Lake Superior is fierce, bewitching and not to be taken lightly. With a surface area covering 31,700 miles, it’s the world’s largest freshwater lake, roughly the size of Austria. Its pristine waters are famously frigid, with weather patterns whipping up unpredictable storms. Since my childhood skipping pebbles from its shoreline in Duluth, Minn., I have revered and feared the lake, and I have spent a lifetime trying to know it better.
Its rugged North Shore, a land of boreal forests growing out of rocky Canadian Shield terrain, stretches 624 miles from Duluth, across the border to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Earlier this summer, massive wildfires burning inland created smoky conditions that reached as far as New York. But the lake’s shoreline was spared.
The wild coastline is so vast, there is no one way to see it. Viking has a 15-day itinerary traveling from Toronto to Duluth for $18,000. There’s also the option of captaining your own yacht, sailboat or kayak. For most Americans, though, the best option is to drive north from Duluth along the road immortalized by Bob Dylan in his 1964 album “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Highway 61 turns into the Trans-Canada Highway across the border and the mountainous terrain gets higher, the forests thicker and the “Moose Crossing” road signs more numerous — a good reason to not get distracted by the sweeping views of what people here call the Big Lake.
There are more than a dozen state, provincial and national parks along this route — an entire summer’s worth of exploring. I made my journey in a week in early July, driving 385 miles up the Minnesota shoreline, through the port city of Thunder Bay and into untamed Ontario to Pukaskwa National Park before turning back and retracing my route — saving some of the best spots for last.
From Duluth to the Canadian Border
After leaving Duluth at 7 a.m., I drove 50 miles northeast to Gooseberry Falls State Park, to experience an early morning unpeopled tour. The draw? A series of three fierce cascades dropping in succession down the Gooseberry River.
I hiked down to a cedar grove to catch the spray at the base, then along the 1.3-mile River View Trail to the lake’s edge, where the sun burned mist off the water. On the cobblestone beach I met two women in bathing suits parked on a blanket. From the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, they were high school graduates on one last road trip before moving east for college.
“It feels like we’re in a different country,” said Claire Best, who had never seen the Lake Superior north shore.
Another 70 miles north, the former fishing village of Grand Marais is the turnaround point for many Americans. Sitting on a protected harbor, it’s filled with cafes and restaurants like Java Moose and Angry Trout. It celebrates its Indigenous and Scandinavian heritages at the North House Folk School, a campus on the water where visitors can learn how to build a sauna, make Anishinaabe-style beaded moccasins or set sail on a schooner.
After Grand Marais, the traffic thins and 35 miles farther north lies the Grand Portage National Monument, a manicured lakeside park. It is the first National Park Service unit to be comanaged by a tribal nation, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and it is entirely within their traditional homeland. The park preserves the central hub of the Great Lakes fur trade. A reconstructed depot surrounded by high walls sits on the shoreline at the end of an 8.5-mile-long trail used by Indigenous peoples for centuries to access interior lakes.
In the main building within the walled stockade, partners from the North West Company, the Montreal-based fur-trading network established in 1779, ate lavish meals on imported china. Near a crackling fire I found Karl Koster, a park ranger and canoe builder dressed in period costume as a laborer. He has worked at the monument for almost three decades and told me that from this spot it’s possible to paddle and portage to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
“This wasn’t up north back then,” he said. “In the fur trade era, it was the center of the world.”
From the Canadian Border to Pukaskwa National Park
North of the border by 36 miles is Thunder Bay, the largest city in northwestern Ontario, a rugged industrial port town with a growing Indigenous population.
The city’s reinvigorated waterfront — named Prince Arthur’s Landing after the third son of Queen Victoria — unfurls as a two-mile-long sliver of green between a marina, a historic train depot, and restaurants and museums. On a headland jutting into the lake sits an open-air ceremonial pavilion for use by the city’s First Nations, Inuit and Metis residents. The sweltering summer evening I arrived, the sun was still high at 9 p.m. and children were splashing in the water fountains while sunburned sailors stretched their legs and bought ice cream.
The defining view across the bay to the Sibley Peninsula? The Sleeping Giant, a series of steep-sided mesas aligned in such a way that, from the distance, they eerily resemble a slumbering human. According to Ojibwe legend, the figure is the spirit Naniboujou, turned to stone after an Ojibwe mortal revealed the secret location of silver at its feet. It’s possible to summit the giant’s head via the nearly 15-mile round-trip “Top of the Giant Trail” in Sleeping Giant Provincial Park.
