cana island lighthouse

If you Google “best Door County photography spots,” you’ll get a list of 25 places written by someone who came up for a long weekend. The list will include every single town on the peninsula. We’ve been on this water with cameras for 23 years and we’d argue 9 spots is the right number, ranked. Three rules first: this list is for visitors with a camera (any camera, including a phone) who want to come home with images that don’t look like every other Door County tourist’s. We’re not ranking by what’s most-photographed (that’s just the parking-lot list). We’re ranking by what actually rewards the time you spend there. 1. Cave Point cliff edge at golden hour The 30 minutes before sunset, when the limestone cliff face goes copper. Stand at the bluff edge above the main cave, frame the…

Cana Island Lighthouse is the postcard most visitors have already seen before they get to Door County. Eight-and-a-half-acre island, 89-foot tower, working light since 1869, connected to the mainland by a stone causeway you can sometimes walk and sometimes wade. The kind of place that shows up on every Wisconsin tourism brochure. What’s less obvious is how to actually visit it. There are three ways to do it, they are not the same experience, and the choice depends mostly on weather and what you’re already up to that day. Here’s what 23 years of pointing guests at this lighthouse has taught us. What Cana Island actually is Cana Island sits off the Lake Michigan side of the Door County peninsula, in the Bailey’s Harbor area. The island is small (8.7 acres), the lighthouse is the second-tallest on the Wisconsin Great…