Houghton Lake

Houghton Lake is Michigan's largest inland lake by surface area — 20,044 acres, roughly ten miles north to south, with an average depth of just nine feet. That shallowness is the whole personality of the place: the water warms fast by July, wades out a long way before it gets over your head, and freezes solid enough by late January to hold Tip-Up Town USA, the ice-fishing festival the Houghton Lake Chamber of Commerce has run since 1951. Seventy-six years in, it still fills the ice with tip-ups, a polar bear plunge, a parade, and a dog show that outdraws most county fairs. Three communities work the shoreline: Houghton Lake and Houghton Lake Heights along the west and southwest shore, Prudenville tucked into the southeast corner where the lake empties into the Muskegon River. The whole loop runs on W. Houghton Lake Drive — M-55 by its highway name — a strip of supper clubs, bait shops, and mini-golf that has more in common with a Wisconsin Dells than with the wine-country hush up at Torch Lake or Walloon. Nobody pretends otherwise, and the prices reflect it: a family of four eats dinner at the Limberlost for less than two entrees would run up north. The lake's shallow water and steady walleye and pike fishing keep it a working-class fishing lake first, a resort lake second — most of the boat traffic is pontoons and bass boats, not wake-surf rigs. The Cut River connects it to Higgins Lake to the north, close enough that a lot of visitors split a week between the two: Higgins for the clearer, cold-spring-fed swimming, Houghton Lake for the fishing, the ice-cream stands on the strip, and the 30-mile shoreline loop nobody drives in one sitting. Come for a July weekend and it's a boat-and-bar town; come the last week of January and it's the busiest patch of ice in the state.