South Manitou Island: Giants and a Ghost Ship

Off the coast near Leland, within Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, sits South Manitou Island — a place of old-growth forest, a deceptive shipping passage, and one of the most visible shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.

The island had something rare and valuable: the only natural deep-water harbor between there and Chicago. Ships sheltered here from storms, and wood-burning steamers stopped to refuel. But the surrounding Manitou Passage was treacherous — a “graveyard of ships” with more than 50 known wrecks. The most famous is the Francisco Morazan, a Liberian freighter that ran aground in a 1960 snowstorm just offshore (everyone aboard was rescued); its rusting hull still juts from the water, visible from the beach and now a perch for nesting cormorants.

Inland is the Valley of the Giants, a grove of old-growth white cedars, some 500 years old and around 100 feet tall. They survived the loggers thanks to a quirk: growing near the dunes, their trunks got coated in blowing sand that dulled the saws, so the crews gave up and left them standing.