Look Close – Every Single Sign for This Michigan Highway Is Wrong

It's the kind of thing most drivers pass right by without a second thought or perhaps even a single glance - the myriad signs that pass by along a highway. For one highway in Northern Michigan, you may start to look with a sideways, cocked-neck stare when you realize that seemingly every single sign is printed incorrectly.

The highway is M-38 which runs the entire base of the Keweenaw Peninsula 42 miles from Baraga to Ontonagon. And all along that stretch the signs that remind you that you're on M-38 or that point drivers to M-38 are all wrong. What's the issue? Unlike other road signs were the letters and numbers are at a clean 90 degree angle, every single instance of '38' is tilted with the 3 and 8 just askew enough to catch the eye. The M is correctly placed, just the numerals. And it's every single shield.

The photo above is the first westbound marker in Baraga. Here's how the east end of the highway looks, also in Baraga where M-38 meets US-41.

M-38 meets M-28 midway through its journey in the Western Upper Peninsula. There are some properly aligned M-38 signs here, but off-kilter ones as well.

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M-38's west end happens where it meets US-45 and M-64 in Ontonagon. Here again - the numbers just aren't aligned within the diamond.

A visitor to the UP caught the highway oddity and shared it to a Facebook group dedicated to strange sighs along America's highways.

I’ve now driven the entire length of M-38 in both directions twice, and it took me until this year to notice this issue with the type on the assurance markers....Every single M-38 shield along the road in both directions had misaligned font (except, apparently where the road is concurrent with M-2[8])… and it looks like the signs have been in place since 2018.

One comment speculated that perhaps a batch of signs was done incorrectly and rather than re-do or scrap that metal, they install the signs anyway. Another was surprised by the subtleness of the error

This kind of thing normally sticks out to me like a sore thumb, but I don’t think I’d have noticed this one. Something about the diamond shape makes it less obvious. Good eye!

So should you find yourself in the rural western UP on M-38, take a look at a batch of highway signs that don't look like anything else in Michigan.