Harbor Lights

Legend has long claimed that the veil between the human and animal worlds is very thin the farther the sun gets from the earth, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself standing nose-to-nose with a white-tailed deer browsing the harbor at Grand Marais on the eve of the summer solstice. She stood on her hind legs, gazing at the watercolor clouds gathering on the horizon, before turning to nod a silent hello. I fumbled for my lens cap, but before I could catch her, the deer had dashed off to join a conga line of other ungulates dancing a hoofy version of “The Hustle” before a hooting audience dressed in plaid shirts and polar fleece.

The Wooden Boat Show and Summer Solstice Festival the third weekend in June captures both sides of Grand Marais’s wonderfully split personality—the free-spirited creative community that harbored the state’s very first artists’ colony, and the fierce sportsman culture of fishermen, hunters, and hikers who help put the flint in Gunflint.

This is not the Grand Marais I remember as a kid every summer, when my family and friends made the municipal campground home base for mosquito-filled adventures in the backwoods and the nearby Boundary Waters. In those days, Grand Marais had the feel of a way station, the final fueling stop for gas and gorp before setting out over the Sawtooths in the morning, and a welcome return to civilization and soft-serve ice cream in the evening. But more recently, this highly photogenic harbor village has remade and remarketed itself as a destination of its own, with fine restaurants featuring local catch, a thriving timber-frame campus for folk art instruction, and—to the grumbling of many locals—even lakefront luxury lodgings. While the surrounding big woods and great lake still beckon, you don’t have to leave the harbor to feel like you’ve been someplace very special.

Your day should start early with a cup of coffee from the local espresso joint Java Moose (218 W. Hwy. 61, 218-387-9400), which will help warm your hands against the morning chill. From the rocky beach, it’s a stone’s throw past the sailboats buoyed in the harbor to the red-roofed Coast Guard station, which helps make Grand Marais look like a stand-in for the coast of Maine. Turn right at the trailhead just behind the station and catwalk out to the lighthouse and wave goodbye to the fishermen hoping for a good catch. A left turn will lead you through the boreal forest and lava-smooth rocks of Artists’ Point, so called because it seems to inspire visitors to break out the watercolors. (On several trips last summer, we counted more than a dozen plein air artists squinting at the horizon.) On Saturday afternoons, a forest service naturalist is often on hand to point out the flora and fauna, though the light is best at the beginning of the day and again in the gloaming, when you can settle into a comfortable rock and feel your shoulders relax to the sound of the waves.