Michigan Summer Beer Trip - Day #2
June 28, 2007. We woke up around 8:00 Thursday morning to some chilly UP weather. It was in the mid-nineties when we left Monroe so temps in the low to mid fifties with a breeze were a shock. We put on the few warm pieces of clothing we packed up our camp-site and headed off for breakfast and to plan the next leg of our trip.
After breakfast, we drove out to Whitefish Point to the Great Lakes Shipwreck museum. The area of Lake Superior just off of Whitefish Point is called “the graveyard of the Great Lakes” because of the wicked November storms that whip up there which have caused many wrecks on the lake. The most famous shipwreck is that of The Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975.
The museum features exhibits on the most famous shipwrecks in that area dating all the way back to the 1800s, including some of the salvaged wreckage. One of the highlights is the bell that they brought up from the wreckage of the EF. You can also go and see a short 15-minute film about their 1995 dive to recover the bell in and replace it with a new one engraved with the names of the people who died in the wreck. Kevin and I actually got a little choked up watching the film when one man talked about surviving the Vietnam war and then losing his brother several years later on the Fitzgerald.
One of the drawbacks of the museum is that the Gordon Lightfoot song “Wreck of th Edmund Fitzgerald is on a continuous loop and was also used in the soundtrack for the film. After listening to it on our drive out to Whitefish Point and then hearing it continuously in the museam, we were sick of the song.
After, our trip to the Shipwreck Museam we visited Tahquamenon Falls. Our original intent was to hike from our campground to the falls. However, we realized the night before that our site in the Tahquamenon State Park that the campsite we had chosen was about 15 miles away from the falls and…well we decided to drive. We stopped at the lower falls first and then the upper falls. The upper falls are the larger and more impressive of the two. East of the Missisippi, Tahquamenon (with a fifty foot drop) is the third largest next to Niagra Falls and Cumberland falls in Kentucky.
Our visit to the falls also led us to our second beer destination - Tahquamenon Falls Brewery and Pub which is located in the Tahquamenon State Park near the upper falls. According to our “Michigan Breweries Guidebook.” The Tahquamenon Falls Brewery and Pub was originally an old logging camp built by Jack Barrett of Barrett Logging Company. The pub now is owned and operated by b Lark Carlyle Ludlow, the granddaughter of Jack Barrett. She is also the brewer now at Tahquamenon which we thought was pretty cool considering brewing is for the most part, a male-dominated industry.
As we sat down for lunch the place was bustling with lots of other tourists like us who were there to see the falls. However, we were there for the beer so we sat at the bar and ordered a sampler of the three offerings they had on tap: The Lumber Jack Lager, the Harvest Ale and the Black Bear Stout. The Black Bear was our favorite so we decided to split a pint. For lunch we shared a pasty. Our first the UP. It was one of the best that we had on our whole trip.
Our next destinaiton was Lake Superior Brewing Company in Grand Marais, a sleepy little Lake Superior harbor town. We stopped in to split a sampler which included the Cabin Fever Extra Special Bitter (our favorite). Their Granite Brown (our second favorite) the Hematite Stout, Sandstone IPA, Jasper Cherry, and Puddington Wheat. Lake Superior was a nice contrast to our visit to the Tahquamenon Brew Pub. It was smaller and had more of a “local watering hold” kind of feel to it. We chatted for a while with Stacey a man from Grand Rapids with a summer home just outside of town who was there with his granddaughter for lunch and a pint.
After our brief stop at Lake Superior BP we set off again. We decided to take some of the back roads so that we could see the Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore. Pictured Rocks gets its name from the sandstone bluffs that rise 200 feet up from the water’s surface. The cliffs are shades of pink, red and green from the mineral rich water that seeps from the rock. (Probably some of the minerals that those beers were named after in Lake Superior!)
After driving 40 miles on mostly dirt roads through Pictured Rocks,we decided to call it a night that evening in Munising We ate dinner at a little family restaurant that Stacy recommended for us called ”The Dogpatch” which is cleverly decorated with Lil Abner cartoon characters.