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It’s a fifty-minute drive to the Log Slide Overlook parking lot, the start of my morning hike. I make it there by 9:15 am (eastern, this time zone change is killing me) and hike the five-mile round trip between the Log Slide Overlook and the Au Sable Light Station. This was a recommended route by the cashier at the museum yesterday and was a beautiful hike along the bluffs of Lake Superior, starting with some truly awesome views of huge sand dunes. It’s one of those views that’s hard to capture in a picture – the height and scale of it all.

I have a view of the lake for the majority of the hike and I get to wander the grounds of the light station without anyone else around. In the summer, they do light station tours but we’ve tipped into the off-season so it’s quiet and peaceful. I find a path down to the shore nearby and journal for twenty minutes sitting on a cold rock. This spot on the shore could be Door County — rocky shore backed by forest, a lake you can’t see across.

Au Sable Light Station
Path to the shore by Au Sable Light Station

I hike back through the lemon-lime forest, climb up the steep bluff trail I breezed down an hour ago, and finish listening to the audiobook The Electricity of Ever Living Thing by Katherine May. She, too, talks about the expansive, healing qualities of nature. It’s as good of a place as any to discover (or remember) who you are. You don’t have to perform identity to the trees.

After the drive back, I eat leftovers for lunch at the bed and breakfast — a private space I have to myself right now as the only guest (it feels more like my own Airbnb, except that the host came by to ready the empty guest room and check in on how I was doing). I read for a couple of hours at my spot by the window.

At 4 pm, I take the Spray Falls cruise from Pictured Rocks Cruises, a two-hour boat tour along the Pictured Rocks Lakeshore. It’s a nearly warm fifty degrees in Munising today but decidedly (much) colder than that out on the water. Luckily I layered my jackets and brought my hat and gloves so I manage to stay on the open top deck of the boat the whole time — and endurance test as many retreated below on the route back. Still, I’m a little bit frozen at the end.

The tour is worth it. We get some incredible views of the varied rock formations. Some of the sights I’ve seen from the shore — like Chapel Rock and Chapel Beach which I loved so much yesterday. Others I would never see otherwise — like Rainbow Cave with the turquoise rock in its cove.

Rainbow Cave

Or Lover’s Leap, a giant natural archway that our captain jokes not to jump off no matter how in love we are . . . since it’s an 80-foot drop into only three feet of water. I think darkly, maybe that’s why they’d jump.

In fact, that is the legend when I look it up afterward. This isn’t the only Lover’s Leap in the world and they are generally associated with tragedy. One source says the name was inspired “by a Native American woman who, heartbroken after her lover failed to return from a hunting trip, flung herself from a cliff to her demise.”

Lover’s Leap

The turning point on the tour is Spray Falls, one of the only waterfalls that flows all year. It’s also the site of the 1856 shipwreck of “Superior” though our captain says most of the debris has washed away by now.

Spray Falls
Pictured Rocks Lakeshore

After the cruise, I pick up a walking taco and some chips and queso at the local Mexican restaurant and head home for another bath to warm me up. I had thought about stopping at the local brewery to have a drink and journal but the pull of warm water after being wind-whipped for two hours is too strong.

I take up my spot by the window for the evening.

With Love,
Natalie