Shedder and Shorts

We left for the Jordan River Pathway early Saturday and got to the parking lot a Deadman’s Hill at about 10am. As we got our packs together at the car, a rabbit appeared within a few feet. It was a domestic rabbit, an odd thing to see in a parking lot in the middle of the woods. Just about the time we had our packs on and were ready to head out, it started raining. We dove back into the car and napped for about 30 minutes while it poured. When things started to let up the rabbit was no where to be seen and we donned our rain gear and started down the trail.

Fen in the Jordan River Valley

The loop from Deadman’s Hill (named because a logger died on the hill) to Pinney Bridge walk-in campground and back is 18.5 miles. We hike south on the west side of the river. The first several miles of trail twists through beaver ponds and fen before meeting the Jordan River. The river is a beautiful sandy-bottomed stream of cold, clear water. The shore along it is often peat, and the numerous fallen logs in the river turn it into a maze through which the current twists. We saw some interesting things along the way: two moths in congress, lots of american toads, and some deer flies eating three dead carrion beetles. We got to the Pinney Bridge campground around 4 p.m. and set up the tent, at which point it started to rain again. We hung out in the tent for a while as rain fell, and then went down to the river before having dinner and turning in.

Pinney Bridge campground is nice. If you don’t walk south like we did it’s about a 1/4 mile walk in from Pinney Road. There are maybe 15 sites circling a meadow that used to be a logging camp. We had fun imagining the logging camp, and Anna joked about a Park Service “evening program” about the grounds’ history as first a logging camp, then a Conservation Corp camp, and finally a state campground.

Snail on the Jordan River Pathway

Sunday was a beautiful day, especially in the woods. We hit the trail for the 10-mile hike back north through beautiful woods and over more challenging terrain. Spotted an interesting pawprint in the sand where the trail passed through a meadow. Not sure what kind of animal it was. Anna talked a bit about how, going on hikes is more interesting for her know that she’s not doing scientific fieldwork; said that for the past several years going on hikes was a bit too similar to going to work. When we got back to Deadman’s Hill at about 3pm and the rabbit was there at the car again.

This is a great hike. I think even nicer than the Manistee River Trail loop.

Looking for a good day trip not too far from Lansing, we elected to hike the Long Lake trail at Yankee Springs State Recreation Area. This spot held a few attractions for us. There’s an interesting kettle there called the Devils Soup Bowl, but there’s also a lot of swamp, and we were hoping some of it might turn out to be Prairie Fen, the rare habitat that’s an academic focus for Anna. We hit the trail head around 11a.m. Jim Dufresne outlines a nice loop in his book 50 Hikes in Michigan that has one hiking out on Long Lake Trail, then Hall Lake for a view of the Devils Soup Bowl and returning along Chief Noonday Trail and about 1.5 miles of road. We quickly ruled out that loop as the heavy traffic would have made the road portion of the hike unpleasant for us. So, we headed out on Long Lake Trail with the map and figured we’d piece something together, avoiding the road and, hopefully, spotting some fen.

Tiger Beetle and Soldier Ant

We wound up circling around a circuit involving Long Lake, Hall Lake, a few other trails. We went out probably 3 miles to the Devils Soup Bowl, which is an interesting geological formation. The trail around it is pretty sandy, the usual sign of esker, but there wasn’t the pronounced distinction between esker and kettle that I’m familiar with from the Kettle Moraine area in Wisconsin. The Yankee Springs website lists the Devils Soup Bowl as a major attraction, along with Grave’s Hill Overlook.  The overlook, however, doesn’t exist anymore (I’m not the first person to blog about this). The thick stand of autumn olive that obscures whatever vista was once there is a great illustration of an invasive species running unchecked. In this second half of the hike, the part further east near the Soup Bowls and Hall Lake, there were lots of invasives like Autumn Olive and Japanese Knotweed covering the understory and filling the fields.