Heading to Pukaskwa National Park, about 200 miles farther northeast along the Trans-Canada Highway, the road rolls through spruce forests, across deep river gorges and to the tops of ridges where pullouts overlook the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area. This pie-shaped preserve, established in 2015 and sprawling across 4,200 square miles, includes hundreds of islands.
Pukaskwa National Park and Back
“I grew up thinking, ‘Who wants to live in northern Ontario?” said Karen Blackbourn, the park manager at Pukaskwa, which stretches across 725 square miles, most of it backcountry. “But the first time I saw Lake Superior I was blown away.”
No stranger to remote places, Ms. Blackbourn last worked with Parks Canada at the roadless, polar-bear-filled Wapusk National Park near Churchill, Manitoba.
We hiked over scattered mounds of moose dung, up steep, rocky inclines, and past ancient stands of paper birch along the 37-mile-long Coastal Trail, one of only two ways to explore Pukaskwa’s backcountry. The other way is to kayak its 70-mile-long undeveloped shoreline. Neither option has road access or cellphone service.
The park gets about 17,000 annual visitors. Most travelers focus on the forested sites and five A-framed tent shelters in a campground surrounded by hiking trails leading to empty sand beaches. The nearby visitor center sits on a protected inlet where guests can paddle rented canoes without fear.
Our aim was to hike 12 miles round-trip to a suspension bridge stretching 100 feet across the White River. The bridge is less than halfway to the end of the Coastal Trail, but it’s a dramatic juncture. We reached it in about two-and-a-half hours. I stood in the middle of the perforated steel structure, mesmerized by the white water ripping through a black-rock gorge 75 feet below my hiking boots.
The bridge marked the turning point for my trip, too. Early the next morning I drove back to Rossport, where I met Zack Kruzins, a kayaking guide and the founder of Such a Nice Day Adventures.
Paddling conditions were perfect — air temperature in the high 70s and water so flat it looked like a freshly ironed silk sheet — as a group of experienced local kayakers and I followed Mr. Kruzins past a cliff on Quarry Island, where nesting peregrine falcons screeched. We paddled toward Battle Island, nearly six miles out and home to a now-automated lighthouse high on a cliff. In 1975, monster waves from a November gale, the same one that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald, killing all 29 crew members in a disaster memorialized by the singer Gordon Lightfoot, shattered the tower’s windows. Off the island’s eastern shoreline lies the wreck of the 181-foot Ontario, sunk in 1899 by a freakish August snowstorm.
On the western horizon is Mount St. Ignace, all 1,854 feet of it. It crowns St. Ignace, the largest island in the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area. I’ve paddled through other island chains on the south shore but in this archipelago, we saw nothing man-made other than the lighthouse, detritus from the Ontario shipwreck and a handful of passing boats.
When we returned to shore, I began the drive home, with a stop at Sleeping Giant, 106 miles west. In the end, I didn’t quite hike to the top, aborting my mission somewhere on the back of the giant’s head, so that I could visit the Silver Islet General Store, at the end of the Sibley Peninsula, before it closed.
Established in 1871, the store served miners who worked the underwater shafts of Silver Islet Mine — the real-life treasure in the Sleeping Giant legend. Now the store is a summertime institution with a marina and a teahouse serving pastries made with local produce. I ate rhubarb crisp and drank iced tea under the warm sun, overlooking the marina.
On my way out the store’s animated co-owner, Jeff Korkola, pulled an inventory from 1883 off a high shelf to show me the record of payment for a $2,538.26 shipment of coal that never arrived. The coal, he explained, was needed to fire the pumps to keep water out of the mine shaft. Without it, the shaft flooded and “the richest silver mine in the world shut down,” he told me.
But the highlight of my trip may have come on Nipigon Bay, in Ontario, 50 miles east of Thunder Bay, because every Lake Superior adventure needs at least one perfect sauna. I found mine at a glamping oasis called Cypress Sleeper Barrels. Guests sleep in elegant hobbit-like wooden barrels, custom-built on Vancouver Island.
My attention was drawn to the smaller barrel on the edge of the crescent beach — the wood-heated sauna. I stoked it to 200 degrees, threw water on the stove and waited for steam and heat to overcome me. When I felt like I was going to melt, I ran across the sand before wading waist deep in and diving into the mind-numbing water. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to fully embrace Lake Superior.
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