Lake of the Clouds — The Famous Overlook in Michigan’s Porcupine Mountains

If you’ve ever been to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you know this view. This is the famous Lake of the Clouds overlook, photographed from up on the escarpment on September 30th, 2018.

From the rocky outcrop at the top, the land just falls away beneath you — the long, narrow lake tucked into a valley of unbroken forest that was only beginning to turn for fall, all of it under a big, moody sky of low clouds. It’s one of the most photographed spots in the whole U.P., and standing there in person, it’s easy to see why.

The quick facts

• Where: Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Ontonagon County, in the far western U.P. of Michigan
• The park: 59,020 acres — the largest state park in Michigan, protected since 1945
• Old growth: better than 31,000 acres of never-logged northern hardwood forest, the biggest stand left west of the Adirondacks
• The lake: about 133 acres, sitting around 1,076 feet up and a few hundred feet below the overlook
• Highest point: Summit Peak, 1,958 feet, with an observation tower on top
• Trails: roughly 87 miles of them, including the Escarpment Trail that runs right along the ridge above the lake
• Getting the view: drive to the overlook at the west end of M-107, then a short, paved walk to the edge
• Best fall color: usually the first week or two of October

A little about where this is

I should back up and say a bit more about this place, because honestly the photo doesn’t come close to doing it justice, and Lake of the Clouds is worth knowing about beyond just being a pretty picture on somebody’s blog.

The overlook sits inside the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, way out at the western end of the Upper Peninsula in Ontonagon County. If you’re looking at a map, it’s about as far northwest as you can get in Michigan before you either fall into Lake Superior or end up in Wisconsin. It is not a quick trip from Neenah, let me tell you. Karen and I made a whole fall road trip out of it in 2018, and getting all the way out to the Porkies — that’s what everybody up there calls them — is a serious chunk of driving even once you’re already in the U.P. You come up along Lake Superior, through Ontonagon and the little spot called Silver City, then turn up South Boundary Road and wind your way through the trees. The old highway, M-107, basically dead-ends right at the top of the escarpment. You park, walk up a short paved path, and then the ground just drops out from under you.

That’s the part the picture can’t capture. You come up over that last little rise expecting a nice view, and instead the whole world opens up in front of you. The lake is sitting down in the valley a few hundred feet below, long and narrow, with forest running unbroken in every direction as far as you can see. The first time you see it you kind of let out a breath without meaning to. Even people who couldn’t care less about scenery get quiet up there. The evening we were there it was breezy and cold up on that rock, the kind of cold that goes right through a fall jacket, and other than the wind it was about as quiet a place as I’ve ever stood.

What you’re actually looking at

The lake itself is around 133 acres — not huge, but it doesn’t need to be. It sits down in a valley between two long ridges at an elevation of right around 1,076 feet. A river called the Carp feeds into the east end of it, and the Carp River flows back out the west end and eventually works its way down to Lake Superior. So that whole basin you’re looking down into is really the long, slow work of that one river, carving its way through the rock over a length of time that’s hard to even wrap your head around.

I’ve read a couple of different stories about how it got the name. The one I like is the simplest — that up on the escarpment you’re high enough that on the right kind of morning, the fog and clouds settle down into the valley and sit right on top of the water, so the lake looks like it’s holding the clouds. We didn’t get that exact effect the evening we were there, but we did get those big low gray clouds rolling over the top of everything, which is its own kind of moody and beautiful. You can see it in the second photo.

These are old mountains — really old

Here’s the part that got me reading more after we got home. That escarpment you’re standing on is the edge of some of the oldest rock you will ever set foot on. We’re talking over a billion years old. A long, long time ago this whole region was being pulled apart by something geologists call the Midcontinent Rift, and lava poured out and hardened into the dark basalt that makes up the ridge. Over the eons the softer rock around it wore away and left this hard spine of volcanic rock standing up — and that’s the cliff you’re perched on when you take the picture.

The mountains themselves aren’t tall by western standards. The highest point in the whole park is Summit Peak at 1,958 feet, and there’s an observation tower up top if you want the really big view. Anybody coming from out west would call these hills and not think twice. But they’re ancient, and they were a great deal taller before a billion years of weather went to work on them. The Ojibwe gave them their name, supposedly because the long ridgeline looks like a crouching porcupine when you see it from a distance. Once somebody points that out to you, you can’t un-see it. Now everyone just shortens the whole thing to the Porkies.

The forest nobody ever cut

The thing that makes this park really special, though, is the forest. The Porcupine Mountains hold the largest stand of old-growth northern hardwood forest left anywhere in North America west of the Adirondacks — somewhere in the neighborhood of 31,000 to 35,000 acres of it that was never logged. Sugar maple, basswood, yellow birch, and eastern hemlock, and some of those hemlocks are better than 300 years old. So when you’re standing at the overlook looking out at that unbroken green — or in our case, green just barely starting to turn — a lot of what you’re seeing is honest-to-goodness virgin forest that has never seen a saw.

