Blue Ice at Fayette Historic State Park

Over the past few years blue ice formations have been getting a lot of attention on the Great Lakes. You may have seen photos from around the Mackinac Bridge. Well, this year we we stumbled upon a great collection of blue ice and it was on northern Lake Michigan at Fayette Historic State Park. 

If you do research you can find different reasons on why the ice appears blue in certain areas. Our goal is to not get into the reasons on why it appears the way it does, but more about our 2023 winter discovery. 

We had a plan to visit Fayette Historic State Park this winter. If you have never been to Fayette, there is a list of reasons to go. First off, it is the site of a historic iron smelting town. Historic buildings are at the park and during the non-winter seasons you can go inside many of the buildings and learn more about the history of the area. We arrived at the park, put on our snowshoes and explored the area around the buildings.

To go along with the historic buildings, there are stunning limestone cliffs. When people think of cliff and rock formations, the shoreline of Lake Superior usually comes to mind. These are different and also very impressive. There are great views from all angles. We decided to walk out on the peninsula across from the cliffs to get a different perspective and that is when we stumbled upon a large collection of blue ice along the beach. 

The best part about this was that we weren't seeking the blue ice but getting outside and exploring gave us the opportunity. If we wouldn't have found this, our day still would have been everything we had wanted but this was a fun surprise. After capturing photos of the ice and the cliffs, we didn't end our day there. We made our way to the snowshoeing trails along the top of the cliffs. There are lookout points throughout the trail to look back at the townsite and out onto Lake Michigan. 

Check out the full video from our Fayette adventure!