Unpaved Paradise

How many perfect days do you get on a motorcycle in a year?

Not just good. Not just great. I’m talking perfect.

How many? Three? Five?

It’s a tough question. But as I round a sweeping curve on a dirt road, with the crystal-blue waters off Lake Superior’s Twelvemile Beach on my right, I know today is one of them.

Because on a late-summer day like this, when all the tourists have fled south, leaving the roads and shorelines lonely and windswept, you can’t find a better place to be on two wheels. The sky is the clearest blue, the temperature hovers in the low 70s, and we’ve got nothing to do but ride motorcycles in what is rapidly becoming my latest favorite place.

It sure doesn’t hurt that we’re surrounded by one of the best dual-sport playgrounds in the country: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The secret is the web of sandy forest roads and gravel byways that crisscross the U.P. There’s something here to suit any level of adventure-touring bike, from wheel-swallowing sugar sand to fast, graded dirt under canopies of trees.

One of the best of them is designated H58. It’s the dirt/sand road that winds through Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. And what do you know, we’re on it.

Did I mention that this is a perfect day?

Bill and I started this morning heading north out of the Ride Guide base camp in the town of Newberry, picking up some deep-sand trails that quickly proved a little much for my Kawasaki KLR650.

Plowing a trough through the powder with extremely street-biased dual-sport tires, I ponder this: Why does the bike feel so heavy, right up to the point where it breaks loose and suddenly feels really light?

Short of turning the big KLR into a new KLX400, I need firmer ground. Fortunately, the U.P. offers an infinite range of riding surfaces, so we point the bikes due north on H37, a paved road heading for the coast.

Rocking along at the speed limit, you can smell Lake Superior long before you see it. There’s a clean, bracing scent over the aroma of evergreens.

Then we crest a gentle rise to see the blue of deep water stretching to the horizon, where it blurs into the sky.

We park the bikes and wander down to a narrow, sandy beach that looks more like the tropics than it has any right to. Somewhere, way out there, is the other shore and Canada, but it’s much too far away to see.

Yeah, this is definitely OK.

Back on the bikes, we follow H58 along the shoreline for several miles. It soon turns from pavement to hard-packed dirt, just right for the KLR.

Eventually, it dawns on me that we haven’t seen anyone else for quite a while. This being the week after Labor Day, we’ve got the south shore of Lake Superior to ourselves, something that gives this otherworldly place a decidedly frontier feel.

First charted by fur trappers and scouts in the 1600s, this shoreline quickly became familiar ground to the timber and mining industries. But unlike almost anyplace else east of the Mississippi, the U.P. has retained a remoteness that you usually only find in the West.

Our map shows a place that seems to symbolize that feeling perfectly. It’s a finger of land extending into the Harbor of Refuge that carries the name Lonesome Point. We decide we need to see it.

After 10 minutes of riding on a dirt road that turns into a rugged two-track, we find that some developer has beaten us to the place. The forest is sectioned off in neat, little plots and posted with “No Trespassing” signs. Apparently, this point won’t be lonesome much longer.

But hey, we’re hungry, and—this day being perfect and all—just when I start thinking of food, the outpost town of Grand Marais appears in front of us. Out by the lighthouse on a narrow spit of land, we find a little restaurant tucked next to the U.S. Coast Guard lifesaving station. Perfect.

Back on the road, we reach a visitors center just outside of town. It marks the eastern boundary of something that’s officially called Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. But a more accurate name would be Dual-Sport National Park.

Set aside by the federal government in 1966, the Lakeshore is 40 miles long and about five miles wide. And within that space, it’s hard to find any paved roads.

The sign at the entrance even says: “Unimproved Roads. Travel at Your Own Risk, Next 20 Miles.” Sounds good to us.

The first leg takes you past Grand Sable Dunes—huge sand mountains left behind when the glaciers retreated and carved out the Great Lakes. From there, we continue to Log Slide Overlook, where a hundred-yard hike leads to a breathtaking view of endless sand cliffs standing guard over a deserted beach that really does go on for 12 uninterrupted miles.

After that, H58 heads inland for a while, eventually leading to the town of Munising. But before that, there’s one more treat left: Miners Castle (right).

A six-mile spur road leads back to Lake Superior and the “castle,” which is actually one of the most majestic of the colorful sandstone formations that give Pictured Rocks its name. At the overlook, you can look straight down from a dizzying height into a small bay, where waves constantly pound away at the rocks.

I kind of wish we had more time. The day has made me a big fan of Superior’s south shore, and there’s a lot more where this came from. You could actually follow the shore west all the way to a peninsula that leads out to a place called Copper Harbor.

But we’ve got other places to be over the next week. Besides, the sun is going down. So I look out over the water and the colorful sandstone, made more vivid by the setting sun. And I try to commit the view to memory for recall during a particularly crappy winter day.

We’ve still got a few more miles before Munising, then another 70 back to Newberry. But it’s tough to leave.

The air is still warm, the wind is light, and the view is mesmerizing in the way that only large bodies of water can make it.

Did I mention it was perfect?