Walloon Lake, Michigan 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Depth Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
Walloon Lake, carved in Baltic birch at 16 by 20 inches: the branching arms, the deep clear basins, and the shoreline where a century of quiet summers has been spent, each depth contour cut as its own layer.
Walloon spreads through the hills south of Petoskey in a shape all its own, arms reaching in four directions from the main basin, spring-fed and clear to roughly 100 feet at its deepest. This is the lake of Hemingway's boyhood: the family cottage, Windemere, still stands on the north shore, and the summers he spent here surface all through the Nick Adams stories. On the chart, those separate arms each carry their own small stack of layers, so the lake's odd, lovely geometry finally makes sense from above.
Each sheet of birch is laser-cut to a survey contour and stacked by hand, with names engraved rather than printed and acrylic glass protecting the relief inside a solid Baltic birch frame.
Families out here measure time in generations at the same cottage. This chart tends to end up over their mantels.
The village of Walloon Lake sits at the foot of the water, with Petoskey and Bay Harbor minutes north and Boyne country to the south. Its near neighbor across the hills is Lake Charlevoix, and both appear on the Northwest Michigan chart.
- 16 × 20 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water