Stand on a Lake Superior beach and look straight out, and you will not see the other side. Just water running flat to the horizon, the way an ocean does. There is a good reason for that. Superior is so enormous it is less a lake than an inland sea.
How big are we talking? Let’s run the numbers, because they are absurd.
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area. It covers about 31,700 square miles, which is roughly the size of the entire state of Maine. One lake, the size of a state.
And it is not just wide. It holds about 10 percent of all the fresh surface water on the planet. Let that sink in. One in every ten gallons of fresh water sitting on the surface of this entire world is right here, in the U.P.’s backyard.
Here is the one that really breaks people’s brains. Lake Superior holds as much water as all four of the other Great Lakes combined, and then you could pour in three more Lake Eries on top of that and it would still fit. There is so much water in it that you could spread it out and cover both North and South America, every inch of both continents, under a foot of water.
It is deep, too. Around 1,300 feet at its deepest point, enough to hide a skyscraper underwater. It is the coldest and deepest of the Great Lakes, and that cold runs the whole show.
The water is so cold, year round, that a single drop of it stays in the lake for about two hundred years before it ever flows out. Two centuries. The water lapping at your feet on the beach has been in this lake since long before your grandparents were born.
That same brutal cold gives Superior its eeriest reputation. They say the lake never gives up her dead, and that is not just an old sailor’s line. The water stays so cold down deep that the bodies of those lost in its hundreds of shipwrecks often never rise to the surface. It is one of the reasons the Edmund Fitzgerald and so many others still rest somewhere below.
It is a moody, powerful thing. Storms can throw up waves more than 30 feet tall. It almost never freezes over completely, even in the dead of a U.P. winter. The Ojibwe called it gichi-gami, the great sea, and they had it exactly right.
But here is what the numbers leave out. For all its size and all its danger, Superior is also breathtaking up close. It is the deep blue water and pounding waves at Pictured Rocks. It is the glowing Yooperlites you hunt on its beaches after dark. It is sea glass and driftwood and the cleanest, clearest water you will ever wade into, even if it does freeze your ankles off.
For the folks who grew up on its shores and moved away, this is the one that aches the most. Not a postcard. The smell of it. The sound of those waves. The way the cold hits your chest the second you dive in.
So the next time somebody downstate calls it “just a lake,” you can set them straight. It is the largest freshwater lake in the world, it holds a tenth of the planet’s fresh water, and it could swallow the other Great Lakes whole.
Yoopers just call it the lake. As if there could ever be another one.
Sources: Britannica; the Great Lakes Commission; Lake Superior Magazine; WorldAtlas; and the Lake Superior Circle Tour.
Featured image credit: Lake Superior from McLain State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Original photo by Yinan Chen via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Cropped/enhanced for YooperHub.
Keep exploring
More From Yooper Hub
Know a story we should cover?
Help Us Find What Matters Across the U.P.
Send us a local lead, community event, photo, or story idea. The best Yooper Hub stories often begin with a reader.
YOUR READING IS COUNTING
You are earning Yooper Points.
Your progress is saved in this browser. Finish the story to earn 10 points, then keep them with a free account.