If you’ve ever stood at the railing above Tahquamenon Falls and thought the water looked like someone had emptied a tanker of root beer into the river, you’ve got the color right. What most people get wrong is the reason.
The U.P.’s biggest waterfall runs a deep amber-brown, and the assumption almost everyone makes is that it’s muddy, dirty, or polluted. It’s none of those. The color comes from tannins, the same natural compounds that darken a cup of strong tea, leached out of the cedar, spruce, and hemlock swamps the Tahquamenon River drains on its way here. The water is clean and completely safe; it just steeps in the forest first. That’s how the falls earned their nickname: the Root Beer Falls.
Bigger than it has any right to be
Tahquamenon isn’t just photogenic, it’s massive. The Upper Falls is one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi: more than 200 feet across with a drop of nearly 50 feet, and during the spring melt as much as 50,000 gallons of water a second can roar over the edge, according to Michigan’s DNR, which runs the surrounding state park. Four miles downstream, the quieter Lower Falls breaks into five smaller cascades wrapped around an island you can paddle to in a rented rowboat.
The waterfall that ended up in a famous poem
Here’s one a lot of Yoopers don’t know: the falls have a literary claim to fame. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set a scene of “The Song of Hiawatha” right here, where Hiawatha builds his birch-bark canoe “by the rushing Tahquamenaw.” Longfellow never actually saw the place; he worked from accounts of Ojibwe stories, and the name itself comes from the Ojibwe who lived and fished along the river long before anyone wrote a poem about it.
Before you go
If a trip is on your list, a few things are worth knowing first:
- It’s in Tahquamenon Falls State Park, between Paradise and Newberry in the eastern U.P., off M-123 and less than two hours north of the Mackinac Bridge.
- You’ll need a Michigan Recreation Passport on your vehicle to get in; residents can add it cheaply to their plate registration, or buy a day pass at the gate.
- The Upper Falls has a paved, accessible path to the overlooks, but reaching the lower viewing deck at the brink means taking 94 steps down (and back up).
- It’s one of Michigan’s busiest state parks, drawing around half a million visitors a year, so early mornings and weekdays are your friend if you want the railing to yourself.
So the next time someone squints at the water and says it looks dirty, you can set them straight. That’s not mud. That’s the U.P. forest, steeped to perfection.
Explore more: Things To Do in the U.P.
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Sources: Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Tahquamenon Falls State Park; literary background from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” and public historical records.
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