There wasn’t as much wetland as we’d hoped for here, but there were one or two spots that Anna said might well be fen. It’s difficult to make the call without really getting into them, though, and when folks lay trails they usually avoid fens because they’re not super friendly (water, hummocks, smelly, poison sumac, etc.). The neatest thing we saw was a tiger beetle eating a soldier ant. We watched the beetle struggle with the ant for a while, with the ant gradually growing more placid. Then we walked to the car and drove home while I imagine the beetle ate the ant.I guess the ballet of life goes on, or something.

Made plans last night with Sandwich, Matt Pantone, and Lunch Box to go hiking and fishing at Lake Ovid today. When I got up at 8:00 this morning it was already 82F outside. I my fishing stuff and a lot of water into the car and headed to Sandwich’s house. We picked up some worms and arranged for a boat rental at the store at Round Lake on route to Lake Ovid at Sleeping Hollow State Park. The boat was an eight foot aluminum job with some messed up oars that had failed us by the end of the day. It leaked a little bit, too.

Lake Ovid Bass

Lake Ovid’s fairly big. We had been provided along with the boat rental with a contour map of the depths, but the size of the lake and wind really restricted just how much ground we could cover in the rowboat. We managed to row out against the wind until the island was just to our windward side and could sit calmly there and fish. I caught a bluegill and a very small bass. Sandwich spotted a deer on the far shore. We moved after a while into some weeds, where everyone hit on some bluegill. They were even taking Sandwich’s bare hook (he also got a bass here). We ran out of worms and the action slowed a bit on plastics. Then we rowed back to the island, where I caught a decent largemouth on a chartreuse mister twister.

We’d been out on the water for about four hours when we called it quits; never did any hiking. Got some decent sun and had a nice day. On the way home we spotted two sandhill cranes in a fallow cornfield on Shepardsville Rd.

Took a gamble and headed up to Leelanau County hoping to get a July 4 campsite at Sleeping Bear Dunes without a reservation. At park headquarters we were turned away, but regrouped in the parking lot, went back in with some persistence, and wound up with the precise site we wanted. There are six back country sites in the Platte River area under the name White Pines. The walk in from the road is just a little over one mile. Once we packed in and had the tent set up Anna napped while I took a four-mile round trip hike to Bass Lake.

Lake Michigan Shoreline

White Pine is just a few tenths of a mile from the Lake Michigan beach. The shore is beautiful, and because there isn’t any road access, there were relatively few people around. We went swimming in the lake on Saturday afternoon and watched the sunset in the evening, feeling fortunate to have such a great place to visit. On the path between the campsite and lake we saw a very small bird. Anna guessed it was a robin because there was a robin calling nearby. Too small to fly, it was sitting on the ground, swaying softly side to side. When we returned on the same path about an hour later it was gone.

This was a great spot. I’d like to come back, either to this area or perhaps to North Manitou Island.

It was difficult for me to appreciate on first reading Louise Dickinson Rich’s book “We Took to the Woods” (Down East Books, Camden, Maine, 1942,1970).  First published in 1942, “We Took to the Woods” is a memoir of Rich’s experiences living along the Rapid Rive in the remote, northwestern corner of Maine. It was a New York Times bestseller for a very long time and is a staple of New England-themed collections. When I first read it at 19, I had hoped Rich would have something misanthropic to say; I wanted a condemnation of society.

We Took to the Woods

That was a silly thing to hope for. I recently reread “We Took to the Woods” and came to the same conclusion Katherien Woods did when she called it “priceless,” “irresistably spontaneous,” “perspicacious,” and “hilariously funny,” in the New York Times. Throughout “We Took to the Woods,” Mrs. Rich offers a forthright explanation of the joys and hardships of living remotely, but does so with a sensitive selfawareness that never places her at odds with the folk lurking in the towns downriver.

“We Took to the Woods” is largely a collection of folk vignettes about life in northern Maine. There is less discussion of the flora and fauna of the area than there is description of the lifestyle adopted by the Richs and the characters living in the woods along with them. Mrs. Rich titles her chapters with questions she is often asked by people from outside (things like, “aren’t you ever frightened?” and “but how do you make a living?”). This device inserts the skepticism and judgment Mrs. Rich feels from the outside into her life in the woods. Rich is consistently comparing life in the woods to life on the outside, explaining that she keeps busy keeping house, is entertained by the motley characters with whom she shares the woods, and is intellectually stimulated by the majesty of her surroundings. For the greatest part, “We Took to the Woods” is a picture of how Mrs. Rich views her experience in the woods vis a vis the expectations of outsiders.

