Page 57 - Manistique Visitor Guide - 2023

Manistique Visitors Guide 57
A Rare Sight
The Big Spring
By The Michigan DNR
stream that winds through the adjacent forest to empty in Indian Lake,” according to the Bessemer Herald.
Visitors to Palms Book State Park, located north of Manistique in Schoolcraft County, were been treated in March to an unfamiliar sight, that of seeing the park’s famous natural spring topped with a cover of ice.
The spring maintains a constant water tem- perature year-round, with more than 10,000 gallons of water per minute gushing from cracks in the underlying limestone.
Kitch-iti-kipi, the Big Spring, is Michigan’ s largest natural spring. A description of the site was published in newspapers across the state in April 1929, during the week Palms Book became a state park.
Another description of the location, from an article published in 1955 in the Escanaba Daily Press, offered a tip of the hat to John I. Bellaire, a local merchant who became entranced by the emerald waters of the spring.
“The ‘Big Spring,’ which received its name from an old legend, is 45 feet in depth and about 200 feet across. Strange incrustations festoon its crystal depths. The overflow from its seething bottom find outlet in a rushing
Bellaire, who initially found the spring being used as a logging dump, visited the site almost daily to sit and gaze at waters.
“Today the thousands who board the raft to travel over the spring marvel as they
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