Temperance River State Park

About this park

Temperance River State Park, established in 1957, takes its genuinely unusual name from a bit of North Shore wordplay: unlike every other river along this stretch of Lake Superior, the Temperance River historically carried no sandbar at its mouth, its waters flowing too deep and strong to let debris accumulate the way it did at neighboring rivers. Early settlers reasoned that a river with no "bar" deserved the name "Temperance," a tongue-in-cheek label that stuck permanently to both the river and the park that now protects it. The river's narrow, dramatic gorge formed as rushing water cut through the area's soft volcanic bedrock, with swirling sand and gravel boring potholes into the rock that gradually deepened, widened, and connected into the deep channel visible from the park's trails today; some older potholes now sit high and dry where the river has since shifted into a new channel. A trail along the gorge rim leads hikers past the park's waterfalls toward Hidden Falls and onward into the adjoining Superior National Forest, while Carlton Peak, incorporated into the park in more recent decades, now draws dedicated rock climbers to its exposed cliff faces. Both the Temperance and nearby Cross rivers carry official trout-stream designations, and decades of stocking brook, brown, and rainbow trout have established genuinely self-sustaining wild populations of brook and brown trout, supplemented more recently by introduced chinook salmon and steelhead. Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, likely became the first European visitors to this stretch of the North Shore when they passed through in 1660, and the park's vegetation today remains remarkably similar to what those earliest visitors would have seen, a landscape of white and yellow birch, white pine, spruce, fir, and cedar largely unchanged since presettlement times.