Michigan: The Superior Shore, the Garden Peninsula, and the Eastern UP

Introduction

Three sites that do not form a loop with each other — they are strung along the south shore of Lake Superior and the north shore of Lake Michigan, two or three hours apart — but each is worth building a day around, and together they cover the ground between the Copper Country and the Mackinac Bridge. This is the volume for the drive home the long way.

3.1 Bay Furnace and Onota — near Christmas, Alger County

Access: walk in. ⭐ The best ruin-plus-campsite combination in Michigan, for the simple reason that the ruin is inside the campground.

What survives: the blast furnace stack — about 45 feet high, closed-top, with nine-foot boshes, built of large reddish-grey sandstone blocks quarried at Powell’s Point. Interpretive trails circle it, looking out over Grand Island and Lake Superior.

What was: Onota, an iron-smelting town of 517 people. The Bay Furnace Company built the furnace in 1869 near the western shore of Grand Island Harbour, on a site that had been an Ojibwe fishing station long before. It produced 3,500 tons of crude iron a year.

🔴 The town died in a single afternoon. On May 31, 1877, a wagonload of charcoal started an accidental fire and Onota burned. It was never rebuilt. That is the whole difference between this site and the Copper Country ones — the mining towns died slowly, over decades, as the ore ran thin and people drifted away. Onota died at once, in one day, with the furnace still in profit.

Access: M-28 five miles west of Munising to Christmas; Bay Furnace Drive just west of town. The site sits inside the Bay Furnace Campground and Picnic Area, Hiawatha National Forest.

⚠ Federal campground, federal rules. State dispersed-camping rules do not apply here — this is a fee campground with sites, and it fills in summer.

3.2 Fayette — Fayette Historic State Park, Delta County

Access: open, with rules — Recreation Passport required.

Not a ruin and not a restoration: a whole company town, preserved. Fayette made charcoal pig iron from 1867 to 1891 at the tip of the Garden Peninsula, with a peak population around 500. The surviving buildings include the twin smelting furnaces, the company store, the hotel, and houses — enough of a town that the street pattern still reads as a street pattern.

🔴 The townsite has a shorter season than the park, and this catches people.

Table 1 — Fayette — Fayette Historic State Park, Delta County

	Open
The park	365 days a year, 8 a.m. – 10 p.m. ET
The historic townsite buildings	mid-May to mid-October
The campground	mid-May to mid-October
The boat slips	early May to early November

Arrive in April and you get a beautiful empty harbour and a locked town.

Camping: the park’s own electric campground reserves at $35–$196 a night depending on the site, which is a lot of money for this rig’s needs. ⭐ Portage Bay State Forest Campground is the better answer — 23 rustic sites on the Lake Michigan shore of the same peninsula, with a boat launch, a sand beach and trails. Rustic, cheap, and a far better fit for a truck with a tent on the roof.

3.3 Fiborn Quarry — Fiborn Karst Preserve, Mackinac County

Access: open, with rules — non-profit preserve, posted guidelines govern.

A limestone-quarry town, now 480 acres bought by the Michigan Karst Conservancy in 1987 and managed as a natural area open to the public.

What survives: the railroad house and the ore-car loader in the heart of the old quarry, house foundations along Fiborn Quarry Road, and the boarding-house foundation. The trails are the Sinkhole Trail — a short loop past shallow sinkholes and a creek that disappears into the ground — and the 1.5-mile Barbara Ann Patrie Memorial Trail along the quarry edge, through second growth, past sinks and Fiborn Pond.

⭐ This is the only site on the list where the geology is more interesting than the town. Karst is limestone that water has eaten holes through: sinkholes, disappearing streams, and caves. The quarry was here because the limestone was here, and the limestone is why the ground has holes in it.

🔴 The preserve’s rules exist specifically to prevent “unsupervised, unsafe cave exploration.” Read them before going and treat the cave system as off-limits absent an arrangement with the MKC. This is not a liability formality — it is a landscape where the ground genuinely is not continuous.