Day 19- Lake Superior Circle Tour: Kenton, MI to Ashland, WI

Lake Superior Bike Tour: Kenton Michigan to Ashland Wisconsin

Day 19

Before leaving our motel in Kenton, Michigan on the final day of our Lake Superior bike tour, we met a couple of other touring cyclists. They were biking across the US, so they were headed in the opposite direction as us. Most people doing a Trans-America tour ride west-to-east because of the prevailing winds. When you’re biking in a circle, it doesn’t matter which way you go. Even though we were technically biking against the prevailing winds on the South Shore of Lake Superior, we actually experienced much worse wind on the North Shore up in Ontario.

Before we headed out on the road, we biked a little ways down the Bergland to Sidnaw Rail Trail to check out this very high trestle over a little tributary. The rail trail is primarily a snowmobile trail, but if we had gravel bikes we definitely would have enjoyed biking on this gravel trail. There are so many places that would have been so much more pleasant if we had gravel bikes on the Lake Superior Bike Tour. If you are considering biking around Lake Superior, we would definitely recommend taking a gravel capable bike.

If we had brought gravel bikes on this tour, we would have been able to spend so much less time on highways and so much more time on snowmobile trails and logging roads.

From the Two Rivers Motel, we headed west on M-28, continuing through the Ottawa National Forest. We were kind of annoyed, because last night, the owner of the motel we stayed at told us there were no campgrounds or hotels beyond his, but it turned out there were many places.

We biked through the little towns of Bruce Crossing and Ewen. M-28 continued to be low traffic, and overall we found it to be very pleasant riding. Upper Peninsula had really been a mixed bag of thrillingly dangerous highways and highly rural roads through deep woodlands and ghostly small towns with memorials made up of old mining equipment.

After some early morning hills, our final day of the bike tour was mostly primarily downhill. In fact, since we were starting far inland and heading to the shore of the Lake Superior, we actually would lose nearly 1600 feet of elevation over the course of the day.

Biking through the Upper Peninsula is a mix of quiet country roads and intense highways without shoulders.

We arrived in the town of Bergland, and we biked past Lake Gogebic. This is the largest lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And when I say in, I mean inland, because obviously Lake Superior is bigger. So this is really the biggest little lake in the U.P.

Gogebic means “where trout rising make small rings upon the surface,” which might be the most poetic place name around Lake Superior. Followed in close second by Pancake Bay.

Several years ago we had spent Valentines Day in a ski-in cabin near here. This area during winter is the snowiest place in the Midwest. Squeezed between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, this area will receive upwards of 300 inches of lake effect snow during the winter months. However, this was not winter, and it was in fact, a really hot and humid day.

From this point westward, the U.P. becomes much more populated and M-28 gets busier. We biked into Wakefield, a picturesque town that wraps around Sunday Lake. We stopped for lunch. at Sunday Lake Park after about 50 miles of riding. We ate super weird mix and match “bikecuterie,” consisting of twizzlers, stroopwafel, biltong, carrots, and apples.

After biking around Sunday Lake, we joined Highway 2, which would take us all the way across Wisconsin to finish out our bike tour. We actually contemplated staying in at Potato River Falls for the night, but we decide we were just going to pedal right past that and power through the heat all the way to Ashland. Our final destination was about 50 miles away.

Right after we left Wakefield, we pretty much immediately entered Bessemer. Wakefield, Bessemer, and Ironwood kind of just stretch into one long town until you reach the Wisconsin-Michigan border. Bessemer is an oddly retro looking town with a lot of low-slung, mid-century kitsch motels, neon signs, and fiberglass statues.

In Ironwood, a grungy boom and bust town, Ian got skimmed by a stupid little shuttle bus that’s driver then immediately flipped him off. A completely normal reaction after you nearly hit someone with your 5-ton vehicle. We then moved to the sidewalk and someone yelled at us to get off the sidewalk.

In Ironwood, Ian got a staple in his tire, and got a flat tire. We got it quickly changed in the parking lot of a church fortunately. Soon we were headed out of town and finally back into Wisconsin.

Fixing a flat tire in a church parking lot on our Lake Superior Bike Tour.

This section of Highway 2 crossing the state line is four lanes and divided. As you enter Wisconsin, where Highway 51 meets Highway 2 there is this section of on-ramps that was pretty terrifying to ride on. As we had to cross the exit and the entrances we just had to pedal like crazy and hope that no cars came along while we were crossing.

From there on out through Wisconsin, there was little to no shoulder for about 25 miles. I had to stop at a bar in Saxon to pee, which was incredibly awkward.

We biked up and down some very large hills and at the tops we could occasionally get glimpses of the blue gray of Lake Superior. By mid-afternoon the heat really started to get to us. We took some salt tabs and tried to eat a shelf stable, artificially green, giant pickle in a bag that Ian had bought at a gas station. The moment that Ian sunk his teeth into the pickle all of this liquid came pouring out of it, like some sort of big salty gusher.

Beautiful farm fields in Northern Wisconsin on our bike tour around Lake Superior.

Before we knew it we were biking through the Bad River Reservation or Mashkiiziibii, There was a wide shoulder here, and it had clouded over and even rained a bit, which felt good in the intense heat. At this point we knew we were going to make it all the way to Ashland and finish out our Lake Superior Circumnavigation.

The Kakagon and Bad River sloughs are sometimes called “Wisconsin’s Everglades.” Wild rice is harvested from these sloughs each fall.

We stopped in Odanah and bought some Cheezit Grooves—our new favorite salty snack. Eating more salt took care of our headaches right away. It was surprising how quickly we rode to Ashland after that. It was threatening to thunderstorm, and there was even a severe storm warning.

We hit 100 miles just past Odanah, We felt that it was appropriate that we were doing a century on the final day of our tour. At this point we were in much better shape than when we first started our bike tour.

On our last day of our bike tour around Lake Superior, we biked a century.

Once we reached the outskirts of Ashland, near Splashland Waterpark, we still had to bike about three miles through the city. We got onto the Lakeshore Trail and rode all the way to the small park where we had begun our tour around the lake.

Finishing our Lake Superior Circle Tour in Ashland, Wisconsin.

We took a million photos to commemorate the finale of our 1300-mile tour. Because of the building storm, the sunset was turning the Lake a beautiful golden color. It was hard to believe that we had biked around the world’s largest lake and actually survived.

It turned out that Ian’s bike barely survived. His brake started rubbing and as soon as we rolled up to my sister’s house it became very apparent that something was wrong, and we discovered that he had a broken spoke. His bike was rallying just for us and then finally gave up. We had actually been considering just finishing our bike tour by biking down to my hometown of Spooner, WI about 90 miles away, but the broken spoke put the nail in that little over-achiever coffin.

Ian got a broken spoke on his bike tire in the final miles of our bike tour--very lucky timing!

We celebrated the completion of our tour with our friends and with some margaritas and a lot of food from El Dorado Mexican Restaurant (you need to read this review), and a view of the sunset over Lake Superior. We felt incredibly accomplished, a little depleted, and deeply grateful to be wearing jeans rather than spandex.