If you’re traveling in Michigan’s “Upper Peninsula,” Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore would rank right up there – IMHO – on most lists of “must see” places. Featuring 42 miles of shoreline, this national park features sandstone cliffs, waterfalls, beaches, sand dunes and more “natural delights.”

I visited this park for the first time in 1981, when there weren’t as many concerns about erosion – or access.

Here I am at age 9 at Pictured Rocks. I’m fairly certain my more agile older brother “coaxed” me into going out on this cliff…Nowadays, visitors are not able to just go out here!

We visited the park as a family again in the mid 1980s, and this time we visited Miners Beach. And I participated in my first Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition photo shoot – tween edition (LOL)!

A little more than 20 years later in 2006, I would be up the shore a ways and sitting like this in Sevenmile Creek while we were on a backpacking trip. No pics of this! But I pretty much was doing EXACTLY THIS. We had a virtually private beach for most of the day.

Fast forward to May, 2019 – it was a rainy day in the U.P., as we drove from Houghton, MI to our “destination” in St. Ignace. We decided to take a litle “detour” and take a look at Miners Castle:

See that little black dot on the bottom of the cliff on the left? That’s a little hole. Water was “splooshing” through here and it sounded…wonderful! Some of these holes are big enough to accommodate kayakers.

When I was 9, I stood on that cliff you see in the background! These days, I’m content to just take pictures from a safe distance…