Mullett Lake

Mullett Lake is the deep end of the Inland Waterway — 16,630 acres and 148 feet at its bottom, the last and largest lake before the Cheboygan River carries the chain's 38 miles of connected water north into Lake Huron. It takes its name from John Mullett, who surveyed this stretch of Michigan with William Burt in the early 1840s; Burt's own lake sits one channel over, and the two names have shared a map ever since. Mullett's depth is its real character — cold enough to hold lake trout and brown trout alongside walleye and muskellunge, and deep enough to have produced the state-record lake sturgeon. Topinabee is the only town that actually sits on Mullett Lake's shore, a village named for a Potawatomi chief and built up around a railroad hotel Horace Pike raised in the 1880s. It has stayed small on purpose: Breakers Bar & Grill and Cafe Noka both look straight at the water from their patios, and Topinabee Market & Deli, across from the public beach, is the one stop that covers gas, groceries, and a cold six-pack under one roof. Nothing here has scaled past a village, and that is the appeal. Cheboygan, twelve miles north by road or by the North Central State Trail's lakeside run, is where a week on Mullett Lake actually resupplies — the hospital, the hardware stores, Family Fare's aisles, a Main Street with an opera house and its own coffee roaster. It is also where the lake lets go: the Cheboygan River locks carry boats from Mullett's fresh water into Lake Huron, and Nautical North's tours run that exact transition. Summers run full at Aloha State Park's protected harbor and twin beaches; by late September, Golden River Orchard's pumpkin patch and a thinner trail crowd mark the turn toward a lake that spends its winter under ice and snowmobile traffic instead of boat wakes.