Hey, traveler. You don’t have to go to the end of the Earth to get far away from everything and everyone. In fact, you don’t even have to leave the Great Lakes watershed. I have visited all five Great Lakes — not just the lake on which Chicago is built, but Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Here are my choices for the most exotic locale on each lake. 

Lake Superior: Isle Royale National Park, Michigan

Isle Royale is a long way from anywhere. The least-visited national park in the Lower 48, about 15,000 people set foot there every year — fewer than an afternoon crowd at Yellowstone. The only way to get there is a three-hour ferry ride aboard the Isle Royale Queen IV, which sets out once a day from Copper Harbor, Michigan, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The landing at Rock Harbor is the only developed corner of the island. There’s a camper’s commissary, a gift shop, and lodge with soft beds and a china-plate restaurant. By law, only one percent of the island is set aside for civilized comforts. The rest is wilderness. This may be the most remote spot in the continental United States: where else, even in the mountain west, can you find yourself so far from the nearest automobile? The island closes November 1, and from then until spring, the only visitors are scientists who fly in to count the moose and the wolves.

Isle Royale is the essence of the north — wolf, moose, fir, rock, water — condensed to 133,000 acres. On the hiking trails, I saw thimbleberry, its tiny pods not yet budded to fruit; wild rose; wood lily; ox-eye daisy; and, every time I lifted my eyes from the trail, the spindly profile of a spruce. The mosquitos hunt in earnest. I slapped rouge smears on my cheeks and hands. At Daisy Farm Camp, loons paddle on Moskey Basin. At the mouth of the cove is Rock Harbor Lighthouse and the ruined shacks of an old fishery. 

The Greenstone Ridge is the spine of Isle Royale, far above the bug-swarmed shoreline. The trail flattens out at Mount Ojibway. Getting there is like climbing a staircase, a mile and a half long. Then it rises again to Mount Franklin, named for Benjamin Franklin, who swindled Isle Royale from the British at the 1783 Treaty of Paris talks. One historian says that 18th Century maps incorrectly placed Isle Royale in the middle of the lake; another that Franklin heard stories of fabulous copper deposits. From atop the mountain, a hiker can see meadows of summer-faded grass, flecked with yarrow and thistle. To the north, past a jungle of evergreens and miles of gloomy water, is the Sleeping Giant: a range of hills shaped like a reclining man. It’s 15 miles away, on the tip of Ontario’s Sibley Peninsula, sharply drawn beneath clouds that overarch like a drawn-up curtain.

My trip to Isle Royale was incomplete, though, because I didn’t see a moose. I met a fellow hiker who saw one “acting bizarre. It just kept charging through the water, like it was running at something. Maybe it was trying to get the flies off itself.”

Lake Michigan: Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan

 The Sleeping Bear Dunes are the Leelanau Peninsula’s most feminine feature. Lake and sand are female: they change shape constantly, like a woman maturing, giving birth, aging. The Natives must have recognized these feminine qualities: the dunes take their name from a legend about a mother bear who led two cubs across the lake, in flight from a forest fire. The cubs drowned, but the mother waited in the dunes for their return, and was covered with sand. 

The easternmost dune, which faces a parking lot, is a hundred feet tall. I climbed its shifting stairs to begin my long hike toward the lake. On the way to the beach, I passed through a wilderness of sand that supports a thin crop of brittle grass and wildflowers. I checked each plant off my laminated brochure: thistle, aster, basswood, dune grass. The overcast sky rippled like the lake on one of its gray evenings. I was descending my fourth dune, or maybe my fifth, when I encountered a hiker headed inland. 

“How much farther to the lake?” I asked him.

“You’re almost there.”

I was almost there for the next half hour. The crests of each dune are crimped, and on every peak, I expected to see the lake. Instead, I saw another barren depression. It was like marching through the Badlands. When I finally glimpsed the water, it filled the ragged bowl of the crest ahead of me. But then, the more I walked, the less water I saw. I was descending toward the shore, so each peak gave way to a narrower slice. 

Once I heard the white noise of surf in my left ear, I knew I was almost there. But Lake Michigan still took me by surprise. I stepped through a gap in the dune grass, and there it was, green as jade. This was the hardest-won beach of my life. Right then, I was too tired to walk back to the parking lot, so I lay down on the sand, using the Sleeping Bear Dunes as my pillow.

Lake Huron: Manitoulin Island, Ontario

A single bridge joins Lake Huron’s Manitoulin Island to the Canadian mainland. The bridge is one lane wide, and its pavement has been worn through to the wooden planks, so a stripe of asphalt runs down the center of the road. Every hour, traffic stops as the bridge swings 90 degrees to open a nautical passage between the North Channel and Georgian Bay.

