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.
The only Great Lake entirely inside the United States, rendered as stacked birch from the Straits of Mackinac down to the Indiana shore. Every contour on this chart is a real depth line, cut as its own layer.
Lake Michigan runs 307 miles north to south with more than 1,600 miles of shoreline, and it reaches 923 feet at its deepest point off the Wisconsin coast. That geography is legible in the wood: the deep mid-lake trench sits many layers down, while the long shallow shelf along the eastern beaches, the one that makes the water so swimmable from Muskegon to Sleeping Bear, stays near the top sheet. The dunes, the piers, the big water in between, all of it in proportion.
Each sheet of Baltic birch is laser-cut to a survey contour and stacked in order, with place names engraved rather than printed. The finish brings up the grain and an acrylic glass front protects the relief. The solid birch frame comes in Dark or Light.
Every family that summers on this lake has their town on this chart, and most can find their beach.
Engraved along its shores are Chicago and Milwaukee at the south and west, Green Bay behind the Door Peninsula, Traverse City tucked into Grand Traverse Bay, and the Manitou and Fox islands off the Leelanau coast. For a closer look at particular water, see the Chicago lakefront chart, Door County, or the full Great Lakes chart.
- 16 × 20 in or 24.5 × 31 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light
- 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