Customer Reviews

61 Gems on Highway 61: A Guide to Minnesota's North Shore--from Well-Known Attractions to Best-Kept Secrets

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I bought this book on impulse at a Barnes and Noble store and I am so glad I did. My wife and I have been to the north shore of Lake Superior dozens times seeing the same old things. Different times of year but basically we hit the highlights each time we went. After buying 61 Gems Along Highway 61 we made another trip "up north" and saw places we never new existed. Many of these places are not the usual tourist stops and are not listed on hand-out literature you get at the rest stops. I think our favorite is the pink beach. A beach lined with pink stones that goes on for a good distance.

This book is for you if you have not been to the North Shore or like us, who had been there many times and missed all these wonderful places. And to top it off Amazon sells it really cheap!

We live near Hwy 61 so it was exciting to read about some of the places we've missed. We originally bought the book to go with some geocaching we wanted to do. We got a good read and our geocaches!

As a North Shore writer and outdoors enthusiast myself, I found this little book to be big on ideas. There is so much more to the North Shore than the greatest hits of Gooseberry Falls and Betty's Pies. Way way too many people go no further up the shore than Split Rock Lighthouse. This book makes it easy for visitors with some yearn to explore. Not that I'm any ultimate test of this, but I spend a lot of time exploring up the shore and I found a number of places in the book, especially up past Grand Marais, that I had not visited or even heard of, like Two Fish House Beach.

The only changes I would suggest in the book are to make the directions more consistent and to do some fact-checking. A lot of folks rely on milepost signs (from 1 to 150 from Duluth to the Pigeon River), but only a few of the entries use this system. Also, I got really confused in the entry for Gem 27, Madeira pullout. The authors seem to combine three different nearby spots in one place: the old trading post, the historic pullout and the Gold Rock area a few miles up the shore.

If you love the North Shore, get this book and find all sorts of new places to enjoy.