The Lighthouse at the "Graveyard of the Great Lakes"

At the wild northern tip of the U.P., where Lake Superior funnels ships into the narrow, treacherous entrance of Whitefish Bay, stands Lake Superior’s oldest working lighthouse — and a museum dedicated to all the ships that didn’t make it past it.

This stretch of coast has a grim nickname: the “Graveyard of the Great Lakes.” More than 200 ships have wrecked in the waters around Whitefish Point, victims of Superior’s sudden, violent storms and the bottleneck of traffic squeezing through the bay. To warn them, a lighthouse has stood here since 1849; the current Whitefish Point Light Tower has been in continuous operation since 1861 — the year Abraham Lincoln took office — making it the oldest operating lighthouse on all of Lake Superior.

Today the point is home to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, one of the most moving destinations in the state. Its galleries tell the stories of the sailors and ships lost to Superior’s depths, with artifacts, models, and recovered relics. Its centerpiece is the bronze bell of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald — the famous freighter that vanished with all 29 hands in a November 1975 storm just 17 miles from this very point. Divers recovered the 200-pound bell in 1995 at the request of the crew’s families, and it now hangs in the museum as a memorial, rung once for each lost sailor at the annual ceremony. At Whitefish Point, it is the human heart of the place.

You can also climb through the restored 1861 lightkeeper’s quarters and walk the boardwalk out to the Lake Superior shore, scanning for the big freighters that still pass close by.