MIMichigan field entry
Da Yoopers Tourist Trap
Ishpeming, MI
An Ishpeming gift-and-rock shop where Yooper souvenirs and Upper Peninsula minerals spill into a roadside museum of homemade inventions, an underground mining display, chainsaw sculptures, giant working machinery and the famously oversized Gus and Big Ernie.
Da Yoopers Tourist Trap combines a legitimate U.P. souvenir and mineral business with a sprawling collection of deliberately ridiculous homemade machinery, sculpture, mining displays and roadside humor.
Field notes
Why it belongs
Gift shop, souvenir store, rock-and-mineral shop, local-products market, roadside museum, mining display, folk-art environment and giant-machinery attraction.
The store's inventory makes it a real tourist retail stop; the enormous working inventions outside make it impossible to confuse with an ordinary souvenir shop.
Da Yoopers Tourist Trap in Ishpeming sells Upper Peninsula gifts, apparel, specialty products, books, collectibles and changing locally themed merchandise alongside Rock Knockers' selection of U.P. minerals. Outside and around the property is a very different kind of inventory: homemade 'Yooper innovations,' chainsaw sculptures, mining displays and enormous mechanical jokes. Two of the best-known are Gus, a giant operational chainsaw, and Big Ernie, a giant working rifle display. The attraction and tourism sources use world-record language for both; OddStops attributes those claims instead of certifying them.
Store contents
What you will find
Directory categories
Known for
- Yooper gifts
- U.P. souvenirs
- Local merchandise
- Rock Knockers
- Upper Peninsula minerals
- Marquette Iron Range minerals
- Copper Country minerals
- Gus giant chainsaw
- Big Ernie giant rifle
- Yooper innovations
- Chainsaw sculptures
- Underground mining display
- Roadside humor