The elusive Lake Superior agate. Rockhounds scour Lake Superior’s shoreline for these rare banded beauties—from the western reaches of the Keweenaw Peninsula to the U.P.’s easternmost Whitefish Point. But in the charming town of Grand Marais, you won’t just find these semiprecious gems hiding in the rocky shoreline, you’ll find the “Agatelady” herself.
This article first appeared in Traverse Northern Michigan. Find this story and more when you explore our magazine library. Want Traverse delivered to your door or inbox monthly? View our print subscription and digital subscription options.
It’s a good day when you’re road-tripping to the U.P. just to go rock hunting. Even when that trip falls during a 45-degree cold snap in June.
I cling to that mantra as we cruise north under M-77’s lush forested canopy. A small sign for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore lets us know we’re getting close.
We dip down a hill that reveals the quaint lakeside burg of Grand Marais. The highway transitions into the town’s main drag, Lake Avenue, dotted on either side with colorful restaurants and gift shops before ending promptly at the Lake Superior shoreline at a spot called Agate Beach. It’s clear we’ve reached our destination.
If I were to conjure up my own rock-hunting paradise, it would look a lot like Grand Marais. A quiet, laidback atmosphere. Walking distance to the beach. A spot to grab my morning matcha and a bar with live music (and a killer whitefish sandwich).
We stop briefly to unload our luggage at the Beach Park Motel, and the adrenaline kicks in. The rain I feared we’d get is nowhere to be seen, and the sun has popped out—its first appearance since we left Traverse City.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
“OK then, let’s go hunt for agates!” I declare to my husband. He smiles, knowing full well that rockhounding was always the plan, rain or shine.
I’m no stranger to the beach-combing scene. I’ve picked Petoskey stones, hunted for hunks of Leland blue slag, collected crinoids. Scattered throughout my home, you’ll find bowls and Ziploc bags full of finds from countless beach days—fossils of all shapes and sizes, lake-tumbled beach glass and rocks that simply look cool.
But this weekend I’m in Grand Marais for the coveted Lake Superior agate—a semiprecious gemstone formed 1.1 billion years ago by processes that scientists still don’t fully understand. A seemingly impossible combination of color and structure designed by nature.
There are thousands of agate varieties on Earth, and here in the Lake Superior region, our agates were once thought to be the oldest (disproved only recently by a discovery in Australia). Still, Lake Superior agates—dubbed “LSA’s” and “Lakers” by nerds in the know—are the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, and they’re considered an extremely rare find, especially those larger than a pebble.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Each year, rockhounds flock to beaches from Copper Harbor in the Keweenaw Peninsula to Grand Marais and Whitefish Point—and don’t forget Minnesota, where LSA’s are the state gemstone—looking for Lakers, which often come in warm iron-rich hues like red, orange and yellow, and can exhibit many different designs (experts would call this “self-organized structure”), from fortification (the most common) and circular “eyes,” to red and white candy stripes and straight “water-level” lines, to name a few.
And today, we join the hunt.
We bundle up and drive east of town to a stretch of beach I’ve only read about online, park among a few other beachcombers and tread through the sand to a vast rocky shoreline, with Lake Superior shimmering under the midday sun. The piles and piles of multicolored pebbles are unreal and beautiful … and massively overwhelming.
I fill my lungs with fresh lake air and look down. Immediately I’m distracted by all of the colors and designs that we don’t typically see along Lake Michigan. Yes, I’m looking for agates … but, what is THAT!? Pluck, examine, keep, repeat.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Eventually, I stop my squat-walking—that cute thing rockhounds do when they want to keep their face low to the beach while continuing to slow-mo waddle—and look back to see my husband sitting in a pile of rocks.
Surely, he can’t cover enough ground with that kind of extended break, but after 45 minutes of squat-walking, it does look … relaxing.
I stroll over (my legging pockets now stretched to max capacity) and find him digging through a pebble pile. And I realize it’s genius. These mounds are deep. “This is my ‘sit and dig’ technique,” he announces proudly.
I plop down next to him and follow suit, brushing away layer after layer of rocks. Brush, scan, brush, scan.
And that’s when it happens. A fateful swipe reveals a bright orange glow sitting atop much darker stones.
My heart leaps. A piece of beach glass maybe?
I quickly pluck the translucent treasure and cradle it in front of my face. That’s when I see the banding, and a surprisingly detailed gradient of white, creamsicle and burnt orange. I gasp, jaw agape, before running over to my husband for a celebratory hug.
It’s a Lake Superior agate.
I’m vibrating with excitement as I carefully stow the small gem in my camera bag.
Tomorrow, I’ll show it to the Agatelady.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Walking into Karen Brzys’ Agatelady Rock Shop, I’m greeted by Peruvian music and more agates, rocks and minerals than I’ve ever seen in one place.
Karen’s whimsical artwork hangs in the windows—translucent slices of Brazilian agate welded together in different patterns (a sun, made with a round center agate and oval agate “rays,” is my favorite). Other agate slices that she’s fashioned into lampshades glow atop antique Tiffany brass bases. And directly in front of me: bins and bins of raw Lake Superior agates in about every shape and color you could imagine.
It’s heaven.
True to her name, it doesn’t take long to realize that Karen “Agatelady” Brzys knows just about everything there is to know about the elusive Lakers. When she’s not running the shop, writing books or creating art, Karen’s reading the latest research on agates, even traveling downstate to have international studies translated at the University of Michigan.
Her thirst for knowledge is admirable, especially considering she’s an unlikely rockhound.
