A deep-dive of reporting, video and photography from the Upper Peninsula
The people just keep coming. It’s an onslaught of summer visitors to a destination that not long ago was considered a hidden gem found deep in Michigan’s Northwoods. The number of tourists who each year trek into the Upper Peninsula to see the spectacular and colorful cliffs at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore hit a new record each of the last seven years. This summer season is already off and running. Is this good for the U.P.? |
| It is the enduring legacy of historic mining, a vestige of the Keweenaw Peninsula’s heyday as the world’s greatest source of copper. For more than 100 years, roughly 50 billion pounds dumped in a pile so large it once extended a half mile into the lake, has been slowly, inexorably, eroding south. As they move, the stamp sands swallow the coast and smother the lakebed, transforming miles of shoreline into a lifeless, apocalyptic hellscape that people liken to the surface of the Moon. It is a slow-motion ecological disaster unfolding across a century. |
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