Fish Creek area is popular with nature lovers - Door County Tourism
Things to do in Door County are as varied as the peninsula's landscape, ranging from poking about in museums and hiking to climbing lighthouse ladders.
Door County - a peninsula jutting into Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin - provides a smorgasbord of attractions and activities that appeal to visitors of all ages.
Tourist activities in Door County
The following suggestions are only a sampling of Door County's leisure time possibilities:
- The Maritime Museum, looking out on the Sturgeon Bay ship canal, chronicles the history of the town’s shipbuilding industry, with turn-of-the-century sailboats and early-day shipbuilding tools as well as the Great Lakes’ most significant exhibit of model ships. Each August, the museum sponsors the Classic Wooden Boat Show & Festival.
- Sturgeon Bay is also the county’s sport fishing center, where guides who have fished Lake Michigan since they were children take anglers out to fish. The catch on the lake side of the peninsula is primarily of lake and brown trout, salmon and steelhead. On the Green Bay side, species include small-mouth bass, northern pike and walleyes as well.
- Cruises on boats like the Leathem D. Smith are popular, too. The Leathem D. Smith was named for its former owner, a shipbuilder/entrepreneur who originated the concepts of self-unloading vessels and container shipping.
- Peninsula State Park, north of Fish Creek, is the place to go for marine views, evergreen groves and meadows bright with wildflowers. Among points of interest within the park, Eagle Bluff is one of the more accessible of the county’s ten lighthouses. Paddleboats and kayaks are for rent at the park’s Nicolet Beach, and the five-mile Sunset Trail is a favorite with both bicyclists and hikers (a free bicycle route map is available at the Door County Chamber of Commerce).
- Hikers looking for more rugged trails will find them at the Ridges Sanctuary, a privately owned wildflower preserve and birdwatcher’s paradise on the peninsula’s eastern shore. Nearby at Whitefish Dunes State Park, 93-foot-high "Old Baldy" is the tallest of the giant mounds of sand. You can watch the Lake Michigan surf pound the beach at Newport State Park on the northeast side of the peninsula’s tip and scuba dive among the wrecks of ships and Indian canoes around Port des Morts Strait.
- Washington Island appeals primarily to visitors who don’t want to share their roads and beaches with lots of other people. There are man-made attractions to be sure -- a recreated stave church, three small museums, a few shops and an ostrich farm among them. But people looking for solitude can find it by riding bikes, hiking or taking the roads less traveled where deer and wild turkeys outnumber humans.
- The county’s cultural roots trace back to the 1890s, when excursion boats brought passengers from Chicago’s North Shore to the Egg Harbor/Fish Creek/Ephraim area, which soon caught on as a fashionable summer resort. Through the years, emphasis on the arts has continued, with symphony concerts, legitimate theater, ballet and musical comedy presented throughout the June through October season. From late June to mid-October, Peninsula Players – America’s oldest professional resident summer theater-- puts on plays in an outdoor setting south of Fish Creek and the Ephraim Village Hall. There is also a summer evening concert series at the Birch Creek Music Performance Center in Egg Harbor , and the American Folklore Theatre performs musical comedy under the stars at Peninsula State Park.
- For visitors intent on expanding their horizons, The Clearing at Ellison Bay offers workshops on subjects ranging from rest and relaxation techniques to photography. On the other side of the peninsula, Bjorklunden, a 405-acre estate in Bailey’s Harbor, sponsors 25 week-long seminars on everything from religion to oil painting.
Copyright Connie Emerson. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.
Connie Emerson - Ever since I can remember, going places and seeing new sights has intrigued me. A robin drinking from a puddle after a springtime Paris ...
