Harbor entrance, range lights, pier & beach

The beautiful Grand Marais harbor, long an important refuge for boats from Lake Superior storms, is also shallow, requiring dredging to remain viable.

Drive out the short peninsula that forms West Bay and you'll pass the North Shore Lodge restaurant and motel and then come to a parking area by low dunes. The windswept BEACH at Coast Guard Point is on the other side of the dunes. A long stone PIER juts out into Lake Superior, built to protect the harbor entrance. Coho, steelhead, and whitefish can be caught off this pier. Sometimes in spring and fall, when the wind comes from the north-northwest, there are so many whitefish that the pier is crowded with anglers.

On the pier is the FRONT RANGE LIGHT—a room perched on a steel skeleton. The REAR RANGE LIGHT on shore behind it is similar but with an octagonal lantern. When incoming vessels line up the lights, they are guided into the harbor. Range lights aren't warning lights, they're welcoming lights, says lighthouse fan Pat Munger, a member of the local historical society. Its museum is in the light keeper's house across the road. Next to the house museum, a PICNIC GROVE is behind the monument to fishermen drowned in Lake Superior.

The former GRAND MARAIS COAST GUARD STATION, a large frame building, has been used by Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore as a maritime museum. Now its contents are in the AuSable Light Station. A Coast Guard radioman here was the last to make contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Take Lake Ave. straight through town. Just before it ends at the beach, turn right onto Canal/CR 702 and go east past the North Shore Lodge.
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Return to Grand Marais

GRAND MARAIS
POINTS OF INTEREST

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

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

Harbor entrance, range lights, pier & beach. Fish from the long stone pier jutting far out into Lake Superior, protecting the harbor. Or walk the long beach and enjoy the range light, & 2 museums, one in the old Coast Guard station, draw people to Coast Guard Point ... more

Wreck of Mary Jarecki. See a 130-year-old shipwreck lying on the shore of Lake Supeior ... more

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

Old Post Office Museum. The 1882 Grand Marais post office still has the old postal boxes and clerk's window up front and historical photos and items in back ... 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

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

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. A spiffy collection of many media in Grand Marais' oldest building ... 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

Grand Marais Wi-fi Hotspot. Bayshore Market has wi-fi 7 a.m.-11 p.m. daily. ... 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 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

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