The Tahquamenon River runs amber, stained by tannins from the cedar swamps around it, and at the upper falls it slides over a ledge 200 feet wide and drops about 50 feet. This spring the state’s natural resources department swapped the old 94-step staircase down to the viewing platform for a 1,100-foot boardwalk, a project that cost about $1.6 million. The boardwalk is fully accessible, so the close-up view no longer depends on climbing stairs.
That boardwalk sits near the far end of what Michiganders call going Up North, the warm-weather drift to islands, dunes, cottages and cherry country that sets the rhythm of Michigan’s free time. The season builds from late spring and folds up through the fall, one stop at a time, on dates that are easy to look up and easy to miss. Detroit doesn’t fold up the same way.
So this loop drives north first, while the tour boats and the scenic roads are still running, and saves the city for the end. In autumn, the order matters more than the mileage.
Congress made Pictured Rocks the first national lakeshore in 1966
From Detroit, Interstate 75 runs north to the Mackinac Bridge, the crossing that joins the state’s two peninsulas. It opened to traffic in 1957 and stretches 26,372 feet, about five miles, and a car pays $4 to cross. The authority that runs it calls it the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere, measured by total suspended length.
On the far side, Lake Superior takes over the scenery. Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore follows its southern shore, with Munising as one of its two gateway towns, and the National Park Service describes cliffs built from layers of sandstone, streaked by minerals seeping out of the rock and rising more than 200 feet above the water.
Congress designated the lakeshore in 1966, and the park service calls it the country’s first national lakeshore. Three others were authorized later. The formal ceremony took six more years: Munising marked the park’s establishment in 1972.
Those cliffs are a coastline, so the full run of color is hard to take in from the land. Pictured Rocks Cruises sails from the city dock in Munising, and its 2026 season ends on October 18. Anyone driving up this month has to reach the dock by then, or the view from the water waits until spring.
Mackinac Island has kept cars out since 1898
Back across the bridge, ferries carry visitors to an island that turned away the motor car while the state’s own auto industry was still in its infancy. Carriage drivers petitioned the village council because the new machines frightened their horses, and the council banned horseless carriages in 1898. The island tourism bureau says M-185, the 8.2-mile road around the shore, is the only state highway in the country where motor vehicles aren’t allowed. Deliveries still come by horse-drawn dray.
The island’s other distinction is older. President Ulysses Grant created Mackinac National Park in 1875, making it the country’s second national park after Yellowstone. When the Army pulled out of Fort Mackinac, the park passed to Michigan in 1895, and the state turned it straight into a state park.
The cottages on the bluffs say more about Michigan’s habits than the fort does. In 1884 an Army officer, Captain George Brady, received authorization to survey parts of the park for lease, and the first summer cottages went up on park land in 1885, with the rent earmarked for park improvements such as better roads and new trails, according to Mackinac State Historic Parks. It’s hard to find a tidier origin story for the Up North summer: visitors from around the Great Lakes leasing lots on the bluffs for their cottages, and their rent paying for the paths they walked.
The Grand Hotel opened in 1887. It still closes for winter on the last Monday in October, October 26 this year. That morning the hotel rings a bell and carries the rocking chairs in from a porch the tourism bureau bills as the world’s longest. Most restaurants, shops and places to stay on the island close by the end of the month, and most ferries stop their regular daily runs.
Traverse City’s cherry festival turned 100 this summer
From the straits the loop swings southwest to Traverse City, where the town’s cherry festival grew out of a farm ritual. Growers held a spring blessing of the blossoms from around 1910, the town crowned its first Cherry Queen in 1925, and the first cherry festival followed in 1926, according to the town’s tourism office.
It drew national attention within a few years. President Herbert Hoover came in 1930, and the state legislature made it a national festival the following year.
This summer the National Cherry Festival reached its 100th edition, running from July 4 to 11. Organizers brought back old favorites such as the bed races and the milk carton boat regatta, and 9&10 News reported as it wrapped up that 90% of the 150 events had been free. Attendance was still being counted at that point, and planning for the 101st had already started.
