Lake Leelanau & the Narrows Country — a stop on M-22 North.
Inland on your right runs Lake Leelanau — a long narrow lake that nearly cuts this peninsula in half, in two arms joined by a narrows at the village of Lake Leelanau.
It's about twenty-one miles of water end to end, and it's the reason the peninsula's road network looks the way it does: you can't drive straight across the middle, so everything has to go around one end or the other. That single geographic fact has shaped every settlement up here.
The lake drains north through the Leland River — the short stretch that runs past the Fishtown shanties and into Lake Michigan. That drop is why there was a dam and a mill at Leland in the first place, and why the village exists at all. Antoine Manseau dammed the river back in eighteen fifty-three, and the town grew around the mill.
It's a working lake now in the summer sense — cottages, boats, good fishing for smallmouth bass and pike, and a couple of small marinas. In winter the ice fishing shanties go out.
You'll catch glimpses of it through the trees for the next several miles. Then the road climbs a little and the orchards start, and we run up toward the tip.