Mackinac Island

You fly into KMCD on the island itself, not 83D on the mainland. Coming in, the Mackinac Bridge and the Round Island Light are easy to pick out, and the island sits in the straits with no cars on it; M-185, the road around the shoreline, is the only state highway in the country where motor vehicles are banned. The village banned them in 1898 because the engines kept spooking the carriage horses, and the ban was meant to be temporary. Once you're down, there's nothing to rent because there's nothing to drive; you get around on foot, by bike, or by horse-drawn carriage, same as the roughly 600 year-round residents and 500 horses. Fort Mackinac sits on the bluff above the harbor; the British took it in 1812, in the first land action of the War of 1812. The island became the second national park in the country in 1875, three years after Yellowstone, then was handed to Michigan as its first state park in 1895. The Grand Hotel opened in 1887, and its front porch (660 feet, billed as the world's longest) is long enough to pick out from the air. Downtown, the fudge is non-optional; locals call the summer crowd "fudgies." The flying changes with the season. In summer the ramp stays busy; in winter, once the ice shuts the ferries down, the airplane stops being recreation and becomes the island's supply line.

Coming into Mackinac (KMCD), the red-and-white tower on the little island just south of the field is the Round Island Light. It went up in 1895 to mark the shoals in the straits where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet, built by Frank Rounds, the same Detroit carpenter who had just finished work on the Grand Hotel. The painted-brick tower stands 57 feet on an otherwise empty island; with its red base and pale top it gets compared to an old schoolhouse, and it's a near-twin of the Two Harbors light in Minnesota. It was manned until 1924, then run by a single caretaker until 1947, when the Coast Guard abandoned it for an automated light closer to Mackinac Island. Left to the weather and vandals, it nearly came down before the Forest Service took it over in 1958; it's since been restored, light and all. If it looks familiar, it's in the movie "Somewhere in Time."

The five-mile suspension bridge connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. From above, the bridge appears as a delicate thread between two landmasses with the deep blue Straits of Mackinac flowing beneath. The bridge towers rise 552 feet above the water. On clear days, you can see the curvature of Lakes Michigan and Huron simultaneously. Combine with a landing at Mackinac Island (KMCD) for one of the best day trips in Great Lakes aviation.

The St. Marys River drops 21 feet between Lake Superior and Lake Huron over a stretch of rapids at Sault Ste. Marie. For ten thousand years that drop made the rapids an Ojibwe fishing ground and a hard portage for everything else. Today the same 21-foot drop is the reason 80 to 86 million tons of cargo per year — including roughly 95 percent of all American iron ore — pass through Sault Ste. Marie. The Soo Locks are the busiest lock system in the world by tonnage. They move more freight than the Panama and Suez canals combined. The first permanent lock opened June 18, 1855. The steamer Illinois was the first vessel through. Before it, freight bound for Lake Superior had to be unloaded, hauled around the rapids in wagons, and reloaded — a process that capped the practical size of any vessel that could serve the upper lakes. The 1855 State Lock changed that overnight. Pittsburgh's steel industry, the iron ranges of Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the grain trade out of Duluth — all of them date from the day the Soo Locks made deep-draft commerce north of Lake Huron possible. In 1876 the locks first passed a million tons. By 1893 it was ten million. By 1941 it was a hundred million. Annual freight peaked at 217 million tons in 1948. There are currently four locks, of which two are in regular use. The Poe Lock (rebuilt in 1968 at 1,200 feet long and 110 feet wide) handles all the largest ships — the 1,000-foot "lakers" that dominate iron ore traffic. The MacArthur Lock (1943, 800 feet long) handles smaller vessels. The Davis and Sabin Locks (both 1914) are mostly inactive. A new replacement lock (the New Lock at the Soo) is under construction with completion expected around 2030, finally giving the system redundancy for the 1,000-footers. The Army Corps of Engineers operates the locks. Tolls were charged 1855-1881; they have been free since. The locks close mid-January to mid-March each year for the only maintenance window the system has. The Soo Locks Park on the south side provides free public viewing from observation platforms 6 feet above the water as ships lock through.