“I was blind until I was eight,” she says; her condition was caused by exposure to too much oxygen in an incubator as an infant. Karen’s vision improved steadily throughout her life, and doctors told her the fact that she can see at all is a miracle. “I don’t see well, but I see well enough to get a driver’s license and identify agates,” she laughs.
Karen grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and spent her childhood summers in Grand Marais, where her Finnish grandmother was born and her mother was raised. It was here that Karen met Axel Niemi, owner of Grand Marais’ Gitche Gumee Agate and History Museum, which he opened in 1947. Axel, whose parents also emigrated from Finland, managed the Woodland Park Campground by day, and (when he wasn’t hunting for agates) entertained tourists at the museum in the evenings. Karen spent many a summer night sitting on the front porch of the museum, waiting for Axel to return from his day job.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
He gladly took her under his wing.
“He never had children, so he sort of adopted me,” Karen says. “He put rocks under my face, because I could only see three inches … and he would teach me about them.”
At the age of 10, with her sight improving, Axel had Karen look through a telescope one evening. She peeked through the eyepiece and saw Saturn’s rings—a moment that changed everything for her.
“Axel said to me, ‘Karen, given your eyesight problems, if you can see the rings of Saturn, you can do anything,’” she recalls. “And that was the first day of my life. I believed that to be true.”
Karen went on to earn advanced degrees—a bachelor’s in natural resources and a master’s in higher education administration—and she even went down 13 different career paths. But working with agates always called to her.
In 1994, she moved full-time to Grand Marais and co-founded Lake Superior Brewing at the Dune Saloon. (Unsurprisingly, the brewpub’s logo is a banded agate, and the saloon still has a rainbow of agate slices adorning its front windows.)
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Four years later, Karen had the opportunity to purchase the museum from one of Axel’s friends and promptly renovated the downtown building before opening the following year. She used the money she made to publish books—seven to date, from the history of the U.P. to the geology of Lake Superior’s stones.
But running the agate shop hasn’t always been easy, especially during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. It seemed that for every kind, interested rockhound who came into the museum, there was a boorish tourist demanding info on finding agates, or insisting that she identify buckets full of beach rocks. She found that folks interested in chatting or buying a souvenir would tire of waiting and leave, and those wanting free information never left.
In 2022, Karen made the impossible decision to close the museum, and a year later, she opened the Agatelady Rock Shop two miles south of town, near the eastern entrance of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Even though she’s still only a couple minutes from the beach, she’s found that most of the folks who make the effort to visit now are genuinely interested in the shop’s geological treasures.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Karen also decided to set some healthy boundaries with her visitors—semi-retirement shop hours are limited, but rockhounds can set up private appointments, classes and lectures on other days. As a bonus for those who venture to her new shop, she’ll look at three of your rocks for free and let you know whether they’re agates.
And if a rock is, in fact, a prized LSA?
“If it’s an agate, I ring the bell,” she says, walking over to the front corner of her shop. A stately bell hangs against the wall; she swings the clapper back and forth so I can hear. “They love it … some people cry.”
That kind of sentimental reaction may sound odd to some. But when you’re a rockhound who 1) spends your free time either looking for agates or seeing other people find agates, and 2) nerds out and understands the significance of this rare piece of geological history … well, you get it. This author is personally a bit of both, but when it comes down to it, I just really love art found in nature. Plus, who doesn’t like hunting for ancient buried treasure?
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
As Karen tells it, Lake Superior agates were formed 1.1 billion years ago in the Midcontinental Rift, through a very specific series of events that involved basaltic lava, gas pockets and acid rain (cool, right?).
“The most interesting thing about agates,” Karen says, “is we don’t know exactly how they formed. We can make diamonds, sapphires, other precious and semiprecious gems. And there have been people that have attempted to make agates; I’ve had calls from chemists over the years.”
But no one has solved the puzzle.
There isn’t any single definition of what an agate is. But they’re identified by two main characteristics: more than 50 percent of the rock has to be micro-crystalline silica (usually chalcedony), and there has to be self-organized structure—we’re most familiar with concentric banding, but there are about 30 different types of structure an agate can have.
Lake Superior’s beaches are full of “agate imposters” like jasper and chert, which can share similar characteristics. But the main difference, Karen explains, is translucency. Jasper and chert consist of round microcrystals (smaller than white blood cells), which causes them to be opaque. In agates, the microcrystals are fiber-shaped, and that geometry allows for transparency.
LSA’s, however, are tricky; some sections can be so iron-rich that they lose their translucency. I think back to the tip of my recent find—the dark orange color is much less see-through than the white and light orange bands. An iron-rich Laker.
“Would you mind looking at the rock I found yesterday?” I ask eagerly at the end of our chat. While I’m fairly confident in my find, I feel nerves coming on. The Agatelady’s judgment is what counts, and I really want her stamp of approval.
I hand the gem to Karen and she reaches back for her magnifying headlamp. She takes her time inspecting, quietly noting the colors and the banding.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
And then … nothing.
Was I too cocky?
Did the imposters fool me?
Karen finally smiles, gets up from her chair, and walks over to the corner of the shop. She gleefully rings the agate bell.
I let out a yip and do a happy dance for my lucky find—it’s hard to contain my bliss in this joyful moment shared between rock nerds.
I’m in awe of the beauty, the rarity, of this treasure found. Of the remarkable gems that come from the depths of our own Lake Superior. But it’s also more than that.
In a world that keeps getting louder and faster, I feel present and at peace when I’m on a beach picking through a pile of rocks. No schedule, no goal. Rockhounding demands nothing of us, except a bit of focus and discernment, and in return, it rewards us with a meditative moment. Find or no find.
There’s a singular magic in slowing down and spending time to literally, and figuratively, ground yourself. And just like an agate, it can’t be replicated.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta