Root Beer Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — September 2018
Karen and I took a fall trip up north in 2018 and stopped at the aptly nicknamed “Root Beer Falls.” If the photo makes the water look like a giant mug of foaming root beer, well, that’s pretty much how it looks in person.
The color comes from tannins — the same natural compounds that leach out of fallen leaves and pine needles and stain so many of the streams up here a deep tea-brown. Add a good rain upstream and the falls churn it into a frothy head of foam. Throw in the fall colors and a little sunshine breaking through the trees, and it made for a perfect stop.
The Story Behind Root Beer Falls
“Root Beer Falls” is really just the nickname — the proper name is Tahquamenon Falls (it’s pronounced ta-KWAH-meh-non). It’s one of the crown jewels of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, sitting in Tahquamenon Falls State Park out in Luce County, between the little towns of Newberry and Paradise, on the Tahquamenon River as it makes its final run toward Lake Superior.
The Upper Falls — the big one in our photo — drops about 48 feet and stretches more than 200 feet across. During a good spring runoff it can push close to 50,000 gallons of water every single second, which makes it the third most voluminous waterfall east of the Mississippi, behind only Niagara and Cohoes Falls in New York. That’s a whole lot of root beer.
That frothy head of foam on top isn’t pollution, by the way — it’s completely natural. The same tannins that tint the water act a little like a soap, and all of that churning and tumbling over the rocks whips it up into foam, just like the head on a freshly poured mug.
About four miles downstream you’ll find the Lower Falls, a set of five smaller cascades wrapped around a little island. You used to have to row a boat out to reach the island; these days there’s a footbridge — built in 2022 — that walks you right out over the water.
There’s even a little poetry to the place. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wove the Tahquamenon River into his 1855 epic The Song of Hiawatha — this is the country where Hiawatha was said to have built his birch-bark canoe. Not bad for a spot we mostly remember as looking like a giant mug of soda pop.
