A few weeks from now, at the very tip of the Stonington Peninsula, the cedar trees around an old brick lighthouse will start to flutter orange. Locals call it monarch madness, and it is one of the quiet annual wonders of the U.P.: from mid-August into September, monarch butterflies from across the Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada funnel down this one skinny finger of land between Little and Big Bays de Noc, gather in the trees at Peninsula Point, and wait for the right wind to jump Lake Michigan.
The reason is simple and a little heartbreaking. A monarch weighs about half a gram, has a wingspan under four inches, and is trying to fly roughly 1,900 miles to the mountains of central Mexico. It does not cross big open water carelessly. So southbound monarchs ride the peninsula as far as land will carry them, and the point at the end is the jumping-off place. As a longtime coordinator of the annual counts put it, “Peninsula Point at the end is a perfect place for them to funnel down.” At night they roost in the dense cedars near the lighthouse — the thick cover protects them — clustered with wings folded, warming up for the crossing toward Door County, Wisconsin, on the far side of the mouth of Green Bay.
Monarch madness
Volunteers begin their roost counts on the lighthouse grounds around the third week of August, though the butterflies keep their own weather-dependent schedule. The peak has thinned: a decade or so ago you could find 3,000 or more monarchs shimmering in a handful of trees on an early-September morning, and the eastern monarch population has declined by an estimated 80 percent or more since the 1980s. But the migration still comes, every year, and there is no better place in Michigan to stand inside it than this one.
The lighthouse that would not quit
The tower they gather around has its own survivor story. Congress funded a lighthouse here after Escanaba’s iron-ore docks opened in 1864, and the light first shone in 1865 — a keeper hand-tending an oil lamp every night until an automated acetylene light took over in 1922. The Minneapolis Shoal light made it obsolete in 1936, the Forest Service took the property in 1937, and the Civilian Conservation Corps turned the point into a picnic ground. By 1948, vandalized and unfunded, the tower was slated for possible demolition — until the local Stonington Grange adopted it, restored it, and won first prize in the 1949 statewide Grange community-service contest for the effort. The keeper’s house burned in 1959. The brick tower shrugged, survived, made the National Register of Historic Places, and today anyone can climb its 40-foot spiral staircase for free and look out over both bays.
The whole place rewards the drive down the Stonington: a 1.2-mile interpretive trail through the woods (2.2 miles as a loop with the old two-track), flat limestone shoreline full of fossils 400 to 500 million years old, and spring bird migrations that can top 200 species — points of land like this one catch travelers of every size.
But late summer belongs to the monarchs. For a few weeks, the oldest navigation aid on the Bays de Noc goes quietly back to work, marking the departure point for travelers with four-inch wingspans. Then some September morning the wind swings right, the cedars empty almost all at once, and a cloud of half-gram sailors strikes out over Lake Michigan for Mexico — leaving behind an empty lighthouse, a quiet point, and every Yooper lucky enough to have been standing there when they went.
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Sources, credits, and reporting details
Sources & accountability
How this story was reported
Editorial methodArchival synthesis
Last verifiedJul. 21, 2026
Corrections statusNo material correction note is recorded on this article.
Verification note: Initial ledger, verified 2026-07-21 during publication prep. Migration behavior, count logistics, decline figures and the full lighthouse chronology checked against the Forest Service page, contemporaneous local reporting, and trail references. Sole direct quotation is a thirteen-word sentence via the Escanaba Daily Press. Featured image CC BY-SA 4.0, credit Emily Graham, resized without cropping. No AI-generated or AI-assisted media.
Primary sources
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Recreation Site: Peninsula Point Lighthouse — U.S. Forest Service, Hiawatha National Forest
Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 21, 2026. Federal public information.
Additional reporting
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Monarch butterflies gather at Stonington Peninsula to prepare for migration south — Escanaba Daily Press via The Daily News (R. R. Branstrom)
Featured image record. Published Aug. 25, 2023. Accessed Jul. 21, 2026. Copyright Ogden Newspapers; brief quotation with attribution.
Sole direct quotation in the article is the thirteen-word funnel sentence.
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Peninsula Point Interpretive Trail — MichiganTrailMaps.com (Jim DuFresne)
Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 21, 2026. Copyright MichiganTrailMaps; cited.
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Peninsula Point Light — Wikipedia
Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 21, 2026. CC BY-SA text; cited.
Photo and media credits
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72 Peninsula Point Lighthouse (36)1.jpg — Emily Graham / Wikimedia Commons
Featured image record. Accessed Jul. 21, 2026. CC BY-SA 4.0; credit Emily Graham.
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