Sugar Loaf Mountain is the kind of hike that makes you feel like you cheated. It sits just north of Marquette, Michigan, the climb takes well under an hour, and the payoff at the top belongs to a trail three times as long. We hiked it on a perfectly sunny spring day, with fresh green coming in on the trees, and got two completely different views for the price of one climb.
The stairs, so many stairs
From the parking area off County Road 550 the trail splits into two routes up, a gentler one and a more difficult one, and they rejoin for the final push. Whichever you choose, the mountain saves its real signature for the upper section: staircases. Long runs of wooden stairs stacked one after another, right when your legs have started negotiating with you. It is a short hike, not always an easy one, and we earned the summit at whatever pace the video shows. We are calling it a deliberate pace.
View number one: Lake Superior to the horizon
The first overlook points you at Lake Superior, and the scale of it never stops being strange. It is a lake that behaves like an ocean: water to the horizon, no far shore, just blue meeting blue. From roughly 470 feet up, on a clear day, you can watch the color of the water shift from shoreline green to deep open-water navy. We stood there long enough that other hikers cycled through behind us twice.
View number two: Presque Isle and the shoreline
Walk the summit rocks to the other viewing platform and the scene changes completely. This side looks along the shoreline toward Presque Isle Park, the forested peninsula that juts into the lake north of Marquette, with the coast curving away below. Same mountain, two different postcards, which is exactly what the video title promises. If you have to pick one platform because of crowds, do not. Visit both. They are a two-minute walk apart.
Worth knowing before you go
A few practical notes from our trip. Parking is a simple roadside lot and it fills up on nice weekends, so go early or late. The stairs make the hike doable for most fitness levels but they are real stairs, and in spring the lower trail can hold mud and leftover ice in the shaded spots. Bring a windbreaker even on a warm day, because the summit catches everything coming off the lake. And budget more time than the trail length suggests. The hike is short. The standing and staring is not.
Sugar Loaf is now our default answer when someone visiting Marquette asks for one easy thing to do outside. Trails this short do not usually pay out views this big, and this one does it twice.
The climb, the stairs, and both views are in the video. Watch it on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.