About

It all started as a simple birthday trip. Katie and I wanted to explore a few of the waterfalls on a warm summer day, taking our puppy Logan for an all-day drive and adventure through the Keweenaw. We had a fun day, and afterwards, slightly surprised by the poor online directions to Montreal Falls, I decided that hunting down a few other drops in Keweenaw County would make a fun summer project.

The one-county goal expanded to slowly encompass Ontonagon, Houghton, Baraga and Marquette, and then kept going west and east past all of those. It has been nine counties and about ten years, and today it stands at two hundred waterfalls on 113 rivers. There are hundreds of named waterfalls in the Upper Peninsula — I have seen the number 305 tossed around a few times — so this covers something like two thirds of them.

Some are mere inches high and one of them, Copper Falls, drops close to two hundred feet over numerous tumbles. Most have trails, beaten footpaths or paved walkways, and some are so deep and forgotten that it takes a keen sense of direction to find them. Dams and private property hide a few, though nearly everything listed here sits on publicly accessible land.

My trips varied wildly. Some days were a collection of quick roadside stops that let me rack up a dozen waterfalls in a single outing. Others were intense deep-woods hikes where I was lucky to see two drops in a long day. Those were often the more rewarding ones — the McCormick Wilderness, the Huron Mountains, the Peshekee Highlands — when I could spend most of the day wandering the woods with a good friend and my dog. This may have started as a list of things to check off, but it ended up becoming a good deal more than that.

Every waterfall here carries a rating, and it is a personal number rather than a scientific one: how much the drop was worth the walk, on the day I stood in front of it. A low rating is not a warning. Some of the best days I had out there ended at falls I would only give one star.

The photographs are the reason any of this got written down. The directions will get you to the river and the notes will tell you what I found when I was there, but these are beautiful places and I was carrying a camera. That is the part worth your time.

For future explorers… this is not a definitive guide, nor is any of the information here guaranteed to be accurate. Many of these locations were visited years ago by a foolish young man who would purposefully meander off roads and wade through rivers to avoid no-trespassing signs (and bugs). Rivers move, trails grow over, and a two-track that was passable in 2009 may not be a road at all now. I do, however, hope you can experience these areas and lose yourself (both literally and figuratively) out there in the woods, and maybe see a waterfall or a hundred on the way.