The program also includes a pow wow hosted by the Grand Traverse Band, the Ottawa and Chippewa nation of the region, with guests of every nation invited. It’s a reminder that the orchards stand on older homelands.
Cherry country is a high-summer place first. An autumn visitor gets the waterfront without the parade crowds, the orchards after harvest, and a short drive west to the dunes.
Sleeping Bear’s scenic drive closes to cars in late October
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore takes its name from one dune and the story told about it. The National Park Service presents the story as an Anishinaabe oral tradition, told in two versions. In one, a mother bear and two cubs flee famine on the Wisconsin side of the lake. In the other, a forest fire drives them into the water.
Both versions end the same way. The cubs drown within sight of shore, two islands rise where they went down, and a lone dune keeps the mother’s watch. The park service is candid that the Mother Bear dune only resembled a sleeping bear “at one time”, so the name now rests more on the story than on the silhouette.
The two Manitou islands both sit inside the park, and the dune country facing them is big by any standard. The park counts 65 miles of shoreline, a tallest dune of 450 feet and more than 1.6 million visitors a year, and it calls the whole thing the largest freshwater dune system in the world. The lakeshore dates from 1970.
The Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive is a 7.4-mile one-way loop with twelve stops, a lookout high above the lake among them, and stopping at each takes about two hours. The park opens it to vehicles from late May until late October. After that the road belongs to walkers, although the park warns that wet leaves on its steep grades can turn slippery. Bring a card for the entrance pass, because the park doesn’t take cash.
Detroit’s three casinos grew out of a 1996 ballot
The drive back south ends in Detroit, where the downtown casinos trace back to a single statewide vote. In 1996, 51.5% of Michigan voters approved Proposal E, which, as the state Senate Fiscal Agency later summarized it, effectively authorized the licensing and operation of three casinos in the city.
MGM Grand Detroit opened first, in July 1999, in a renovated federal tax office on the western edge of downtown. MotorCity followed that year inside the former Wonder Bread bakery, and Greektown opened in 2000. Greektown now trades as a Hollywood Casino, all three still operate, and the Michigan Gaming Control Board enforces the law that authorized them.
That board’s job grew at noon on January 22, 2021, when the state’s regulated online casino market went live with a minimum age of 21. Among the first operators cleared to offer internet casino games that day were MotorCity and MGM Grand Detroit, along with several tribal nations from northern Michigan, including the Grand Traverse Band, whose pow wow is part of the cherry festival, and the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe.
So Detroit’s three casino licenses no longer stop at the doors of three downtown buildings. Online play now runs statewide under the same regulator, a market set out in PlayUSA’s michigan online casino market coverage, from the 2019 law that created it to the banking methods and deposit limits the licensed apps offer.
Michigan Central came back after three decades empty
The loop’s last stop is a building Detroit nearly lost. Michigan Central Station, west of downtown in Corktown, was completed in 1913 by the architects of New York’s Grand Central Terminal, and at 230 feet it was the tallest train station in the world at the time. It handled more than 4,000 travelers a day at its peak in the early 1940s. Service ended in 1988. In 2009 the city council ordered the empty shell demolished, and a lawsuit citing its landmark status kept it standing.
Ford bought the building in 2018. More than 3,000 tradespeople then put in 1.7 million hours, and 29,000 Guastavino tiles went back into the vaulted ceilings, nearly all of them original, as urban planners at Wayne State University recount in their history of the station’s rise, fall and return. Ford’s spending on the station and its 30-acre campus came to $950 million.
The reopening in June 2024 was an outdoor concert in the park next door, with Diana Ross and Eminem among the performers. The station isn’t a rail terminal again. It’s a mixed-use building now, and its lobby is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with 90-minute guided tours of the ground floor. Check before going this month, because the station will be fully closed on October 11 and 12.
That leaves one choice to make before leaving home: which end of the state comes first. Drive north in the next week or so and the loop works as written, with the city as the reward at the end. Arrive after the dune road closes and it’s better turned around: start with Detroit and keep the island and the dunes for next spring, when the scenic drive reopens to cars and the north wakes up again.
