Teafall

I drink tea almost every day, and it did me good on Sunday to see a tea waterfall—a teafall, you could call it. Imagine thousands of gallons of tea every second making a sharp drop to a frothy tea river below.

Actually, the hues of the Upper Tahquamenon Falls, which I’m describing, were more complicated than that, but stripes of tea brown were the dominant feature, along with pale yellow stripes and ribbons of more standard waterfall white. Turns out that the Tahquamenon River drains UP wetlands that contain vegetation that contributes tannic acid to its waters, so a tea river and a teafall isn’t too far off the mark.

Invariably, tourist literature about Tahquamenon notes that the upper falls are the “second largest after Niagara Falls” “east of the Mississippi” and “in terms of volume,” a contorted grasp at superlatives that does the falls no justice. This is a teafall. Is that not cool enough? Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t impress with its drop, or roaring fall flow, both of which add up to a substantial bit of turbulent water. But it ain’t Niagara, and it doesn’t need to be.

Probably because the falls are toward the northeast corner of the Upper Peninsula, and not really on the way to or from anywhere, they beat Niagara by a mile not in terms of height or flow, but in restrained tourist infrastructure. Located in Tahquamenon Falls State Park, the entire tourist establishment consists of a sizable parking lot—not close to being full when we were there—a gift shop, snack bar and brewpub. I had a glass of the “tannin red” from the pub while the Yuriko and the kids ate ice cream from the snack bar. Not bad at all.

A footpath leads away from these buildings, and toward a handful of wooden observation decks along the Tahquamenon River, including one at the lip of the falls, in the style of the overlook at Niagara. A steady trickle of people came to see that falls, but not hordes. Ann and Lilly romped around and threw rocks into the river (a persistent activity on this trip—where are the rocks? I see water.). Yuriko and I enjoyed at the oddity of the falls, the lushness of the surrounding forest, and the warmth of the UP post-storm afternoon. You don’t need a lot of tourist infrastructure at a place like that.