MIMichigan Geography

Two land masses, joined only since 1957

No other state is split into two large peninsulas that do not touch. Until 1 November 1957 the only way to drive between Michigan's Lower and Upper peninsulas was a state-run car ferry across the Straits of Mackinac, and on the opening weekend of deer season the queue at Mackinaw City ran for hours. The Mackinac Bridge measures 26,372 feet between anchorages, its main suspension span is 3,800 feet, and its towers stand 552 feet above the water. The straits themselves are a five-mile gap through which Lake Michigan and Lake Huron connect, and because both lakes sit at the same surface elevation of 577 feet, hydrologists treat them as a single body of water. The current under the bridge reverses direction depending on wind rather than flowing one way.

The Upper Peninsula was a consolation prize

Michigan did not want the Upper Peninsula. In 1835 and 1836 it was busy fighting Ohio over the Toledo Strip, 468 square miles at the mouth of the Maumee River, because the Northwest Ordinance had drawn a line east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan and nobody had known where that tip actually was. Both territories mustered militia. The only blood spilled came from a sheriff's deputy stabbed with a penknife. Congress broke the deadlock by telling Michigan it could have statehood if it surrendered the strip and accepted roughly 9,000 square miles of the western Upper Peninsula instead. Michigan took the deal under protest and was admitted in January 1837. The land it thought worthless turned out to sit on the Marquette, Menominee and Gogebic iron ranges and on the native copper deposits of the Keweenaw, some of the purest copper ever mined anywhere.

Where the clocks disagree

Four counties in the far western Upper Peninsula, Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson and Menominee, keep Central Time while the other 79 counties keep Eastern. The line follows county boundaries, so driving east out of Ironwood costs an hour. The split exists because those counties trade with Wisconsin rather than with Detroit. It also produces the state's oddest daily fact: Ironwood sits at roughly 90 degrees west, about the same longitude as St. Louis, while Michigan's eastern edge at Port Huron is near 82 degrees. Sunset on the Eastern side of the state in late June comes well after 9 pm, and on the western Upper Peninsula, on Central Time, the sky stays light past 10.

The state's relationship with Canada is equally counterintuitive. Detroit looks south across the Detroit River at Windsor, Ontario, the only stretch of the continental United States where Canada lies in that direction.

1,979 feet, and it took a resurvey to settle it

Mount Arvon in Baraga County is the highest ground in Michigan at 1,979 feet. Until 1982 the title belonged to Mount Curwood about three miles away, and the two are so close that a fresh survey was needed to separate them; Arvon won by roughly a foot. The lowest ground is the Lake Erie shoreline at 571 feet, giving the state about 1,408 feet of total relief. Lake Superior is deeper than that: its floor lies 733 feet below sea level at the deepest sounding of 1,332 feet, so the bottom of the lake is further below sea level than Mount Arvon is above the state's lowest land. What passes for rugged country in Michigan is all in the western Upper Peninsula, in the Huron Mountains and in the Porcupine Mountains, where the Lake of the Clouds sits in a trough between two basalt ridges above Lake Superior.

Four Great Lakes and 3,288 miles of coast

Michigan touches Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie. No other state touches four of them. Its 3,288 miles of Great Lakes shoreline give it more freshwater coast than any other state and, counting everything, the second longest shoreline of any state after Alaska. Nowhere in Michigan is more than about six miles from an inland lake or stream, and the state contains roughly 11,000 inland lakes on top of everything else.

Isle Royale complicates the picture. The island is 45 miles long, lies in Lake Superior closer to Ontario and Minnesota than to the Michigan mainland, and belongs to Michigan anyway thanks to the 1783 boundary negotiations. Isle Royale National Park, established in 1940, is the least visited national park in the lower 48 states and closes entirely each winter. Its wolves and moose have been studied without a break since 1958, the longest continuous predator and prey study conducted anywhere.

Lake effect snow, perched dunes and record cold

Prevailing westerlies cross 60 to 90 miles of open Lake Michigan, pick up moisture and unload it on the western Lower Peninsula. The resulting snowbelt runs from Benton Harbor up past Traverse City, and the Keweenaw Peninsula, exposed to the full fetch of Lake Superior, regularly clears 200 inches in a season. The same lakes work in reverse in spring, holding air temperatures down long enough to keep fruit buds dormant through late frosts, which is why cherry orchards cover the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas at a latitude that should be too cold for them.

Wind moving off the lake also built the perched dunes at Sleeping Bear, where sand has been blown up onto a glacial headland and stands 450 feet above the water. Away from the lakes the moderation disappears fast: Vanderbilt in the northern Lower Peninsula recorded minus 51 F on 9 February 1934, and Mio, 30 miles away, hit 112 F on 13 July 1936.

Common questions about Michigan geography

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