Late last March, we bumped along a half frozen dirt road seeking out a campsite I had marked on Google Maps weeks before. Even though it was March and the forecast called for sleet the next day, I wanted to camp on the beach.
There was no cell service so we navigated by an old Michigan road atlas left under the passenger seat with crumbs and mint wrappers, no other people around save the tracks of snowmobilers. We drove along the road, slushed out and half flooded, somewhere west of the Two-Hearted River.
Fist-sized rocks washed up along the Shipwreck Coast.
When people think remote, you don’t really think of the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But the space between Whitefish Point and the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is largely that— a hundred some mile long sand beach littered with thick and sand blasted trunks of trees and bones of ships.
The Shipwreck Coast, sometimes called the Skeleton Coast of Michigan, is geographically relevant. Exposed to almost 200 miles of open lake the north and northwest, the Shipwreck Coast takes a regular beating from Lake Superior’s dominant wind patterns. The largest recorded wave on Lake Superior on Lake Superior clocked in at about 29 feet, but anecdotal reports estimate closer to 35-foot rollers are possible.
Navigation wise, the area can be hazardous. The Shipwreck Coast marks the southeastern boundary of a bottleneck on the Lake; all ships must pass by Whitefish Point to reach the Soo Locks in order to access the Lower Great Lakes.
North of the Shipwreck Coast are Michipicoten Island, Caribou Island, and the hazardous Six Fathom Shoal; the Edmund Fitzgerald is speculated to have scraped bottom on Six Fathom before she sank, 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point. In a storm, the Shipwreck Coast is a hundred mile long pounding surf beach; nowhere for a distressed ship to land or take shelter. Between the shoals to the north and unforgiving surf to the south, passing through Eastern Lake Superior can be like threading a needle.
As a result, almost 200 Shipwrecks rest off of Lake Superior’s Shipwreck Coast.
Whole sand-stripped trees 20 yards up the beach.
Was sunny when we pulled into the parking lot of Lake Superior State Forest Campground. The ground was mostly frozen, and we found a nice campsite with a fire ring and beach access. In Michigan, the State Forest Campgrounds tend to be the best— cleaner than others from underuse, usually with available spots even on peak weekends, cheaper to stay at.
For us, the campground was empty.
We made dinner, a freeze dried burrito mix with flour tortillas over a camp stove, and I walked along the beach alone. The last bits of the ice shelf still hugged the shore, snow and sand mixing so it was impossible to say for sure what was beach and what was precarious late season pack ice. I stuck mostly to the upper beach with tennis ball sized rocks and whole trees, washed up in some violent storm from the Fall.
On days when it’s calm it can be hard to imagine the same body of water threw a whole tree thirty yards from the present waterline.
In the distance, I thought I saw people walking the beach and went to wave then stopped— what I’d thought were people warped into two deer, and they slinked quickly back into the woods. I stuffed my hand back in my pocket, struck with a strange feeling of aloneness though Andy was just down the beach, building up a fire.
At night I curled into my sleeping bag with a book and read the story of the SS Murdock, a probably fictional but not improbable story in Going Coastal about a ship gone down off the coast of Grand Marais, Michigan, just a few miles from where we slept.
Outside our sun changed to night then to sleet and we shared my comically small “two person” backpacking tent while the wind picked up and I read about the sort of things that happened once on the outside of the tent.
I read that the Coast Guard used to walk the beach after big storms, miles at a time, searching for survivors and evidence of boats. I read that there are ship bones here, buried in the sand.
Maybe that was my strange feeling— just the echo of bones beneath my feet.
In the morning we woke to rain and dew in the tent, packed up quickly and left, miles to go to beat a snowstorm home.
“A man came by when you were out walking, a snowmobiler.”
“Really?” I asked. I had thought we were mostly alone. I thought back to the people I thought I’d saw on the beach, now sure I’d seen them and it was just a trick of the eye, that the deer had come out of the woods at the same time.
“He said we had the right idea coming in March. Any other time that campground is crawling with the motorcycle crowd.”
“Huh. I guess that makes sense.” Lakefront property is a high commodity, and even things that feel remote in the slush season of March are bound to be less so come tourist season.
I thought about coming back, and if I’d even want to. The quietness of March, snow and slush and empty beach, seemed too good to give up and pencil in a summer memory instead.
I think I wanted to keep the Shipwreck Coast like that for me— empty and cold, a quiet place where figures in the distance could be people or ghosts or just a pair of deer, darting in and out of the forest.
Thanks for reading!
x Maddy
One of my absolute favorite stretches of coastline anywhere