Day Hill Loop

The Day Hill Loop climbs from the Lake Superior shoreline through the inland forest of Split Rock Lighthouse State Park to reach the elevated ridge above the lighthouse, providing a bird's-eye perspective on the famous lighthouse and its dramatic cliff setting that is unavailable from any road. The trail departs from the campground area and climbs through a succession of vegetation zones moving uphill: first a Lake Superior shoreline community of alder and willow, then a boreal forest of balsam fir and spruce on the lower slope, then a mixed forest of birch and aspen on the middle elevation, and finally an exposed ridge-top community of jack pine and bearberry on the thin soils above. The ridge-top section traverses Day Hill, the highest point in the park at approximately 700 feet above sea level, where a cleared viewpoint provides the sweeping panorama for which the loop is known. The lighthouse appears from above as a white cylinder at the cliff edge, the keeper's buildings arranged around it in a pattern invisible from below, and Lake Superior extends to the horizon beyond. The basalt and anorthosite bedrock of the cliff face is visible from above as a fractured surface where ice wedging has calved enormous blocks into the lake below over millennia. The descent follows the bluff edge south before dropping steeply through cedar forest back to the shoreline trail for the return to the trailhead.