Grand Island Bus Tour

For our 16th wedding anniversary, we went camping and did the Grand Island Bus Tour. Needless to say, there is a lot of beautiful scenery around the island. There is camping available on the island. The campsites are secluded, so you do not have to deal with “combat camping”. Of course, it is tent-only camping.

Camping on Grand Island

Grand Island Camping Guide

Grand Island features 21 designated campsites, consisting of 19 individual sites and two group sites. Reservations are mandatory between Memorial Day and Columbus Day. However, Cobble Cove, Flat Rock, and Muskrat Point remain strictly first-come, first-served.

Designated Camping Areas

Murray Bay

• Sites: Features the Bermuda and Loon Call individual sites.
• Capacity: Up to 6 people and 2 tents per individual site. The group site holds 7 to 25 people.
• Access: Accessible via the island trail network or by water.
• Amenities: Includes a vault toilet near the Day Use Area.
• Note: Camping is forbidden in the designated Murray Bay day-use picnic area.

Trout Bay

• Sites: 4 individual sites available.
• Capacity: Accommodates up to 4 people and 2 tents per site.
• Access: Reachable by trail or water.
• Amenities: Day-use areas and vault toilets are situated on both the east and west ends of Trout Bay Beach.

Juniper Flats

• Type: Group camping area exclusively.
• Capacity: Accommodates between 7 and 25 people.
• Access: Accessible via the trail system or at the Waterfall Beach overlook access point, located roughly 1,000 feet north.

Other Sites

• Rim Trail & The Thumb: 9 additional individual campsites are scattered along these routes. Consult the official Grand Island map for precise locations.

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Random Backcountry Camping

Random dispersed camping is permitted on Grand Island, and no permits are currently required. Campers must practice Leave No Trace principles and properly hang all food packs. Each random campsite is limited to a maximum of 6 people and 2 tents.

Prohibited Locations

Campfires are strictly forbidden at random sites. You cannot set up camp on the Tombolo. Additionally, random campsites must be placed more than 100 feet away from:

• Lake Superior cliff edges
• Designated roads and trails
• Established campsites or recreation facilities
• Inland lakes and named creeks
• Private property
• The Research Natural Area (RNA)

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Island Amenities & Packing Essentials

Provided Amenities

• Pit toilets
• Seasonal summer water spigots

Recommended Gear

• Refillable water bottle
• Insect repellent (“bug dope”)
• Toilet paper
• Flashlight, headlamp, or lantern

You can visit this website to reserve camping on the island.

Mather Lodge

We got to visit Mather Lodge, which is just down the road from where stairways lead down to the beach where people were rockhounding. Also known as the Mather-Klauer Lodge, Mather Lodge is a historic wooden structure on the scenic west shore of Grand Island in Lake Superior, Michigan. Built by Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company tycoon William Gwinn Mather in the early 1900s, it served as a private retreat and part of his personal game preserve. It is now available to view on the bus tour. The craftsmanship of this lodge is incredible! There is a screened-in porch, woodwork all around the two-story lodge, and it is rumored that the last bedroom is haunted. If you walk into the room, you can feel a chill run up your spine. We couldn’t catch any ‘orbs’ in the short video and images we took, though.

Trout Bay Overlook

The water view from Trout Bay Overlook was awesome! You can see the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. While there we spotted a ‘Penis Mushroom’ that got a laugh from people in the tour walking by it.

Other Overlooks

When visiting the other overlooks I noticed that camping was available acrosss the road of this overlook and we got to see the Riptide boat tours go by.

Beaches

Even though you cannot collect rocks at Grand Island it is still fun to do some rockhounding. The beaches that are part of a bay has warm enough water to swim in. They also have nice boardwalks and stairs set up for easy access to the beaches.

Grand Island Cemetery

There is a very old cemetery on Grand Island that you can visit. Many of the tombstones date back to the 1800s, and people are still being buried there today. There is a fenced-off area to separate Catholic gravestones from the Protestants. We were told that a boat capsized where they discovered three unknown bodies. They were buried within this fenced-off area. I wonder how they knew if they were Catholic or Protestant?

Stone Quarry Cabin

The Stone Quarry Cabin on Grand Island, Michigan, is a historic 1850s settler’s home and one of the oldest surviving structures on the island. Perched along the Lake Superior shoreline within the Hiawatha National Forest’s Grand Island National Recreation Area, it serves as a cultural and historical landmark often featured on the island’s guided bus tours.

This cabin used to be much bigger, and there are informational plaques to show this. It started out as a frontier cabin from 1845 to 1900, then became a resort from 1900 to 1960, then a family cottage from 1960 to the 1990s, and has undergone rehabilitation from 1998 to 2000 and is part of the bus tour today.

Abandoned House near a Waterfall

There is a beautiful locked-up house along the bus tour that I wish I could purchase, fix up, and live there. Right next to it is a small waterfall to see.

And there you have it with the trip to Grand Island taking the bus tour. If you visited this place or have images to share please do so below.