I drove to the government landing in Providence Bay, on the south shore of the island, in search of a fishing charter. On the way, I passed the Native village of M’Chigeeng and slowed through downtown Mindemoya, with its tavern, hardware store, and Loonie Toonie emporium. Flat gray roads, ditches dusted with samplers of Queen Anne’s lace, spools of hay in open meadows, the water never more than a few curves away. I’ve been on this island, I thought, and then I realized when: Manitoulin is the Lake Huron twin of Washington Island, Wisconsin. Both float at the same latitude. Michigan and Huron are mirror-image lakes, and those islands are mirror images, as well.

Every brochure in the Welcome Centre declares Manitoulin the largest freshwater island in the world. That’s quite a distinction, but the dockmaster was skeptical.

“There’ll be a place in the former Russia that’ll argue that point,” he said, “but we do have the largest lake within a freshwater island in the world, and that can’t be argued.”

My charter boat was the Sandra-Kelly, piloted by a retired nickel miner who flew a Newfoundland flag from the bow, in honor of his native province. (The joke in Canada is that Newfies leave their native island so they can earn enough money to move back.) I paid $150 to catch two salmon, and gave them both to the pilot, so he and his wife could fry them on the grill outside their camper.

I entered Manitoulin on a bridge. I left it on a ferry. The Chi-Cheemaun sails from South Baymouth to Tobermory, where the long arm of the Bruce Peninsula reaches up to catch boats from the North Country.

Lake Erie: Point Pelee, Ontario

Lake Erie’s upper shore is known as “Canada’s Deep South.” It’s covered by the same broadleaf forest that makes the eastern United States so verdant. Canadians find it exotic, and flock here for birdwatching. Point Pelee National Park, a stalactite of land hanging off the underbelly of Ontario, is the only place on the Canadian mainland where it’s possible to dip below the 42nd parallel — the same latitude as Chicago.

This deciduous corner of an evergreen nation is known as Carolinian Canada. Lying south of a line running from Toronto to Grand Bend, it is one-quarter of 1 percent Canada’s landmass, but contains 25 percent of the nation’s people, and grows 25 percent of its crops. Canadians call it the Banana Belt, the Sun Parlor, the Sun Belt. Lake Erie’s waters moderate the weather so trees bud two weeks earlier than anywhere else in the province, and fall is warmer than anywhere else in the country. On the road between Harrow and the park are roadside stands offering trays of deeply colored tomatoes, cherries, cucumbers, plums, strawberries, and carrots — fruits and vegetables that swell to ripeness in the humid summers.

Every 15 minutes, a trolley leaves for the tip of Point Pelee. It drops passengers off on a plank path shaded by elms. To the left is a modernist sculpture: the number 42 striped in maple-leaf red, marking the 42nd parallel. Ahead is a beach, where Point Pelee dwindles to a narrow point splashed by the waves of Lake Erie. It’s not quite the end of Canada — that’s Pelee Island, an hour’s ferry ride away — but it’s as far as you can go on foot.

Lake Ontario: The Niagara Peninsula

The Niagara Peninsula is actually an isthmus, between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Since it is bordered on the third side by New York, it looks like a peninsula on maps of Canada, and nationalists who would like to make the United States disappear have dubbed it so. As the barrier between two Great Lakes, it is rich grape-growing country. On every road between Niagara-on-the-Lake and St. Catharines is a sign that looks like an inverted pyramid of cannonballs, with a curling fuse. The stylized bunch of grapes stands for winery. Niagara must be North America’s wine cellar: nowhere else to do so many vines crawl over such a small patch of dirt. 

At Hillebrand Estates, the tasting room offers ice wine, made from grapes plucked when the temperature reaches minus-10 degrees Celsius, then pressed in a frozen state when the sugar is most concentrated. Ice wine is fermented from pure juice and so requires eight to 10 times more grapes than a normal bottle. 

The Niagara Escarpment, a bluff overlooking Lake Ontario, contributes to the success of grape-growing on the Peninsula. Warm air from the lake prevents spring frosts, raising the temperature five degrees and extending the growing season into the fall, which is essential for bottling Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Air is warmed over the lake, carried over the Escarpment, drops down, and cycles back to the lake, where it is reheated again. It’s the “perfect microclimate” for wine, say vintners. 

(Southwest Michigan and New York’s Finger Lakes, the Great Lakes’ other great wine countries, are also low-lying areas next to lakes.)

The Niagara Peninsula is the most expensive grape-growing land in the world. The Napa Valley, the vineyards of Burgundy — those are rural, but the Peninsula is part of the Golden Horseshoe, the megalopolis that covers the western bell-end of Lake Ontario, from Toronto to Buffalo. That’s one reason a bottle of ice wine costs $85 there.