Michigan Touches Four of the Five Great Lakes — and Has the Longest Freshwater Coastline in the Country

Look at a map and Michigan almost seems to be made of water. It’s the only state that borders four of the five Great Lakes: Michigan, Superior, Huron, and Erie (only Ontario misses out). All that shoreline adds up to something staggering — 3,288 linear miles of Great Lakes coastline, which the State of Michigan (EGLE) calls “the nation’s longest freshwater coastline.” Of that total, EGLE notes 1,056 miles are the shorelines of Michigan’s islands.

In fact, when you count every twist and bay, Michigan has the longest total coastline of any state except Alaska. And the Great Lakes it borders hold roughly one-fifth of all the fresh surface water on Earth. Not bad for a state shaped like a mitten.

All that water means a lot of jaw-dropping scenery. Maybe the best example: Sleeping Bear Dunes, where towering sand bluffs rise hundreds of feet straight up from the bright blue water of Lake Michigan. In 2011, viewers of ABC’s “Good Morning America” voted Sleeping Bear Dunes the “Most Beautiful Place in America,” beating out famous spots like Cape Cod, Sedona, and Grand Teton National Park. The dunes aren’t true sand dunes, by the way — they’re “perched dunes,” a layer of windblown sand sitting atop hills of glacial debris left behind by the last Ice Age.