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Hunts' Guide to Michigan's UPPER PENINSULA

JUST OUT! A new edition of Hunts' Mapguide to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over 300 entries, all conveniently located on maps and chosen because we think they are the coolest things to do in the U.P. (No ad tie-ins!) Great choices for restaurants, hikes, shops, adventures, museums, boat trips, waterfalls, vistas, road trips, and much more! To learn more click UP MAP GUIDE

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GRAND MARAIS
POINTS
OF INTEREST

Pickle Barrel Museum. A summer house in two giant barrels for the creator of the long-lived Teenie Weenie cartoons. Now saved from rot and open to the public with historical displays and period rooms circa 1930. ... more

The Campbell Street Gallery. Much of the space in this restored frame building is given over to owner Maeve Croghan's vivid expressionist landscapes, reminiscent of Canada's Group of Seven ... more

Gitche Gumee Agate & History Museum. Agates, rockhounding, geology, commercial fishing, and the self-sufficient local lifestyle after the lumber company left – Karen Bryzs's heartfelt museum tells these stories ... more

Marketplace. A showroom for a members of Grand Marais Cottage Industries. You'll find photographs, handknits, lamps, novelties, art glass, carvings ... more

Harbor entrance, range lights, pier & beach. People fish from the long stone pier jutting far out into Lake Superior, protecting the harbor. The long beach, the range light, and two museums, one in the old Coast Guard station, draw people to Coast Guard Point ... more

Grand Marais Maritime Museum. In the former Coast Guard station the National Parks Service installed this spare museum with photos and a few artifacts ... more

Light Keeper's House Museum. Built by the Coast Guard in 1908, This 1908 Coast Guard keeper's house houses a hands-on local museum strong on stories. ... more

Grand Marais Agate Beach. Prized for their interesting patterns of concentric bands of translucent red and clear or white, agates attract rockhounds to Lake Superior's northern shore. This long stretch of beach is a convenient place and thus more picked over, but a storm may bring up fresh rocks ... more

Goewey’s Garage. Lee and Betty Goewey make very popular fish carvings as well as art glass windows ... more

Crystal Pine Cone. Beach stones become landscapes and maritime scenes, or animals and people. The Woropay family’s studio/gallery is in a cabin among pine trees ... more

Creative Enterprises. Bob and Nancy Weston’s interesting studio/shop in the woods features nature-inspired crafts from U.P. craftspeople and their own photographs and paintings ... more

Sable Falls. Take a walk through the woods to the top of this delightful waterfall. Go down a stairway to a rocky agate beach and wander east for awhile ... more

Grand Sable Bank & Dunes. Vast dunes seen from the trail here create a dramatic view, especially when the sun is low ... more

Grand Sable Visitor Center. A good place for information on the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, regional nature and history books, and a 2-mile trail through a shady beech-maple forest ... more

North Country Trail/Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Hike the trail connecting the lakeshore's prominent sights to experience them more fully than a drive-up-and-go-on view. Plan your hike so a shuttle bus can take you back ... more

Log Slide Overlook. Almost 300 feet above Lake Superior, there are splendid views to the Au Sable Lighthouse and the immense expanses of the Grand Sable Dunes. Exhibits show the scene when loggers rolled logs down for loading on ships ... more

Au Sable Point Lighthouse. A picture-perfect lighthouse on the rocks, a tower to climb on scheduled tours, shipwreck skeletons in the sand ... more

Twelvemile Beach & White Birch Trail. Walk the long beach or head inshore along a 2-mile nature trail through an unusual forest of old white birches ... more

Kingston Plains Burns. The best-known of the U.P.'s eerie stump fields or ghost forests created when forest fires across the cutover were so hot they burned off the soil's humus and the forest couldn't grow back. Pine resin preserved giant stumps. Some still remain ... more

GRAND MARAIS

Gitche Gumee Agate & History Museum

During all the childhood summers Karen Bryzs spent in Grand Marais visiting her grandparents, what she loved the most was dropping in on retired fisherman Axel Niemi and his Gitche Gumee Agate Museum, across the street from Woodland Park campground. When it closed, she vowed to honor him by reopening his museum — and here it is!

Karen loved looking for agates and learning about them. She also loved Axel's Grand Marais stories. He told about how, in 1910, after the Alger & Smith lumber company finished cutting down the trees, the last thing they took with them was the railroad tracks connecting the village to the outside world. He told about how some employees, largely Finlanders, decided to stay here on cutover land the company gave them. They lived off the land and water, using their ingenuity, thrift, and a good measure of sisu, that Finnish quality of toughness and endurance to built self-sufficient lives.

The Niemi family built three fishing tugs over the years to make a living off the lake, and raised most of the food to feed their family of six children. When the Niemi family sold its fish tug in 1953 the youngest child, Axel, started the Agate Museum as a sideline to his job managing the Woodland Park campground. Karen, from metro Detroit, was among the kids who were fascinated with his stories, his music, his puppet Nutty Buddy, and his knowledge of rocks and minerals.

In 1994 she and her then-husband moved to Grand Marais and bought the Dunes Saloon, turning it into a restaurant, brewpub, and rockhound visitor center. To realize her dream, Karen bought Axel Niemi's former house. There she discovered boxes of Grand Marais artifacts and enough original furniture to turn part of the building into a house museum of everyday life. She tracked down the handmade Shark, the Niemis' last fishing tug, deteriorating in a field near South Haven. It was given to her, but transporting it to Grand Marais was costly. The Shark is now outside the museum, still awaiting restoration. Ask Karen about its thoughtful design details.

Axel's museum reopened in 1999. It's about Lake Superior minerals (fluorescents, copper, and more) and agates. Karen shows interested visitors her "Wowser Box" of favorite agates. The museum also shows how local people lived with very little cash. They grew and processed food, made clothes on knitting machines, fished, and gathered blueberries. Axel used a pig boiler to steam-bend wood for the Shark. "If kids can tell something they learned about history," Karen says, "they get a rock."

Now Karen spends her time and considerable energy writing and publishing books on agates and Grand Marais; going to the big Tucson mineral show; and making and marketing her sliced-agate window panels, lamps, nightlights, screens, and more. They can be seen n the front porch gift shop and on the museum's extensive web site, agatelady.com. It has lots of interesting Grand Marais stories and history.

While at the museum, if visitors choose, they can get an on-site impromptu agate class that takes less than an hour. (It costs $10/group of six or less, $5/extra adult.) The class includes a significant discount on Karen's book, Understanding and Finding Agates ($15). It covers the field in an unusually comprehensive way. Chapters delve into not just agate geology and identification but the modern agate industry and agates and human history.

Other classes must be arranged in advance: Gitche Gumee Geology (2 to 4 hours) and Basic Rockhounding (2 hours). Time and cost depends on needs of the group. Museum staff (probably Karen) is also available to guide agate-hunting and photography trips.

E21739 Braziel St., opposite theentrance to Woodland Park. Take H-77/Lake St. through downtown, turn left/west onto Braziel. (906) 494-2590. From Memorial Day weekend thru June, open Thurs-Sat 5-8 p.m. and by appointment, also by chance. In July & August open Mon-Sat from 1-8 p.m. or by appointment. Open most summer Sundays, too. Sept hours: same as June. $1 admission for adults. Handicap access: call. Some steps.

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