Scott Falls/ The Face in the Rock/ Rathfoot Roadside Park

Photography by James Marvin Phelps

This park and picnic area shouldn't be missed. Visitors can walk across the highway and splash in the pool created by charming Scott Falls. (In A Guide to 199 Michigan Waterfalls, Laurie Penrose points out that in winter Scott Falls becomes a frozen column also worth visiting.)

Then walk from the picnic area through the birches to the viewing platform towards Lake Superior. New interpretive signs tell the story of the Face in the Rock, part of the oral tradition of local Ojibwa. Go down to the beach for a better look at what remains of this Lake Superior landmark.

For centuries the "face" shaped in the sandstone shelf here was a landmark for Ojibwa canoe paddlers and voyageurs as well. It's mentioned in Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's diaries from his first trip along Lake Superior in 1820. Around that time pictographs were carved in it. The Face in the Rock was one of the pieces of the puzzle used by MIT/Harvard science historian and Grand Island summer resident Loren Graham in researching A Face in the Rock: The Tale of a Grand Island Chippewa, praised by no less than Ojibwa-German-American novelist Louise Erdrich as "a fascinating and poignant story. . . very true, very touching." Research for the book tells the full story of Jim Clark, also known as Powers-of-the-Air and Sound-of-the-Wind-in-the-Trees, from his birth on Grand Island through a long life that encapsulated the loss of Ojibwa culture in the face of Euro-American settlement.

Loren Graham's persistence in putting together Jim Clark's story inspired his great-great-granddaughter, Munising native and retired nurse Delores Leveque, to help protect what can still be seen of the Face in the Rock and its carvings, under private ownership, and to make the landmark visible to Ojibwa people and the general public. Right after the book's publication in 1996, Delores began to work her way through various state bureaucracies to get grants to create a viewing platform with benches between the roadside park's picnic area and the beach. (The U.P. staff of Michigan Department of Transportation proved extremely helpful.) Stairs lead down to the beach. New historical interpretive signs installed in summer 2005 tell the story in detail.

On M-28, west of Christmas and about three-fourths of a mile east of Au Train. Wheelchair access: picnic area, platform.
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