Pictured Rocks: The First National Lakeshore

Look north and you are seeing the reason the whole country changed how it thinks about its shorelines. On October fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, President Lyndon Johnson signed the law that created Pictured Rocks, the very first national lakeshore in the United States. Before that day, no stretch of Great Lakes coast had ever been set aside this way.

What earned it that honor rises straight out of Lake Superior just east of here: some thirteen miles of sandstone cliffs, standing as much as two hundred feet above the water, painted in streaks of red, orange, black, blue, and green. The paint is not paint at all. Groundwater seeps through the porous stone carrying dissolved minerals, and as it trickles down the cliff face and dries, it leaves stains behind.

Iron leaves rust reds and oranges. Manganese leaves black and brown. Copper leaves shades of blue and green.

Limonite leaves streaks of white and yellow. Layer over layer, century after century, the seeps have turned a plain wall of rock into something the early French voyageurs simply called the pictured rocks. The stone itself is the Munising Formation, sandstone laid down about five hundred million years ago, resting on the older red Jacobsville sandstone at the waterline.

Wind, waves, and winter ice have carved it into castles, arches, caves, and towers along forty two miles of protected shoreline that runs from right here at Munising all the way east to Grand Marais, roughly seventy three thousand acres in all. And the water below is its own force. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area, cold enough to stay near forty degrees even in summer, deep enough to hide more than a thousand feet of darkness, and clear enough that on a calm day you can look down and see shipwrecks resting on the bottom.

For thousands of years the Ojibwe knew this coast as sacred ground. Today it belongs to everyone. Turn it on, roll the windows down, and let the painted cliffs come to you.