Pull up a map and it looks like a strip of land up north. The reality is a vast, wild, gloriously empty place bigger than entire states
Pull up a map of the U.P. and it looks like a decent chunk of land. What most people do not realize is just how big it really is, and how few people live on it. The Upper Peninsula is larger than nine different U.S. states. And yet, almost nobody lives there.
Start with the size. The U.P. covers about 16,400 square miles. That is bigger than Massachusetts. It is bigger than New Jersey and Connecticut put together. Line it up against the fifty states and it comes out larger than nine of them, including Hawaii, Maryland, Vermont, and Rhode Island. It is nearly a third of the entire state of Michigan.
Now here is the wild part. All that land is home to only about 300,000 people. That is roughly three percent of Michigan’s population spread across nearly a third of its land. Do the math and you get something like 18 people per square mile, compared to well over 200 down in the Lower Peninsula. There is just a whole lot of nothing up here, in the best possible way.
The biggest city in this entire vast region is Marquette, and it has around 20,000 people. Let that sink in. The single largest city in a place bigger than nine states would barely register as a suburb almost anywhere else. Beyond a dozen or so small towns, the people who do live in the U.P. are scattered thin across the woods, the lakeshores, and the back roads.
So what fills all that room? Trees, mostly. The U.P. is blanketed in forest, dotted with more than 4,000 inland lakes, and wrapped in roughly 1,700 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. It is home to bears, wolves, moose, and more deer than you could ever count. In a lot of the U.P., you can drive for a half hour and not pass another car. You can stand on a beach on Lake Superior and not see another soul.
And it is not a quick trip across, either. From Ironwood in the far west to the eastern end near the bridge is around 370 miles. That is a six-hour drive, all of it inside one peninsula, most of it through woods and small towns where everybody waves.
That size and that emptiness are not just trivia. They are the whole reason the U.P. is the way it is. When your nearest neighbor is a mile away and the nearest big city is hours off, you learn to be self-reliant, to fix things yourself, and to lean hard on the people around you. It is why Yoopers are tough, handy, and fiercely close-knit. It is why the place feels like its own little world, so much so that some folks have long dreamed of making it a state of its own.
So the next time someone glances at a map and figures the U.P. is just a little strip up north, you can set them straight. It is a wild, sprawling, gloriously empty place bigger than nine states, with more trees than people and more lake than you can imagine. And for the few hundred thousand lucky enough to call it home, that is exactly how they like it.
Sources: the U.S. Census Bureau and the State of Michigan.
Featured image: Map of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula counties. Image by Saukkomies, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Graphic by YooperHub.
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