Earlier this month, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center put much of the northern United States under a geomagnetic storm watch tied to a solar flare — and for a few nights, it delivered. The aurora borealis pushed farther south than it usually reaches, far enough to paint the sky over Lake Superior's shoreline in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, visible to the naked eye from beaches that don't get a show like this more than once every few years.
We didn't want to just print a photo of it. We wanted a patch you'd genuinely stop and look at up close — the kind of detail that holds up whether it's stitched onto a hat or matted on a wall. So we built two, in two very different materials, and honestly, we think they're some of the best-rendered pieces we've put on a cap.
A Night Sky in Polished Steel
The Lake Superior Aurora Trucker Hat is built from a polished stainless steel bezel wrapped around a photo-quality UV print — not embroidery, not a flat sticker, an actual printed image with the same tonal range as the night itself. Ribbons of green and violet light fall over a silhouette of shoreline mountains, reflected in the dark water below in a way that catches the light differently depending on the angle you're looking from. Stars are scattered faintly through the sky above the aurora, the kind of small detail that's easy to miss and satisfying to notice. It's stunning in person and up close, in a way a photo of it can only half capture.
Shop the Lake Superior Aurora Trucker Hat →
The Same Sky, in Carbon Fiber
The Lake Superior Diamond Trucker Hat takes the same night and gives it a completely different texture. It's the same photo-quality UV-print process, set this time inside a diamond frame with a matte black carbon-fiber weave border, with the aurora rising behind a stand of pine trees rendered in real silhouette detail — individual needles and branches instead of a flattened tree-shape stand-in. The carbon-fiber texture around the border isn't a flat color fill either; it has the same subtle weave pattern you'd expect to see on an actual sheet of the material. Next to the Aurora's polished steel, it reads more rugged, more like a night spent actually standing on that shoreline than looking at it through a window.
Shop the Lake Superior Diamond Trucker Hat →
The patching on these hats is pretty stunning. DO NOT BE SURPRISED TO GET STOPPED BY STRANGERS!!!!!!
Grab the Aurora in polished steel, the Diamond in carbon fiber, or both.
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Lake Ontario Is Now Lake America. We Made the Hat.
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