That it’s still standing is mostly luck with a little bit of a fight mixed in. Back in the 1940s the big timber was getting eyed for logging, especially with the war on and demand running high. Enough people made enough noise about it that the state finally stepped in and turned the whole area into a park in 1945, specifically to protect the old-growth before it could get cut down. Later on, in the 1970s, Michigan added wilderness protection on top of that. I’m glad they did. There just aren’t many places like it left, and once that kind of forest is gone, it’s gone for a few hundred years at the very least.

Copper country

This corner of the U.P. is also copper country, and the Porkies sit right in the middle of that history. People were pulling copper out of this region an awfully long time ago — long before any mining company showed up, native peoples were working the copper here thousands of years back. Then in the 1800s the prospectors came through, and there are old mines scattered around the park to this day. The Nonesuch Mine ran on and off from 1867 into the early 1900s, chasing copper out of the rock. None of them ever made anybody rich out here the way the big mines over on the Keweenaw Peninsula did, and eventually the digging played out and the forest grew back over most of it. The park is actually tied in with the Keweenaw National Historical Park because of all that mining heritage. Poke around the trails and you can still come across traces of it here and there if you know what you’re looking at.

There’s a lot more out there than the one view

We mostly came for the overlook and the scenery, but there’s a whole lot more to the place than the one famous spot. There are something like 87 miles of hiking trails in the park, including a long stretch of the North Country Trail, which runs all the way across several states. The Escarpment Trail follows the top of the ridge right out above Lake of the Clouds, and from everything I’ve read, that’s the hike to do if you want this view stretched out over a few miles instead of just the one parking-lot overlook. It runs around four miles or so one way along the ridge, climbing up and over a couple of named high points — Cloud Peak and Cuyahoga Peak — and the folks who’ve done it generally call it a moderate hike. Not brutal, but the footing is rocky and there are a few steep pitches that’ll get your heart going, so figure the better part of a day if you walk it out and back, and wear real boots rather than sneakers. That escarpment rock is no joke. There’s backcountry camping, rustic cabins you can rent way out in the woods with no road running to them, waterfalls over on the Carp and the Presque Isle rivers, and even a downhill ski hill that runs in the winter. The Porkies get a frankly ridiculous amount of snow — well over 200 inches in a season, which is more than I can really picture.

It’s black bear country too, which is worth keeping in the back of your mind if you’re going to camp. We didn’t see one, but they’re around. And because it’s so far from any city and so little of it is developed, the night skies out there are about as dark as it gets anywhere in this part of the country. The park even puts on star-watching nights once in a while. I can only imagine what the Milky Way looks like from up on that escarpment with no lights for miles in any direction. That one’s on the list for a return trip.

Standing there a while

We didn’t rush it. We ended up standing at that overlook a good long while, just taking it in and trading the camera back and forth. I shot the first photo, the wide panorama, trying to get the whole sweep of the lake and the ridgeline into one frame — which is a lot harder than it sounds when the thing in front of you is that big and your little camera only sees so much at once. The second one is wider and catches more of that heavy gray sky pressing down over the valley. To me that’s the shot that actually feels like what it was like to be there, cold wind and all.

What stays with you, more than any single detail, is just how wild and untouched the whole thing is. No houses, no roads, no power lines cutting across the view. Just water and rock and a few hundred square miles of forest doing exactly what it’s done for thousands of years. There aren’t many views left in the Midwest where you can look out and not see a single thing that people built. It’s something to stand up there in the quiet. It made that whole long drive shrink down to nothing in my memory.

A week or two too early

If I have one regret about our timing, it’s that we were probably a week or two ahead of the real fall color. We were there on September 30th, and the colors out that way usually peak in the first week or two of October. You can see it in the photos — the forest is still mostly green, with just a little bit of turning starting to creep in around the edges. Give it another ten days and that whole valley would have been lit up with red and orange and gold. Honestly I’m not even all that disappointed about it, because it gives me a reason to go back and do the whole thing again.

This was part of a bigger fall trip for us that year — we hit a few other spots up north on the same swing, including the falls over toward the east end of the peninsula. But the Lake of the Clouds overlook is the one that stuck with me the most. Next time I’d like to actually get out and walk the Escarpment Trail along the ridge instead of just standing at the overlook, and stay long enough to catch those colors at their peak and the stars after dark.

It is a long way to get to, no question about it. But standing up on that rock with the lake down below and the whole wild western U.P. rolling out to the horizon, I remember thinking it was worth every single mile. If you ever find yourself out that way in the fall, point the car at the Porkies and go see it for yourself. You won’t be sorry you did.