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Lake Superior & Saux Head Lake

Dawn. Ansel Adams called this “sweet light” and it paints the pines and the frozen arc of the bay with warm yellow-red light.

Welcome to “Elk Ranch East”, on Lake Superior and Saux Head Lake.

People often find it difficult to choose between the serenity of an inland lake and the drama of Lake Superior. Inland lakes offer warm water swimming and water sports, sailing, canoeing, fishing and serenity. Superior is on a different scale: dramatic, grand, beautiful! Gulls bank and dive overhead, storm clouds sweep across the lake, crashing waves wash the shore and ore boats pass in the night, bound for distant ports.

This property has 2,000 feet of frontage: 1,000 feet on a quiet Huron Mt. Lake with granite hills and sand beaches, and also 1,000 feet on Lake Superior. It is a setting that changes with your mood: majestic and grand, or peaceful and residential. In front is what landscape architects call the “limitless dimension” of Lake Superior, the greatest of the Great Lakes, an inland sea of crystal blue water. Behind lies the serene inland lake. Above it all you hear the soft sigh of wind in the red pines.

This land between these lakes is high, peaceful, and beautiful with old growth red and white pines, mixed hardwoods, and long views of sandy beaches. To the north a long, sweeping point extends into Superior, shelter from the prevailing westerly wind. Offshore to the southeast, Granite Island lies a few miles off shore.

This combination of a scenic mountain lake and Lake Superior, with high, beautifully timbered land between, is rare. I have seen nothing else like it in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The log home was completed in 1998 and was featured on the cover of Log Home Living that July. It was also profiled in the September issue of the magazine, and later the floor plan was featured as “one of the seventeen best.”

It was built to last with large, full-scribed red pine logs (even in the five dormers), massive fireplaces of stones picked from the Superior shore, and many handmade fixtures. The unusual and wonderful furnishings and accents in this home are too numerous and unique to describe here, but they go with the house and are listed in detail on the attached document together with much additional information including taxes and room dimensions. You can read it by clicking right here. I’ll mention just a few examples:

The front door is of triple laminated cherry set on five stainless ball bearing hinges. This door weighs 200 pounds, is 2 1/2 inches thick, and was hand-carved with scenes of deer, loons and oak leaves by Jeff Ayers of Jeff Ayers Custom Woodworking. A knarled oak spreads its branches across the glass, and a pair of flying mallards is etched in the glass. This spectacular front door is accented by bronze hardware.

A giant chandelier, “The Buffalo Hunt,” dominates the great room in front of a massive Lake Superior stone fireplace. The chandelier is 48-inches in diameter and was crafted of hand-hammered steel with a rawhide tepee set atop a hand painted shield. Around the perimeter, mounted horsemen with lances raised pursue running buffalo. This dramatic fixture was designed and crafted by Fighting Bear Antiques of Jackson, Wyoming.

There are five bedrooms, four and a half baths, four fireplaces, and a great room/kitchen pictured on this page. The home has about 5,000 square feet of finished living space on three levels. Ancillary buildings include a two-car garage and a log gazebo near the water with a hot tub. Balconies above and large decks below ring the house and lead to a stone fire pit near the lake and the hot tub/gazebo.

This land was originally part of Louis Kaufman’s “Granot Loma,” a property from the last century that is often called “Michigan’s Biltmore Estate.” The Saux Head Point Association purchased and divided it into seventeen large parcels with a 640-acre common area of forest, a 100’ common access site on Saux Head Lake, and a full mile of vacant Lake Superior frontage to the north.

This property includes two adjacent parcels, Saux Head parcels #14 & #15, with a total of 2,000 feet of lake frontage: 1,000 feet on Lake Superior facing the sunrise to the east, and 1,000 feet on Saux Head Lake facing the sunsets in the west. Sand frontage on Lake Superior near Marquette starts at $1,000 a front foot, and frontage on the better inland lakes also sells in the $1,000/front foot range. It is difficult to put a value on the privacy afforded by the land and lakeshore held in common.

Saux Head is a 3/4-mile long, 137-acre Huron Mountain lake with some 18-foot deep water and granite hills along the southern shore. The rugged Huron Mountains protect a wilderness that extends 50 miles to the west. This is the wildest land in Michigan, and many believe it is the most beautiful. The Huron Mountains are cherished and defended by those who love big, wild land.

The owner wrote a little about how he found the property and why, and you can read it here.

Recently Bike Magazine proclaimed Marquette to be one of “The 5 Best Places to Live & Ride.” There’s endless room for snowmobiling, cross county skiing, fishing, hunting, exploring and plain wandering with friends or, if you choose, very much all by yourself.

Marquette is one of the ten newest “All American Cities.” It’s the Upper Peninsula’s largest and it is just 20 minutes to the south. Marquette offers the regional hospital, regional airport, regional seaport, and a variety of city services, shopping, and cultural activities…even Division I sports (hockey) at Northern Michigan University. There is an excellent downhill ski area, Marquette Mt., and an excellent harbor for big-water boating. The Noquemanon 12k cross-country ski trail system above the north shore of Saux Head Lake is very beautiful and a treat for those who love winter. Go the other way on Hwy 550 and you’ll arrive at the small town of Big Bay at the northern end the road.

This 30-mile shoreline between Marquette and Big Bay appears lightly developed from Hwy. 550. In fact the lakeshore is home to the largest collection of high-end homes on the Lake Superior shore. From Marquette, invisible from the road, you will find them at Middle Bay, Middle Island Point, Partridge Bay, Granot Loma, Saux Head, Lake Independence, Squaw Beach, and just north of Big Bay, at the Huron Mt. Club. There is nothing else like that in the U.P.

Out of town this country feels like a frontier, and bald eagles, pileated woodpeckers, moose, black bears and timber wolves support that impression, but it is minutes from the U.P.’s largest city. There is a wind today out on Superior, and I can hear the lake. It’s a wonderful place to live and you should see it. Mother Nature conditions the air, and it smells of pine.

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The information presented in this web site is and by nature will likely always be a "work in progress" subject to errors, omissions and revision. It is intended as a primer for those interested in buying U.P. real estate and contains personal observations and opinions with which others may disagree. It was obtained from sources deemed reliable, but is not warranted by Dick Huey or Huey Real Estate.