Points North

Lake Champlain is more than 16 times smaller than Lake Ontario, the smallest Great Lake. But in 1998, Congress designated Lake Champlain as the sixth Great Lake, teeing off a historical and cultural fight over which lakes can really call themselves Great.

Blue moon ice cream, this quintessentially Midwestern, bright blue dessert, is a mystery. No one can agree on what it tastes like, and no one with the info will say. We try to find out.

Ron Reimink knew how uncomfortable and annoying swimmer’s itch could be. He spent much of his adult life trying to eradicate it in lakes across northern Michigan. Then one day, he realized he was completely wrong.

In 2021, Emily Ford goes on a winter vacation. She doesn’t go to some warm beach location, though. She sets out to thru-hike Wisconsin’s 1,200 mile Ice Age Trail.

Tom Farnquist is in the business of preserving underwater artifacts and displaying them in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. The problem is, a lot of those artifacts were technically stolen from the State of Michigan. And one day, the state notices.

After Traci Lynn Martin’s mom died, she knew she couldn’t keep putting off her dream: Becoming the first person to kayak around the Great Lakes in one year.

Minnesota and Wisconsin are bitter rivals at just about everything. So in 2019, when Wisconsin’s secretary of tourism claimed her state had more lakes than Minnesota, the embers of an age-old debate were stoked. Minnesota is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, but does Wisconsin really have more?

Cougars are making a comeback. The iconic wildcat hasn’t had a breeding population in the Great Lakes states since the early 1900s, but now they’re moving east. Experts say they could be back soon. Some people swear they already are.

Inside rustic cabins and yurts at the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park there are log books. For more than 70 years, visitors have written in them. We went into this time capsule to see if people’s experiences here had changed much over the changing decades.

When a black bear in Minnesota woke up from hibernation in the middle of winter and attacked three people and a dog, researchers were left with one question: Why?