United States · US

Beaver Lake

Beaver Lake is a big, glass-clear inland lake tucked inside Michigan's Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, in Burt Township on the eastern Upper Peninsula. At roughly 765 acres it is one of the largest of the park's inland waters, yet no public road circles its shores: it sits inside the 11,740-acre Beaver Basin Wilderness, where the National Park Service limits traffic to electric motors and foot or paddle power. The reward for the long, twisting drive down the unpaved Little Beaver Lake Road is a rare kind of quiet—a deep, cold lake ringed by old forest, with Lake Superior and its sandstone cliffs only a few miles north. Most visitors come to paddle, fish and hike a landscape that feels far from the crowds of the lakeshore overlooks. Beaver Lake drains through Beaver Creek to Lake Superior and is fed by Lowney, Arsenault and Little Beaver creeks, so the water is oligotrophic—low in nutrients, clear enough to read a disk down about 14 feet, and cold even in late summer. That clarity, the wilderness protection, and the run of fish through the connecting creeks make it a place to slow down, slide a canoe in at Little Beaver Lake, and spend the day on still water where the only engine noise is a gentle electric hum.