Where in Northern Michigan Does the ‘Great Lakes’ Become the ‘Northwoods’?

There's a long running, and exceedingly tired debate, that flares up on social media often about "where does Up North" begin in Michigan. The question often comes down to identifiable roads across the state such as US 10 or M-55 as demarcations of "The North."

There is a much more interesting debate that divides Michigan into two distinct cultural regions: the Great Lakes and the Northwoods.

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Geographers divide the entirety of the United States into 36 distinct cultural regions with Michigan split among just two of them, a region labeled the Great Lakes and one called the Northwoods. These two regions are a part of 5 subregions within the greater Midwest.

Michigan's Great Lakes and Northwoods Regions Defined

The Great Lakes consist of eastern Wisconsin south of Green Bay, Chicagoland and northern Indiana through the coastlines of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York State. Roughly two-thirds of Michigan's Lower Peninsula is included in the Great Lakes region.

The Northwoods consist of Northern Michigan, defined as the northern third of the Lower Peninsula and all of the Upper Peninsula as well as Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota from Duluth to International Falls.

The other cultural regions of the Midwest are snoozily named Upper and Lower Midwest as well as the Ohio Valley.

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The classification really makes some sense when you consider this is a cultural divide. Would you consider that someone who live in, say, Ironwood has more in common with a resident of Duluth than Detroit. Similarly, wouldn't a Grand Rapidian find more commonalities with someone from Buffalo than Grand Marais?

So where is the line drawn? Roughly US-10. And that makes a great deal of sense. Michigan's population centers are all below that highway. The Rust Belt industrialism of Michigan cities are all in that southern two-thirds of the Lower Peninsula.

Everything north of US 10 is vast, rural and woodsy. It's not often that the term Northwoods gets connected to Michigan but the area is very much akin to the similarly aligned regions of Wisconsin and Minnesota. With a rugged stretch of Northern Michigan among the deepest and most remote wilderness in the United States, the classification is more than apt.