Lake-Effect Country — a stop on M-22 South.
This shore has a winter that people who have not experienced it genuinely do not believe, and it is caused by the same water you have been admiring.
Here is the mechanism. In late autumn the lake is still relatively warm while the air over Canada has turned bitterly cold. That cold air blows across three hundred miles of open, unfrozen water, picking up heat and moisture the whole way. Then it hits land, is forced up over the shoreline dunes and hills, cools, and dumps everything it picked up as snow.
The results are extreme and extremely local. This side of Michigan can take well over a hundred inches in a season while towns a couple of hours inland get a third of that. Bands of it set up and sit over one town for hours — it can snow four inches an hour in one place while it is sunny five miles away.
It shuts off when the lake finally freezes over, which is why late-season lake-effect fades.
For anybody driving this road in winter: the highway is plowed and maintained, but visibility inside a snow band drops to nothing very suddenly, and drifting across open stretches is a real hazard. It is also, genuinely, the reason this region has a serious skiing and snowmobiling economy. All that snow has to be good for something.