane their necks upward to watch the water break into mist before it ever reaches the lake.

It is fed almost entirely by snowmelt and rain, so in a wet spring it is a shimmering veil, and by late summer it can shrink to the faintest silver thread down the rock, or vanish altogether. Two falls, one carving a canyon inland, the other painting the cliff itself, both fed by the same restless water that shaped this coast.