While many books about life in the woods amplify the solitude and elevate the narrator as a pivotal figure within his natural surroundings, Rich treats herself always as a visitor in the woods and describes the woods as a phenomenon she has had the opportunity to observe rather than the home and neighborhood in which she lives. In telling of an annual fishing trip to an especially remote pond she underscores the notion of humans as visitors in the woods.

There is that feeling of remoteness and calm and timelessness about it that makes the scramble of ordinary life seem like a half-forgotten and completely pointless dream. It just lies there in a fold in the hills, open to the sky and wind and weather. Ducks and loons breed in its coves, the gulls fly over it in great white arc, and the great fish go their secret ways in its dim depths. Once in a while, human beings, like Gerrish and me, invade its privacy, but we don’t make any impression on B Pond. I always have the impression that the whole valley in which it lies- the hillsides and the deer on the hills, the trees that grow down to the water and the birds that build in them, the pond itself with all its myriad life- simply waits for us to go. I always want to turn back, after we have entered the woods on our homeward trek, to see what enchanting things take place the minute our backs are turned. (281-282)

Rich's Winter House

Despite Mrs. Rich’s attempt to cast “We Took to the Woods” as a collection of responses to questions from the outside, she associates herself more closely to outside life than to woods. In blatant disregard for archetype, Rich never paints herself as having, “gone native.” She remains aware of her status as an unnatural presence in these woods, and acknowledges that the social trappings of the lives we share with each other are more hers to claim than the seasonal ebb and flow of the woods. In sharing her reaction to a day of berry-picking in Prospect, Mrs. Rich expresses her hopes that in death she by able to truly join the natural world in which she is merely a visitor in life.

At night, after being at Prospect, I lie in bed and see great clusters of berries slide by endlessly against my closed lids. They haunt me, there are so many of them yet unpicked, so many that never will be picked. The birds and bears and foxes will eat a few, but most of them will drop off at the first frost to return to the sparse soil of Prospect whatever of value they borrowed from it. Nature is strictly moral. There is no attempt to cheat the earth by means of steel vault or bronze coffin. I hope that when I die, I too may be permitted to pay at once my oldest outstanding debt, to restore promptly the minerals and salts that have been lent to me for the little while that I have use for blood and bone and flesh. (289)

When I first read “We Took to the Woods,” I was hoping for a condemnation of social behaviors and an auto-adoration of this figure who rejected civilization and gained favor in the natural world. This book instead gave me a depiction of the remote life as an analog to the urban one, and a portrayal of the narrator as always a part of the outside world intruding on the naturalness of the woods. As humans, we can never truly shake of that sense of “society,” nor can we ever live alone and truly naturally. Mrs. Rich’s argument seems to be that, nevertheless, we can still live simply and meaningfully, and be well entertained.

Had a big day planned and it turned out okay, but not great. The intention was to fish the Muskegon River east of Newaygo, then do some hiking in the southern end of the Manistee National Forest. The fishing on the river was a bust, mostly because the spot where I thought I have good access, off Thornapple Road, is a State Boating Access site. The first annoyance there was that my State Parks sticker doesn’t count at a Boating Access Site, so I had to pay the DNR another $24 for another sticker, even though I wasn’t boating. The second annoyance was that this spot is a popular staging area for folks to float down the river on tubes and rafts and things like this. They have a lot of fun, which I can appreciate, but in sections like this there are a lot of them and they remove any sense of remoteness from time spent of the river. There were no hiking trails here, just a poison ivy laden path 300 yards down the river. I fished for about 30 minutes and left in a funk.

Headed up past Newaygo into the national forest and parked at an unmarked lot 50 yards into the woods off 40th street. This is a North Country Trail head. I hiked south for about twenty minutes with traffic never out of earshot. Crossed state highway M37, some railroad tracks and a bunch of dirt roads, at which point the trail ended (this point is marked as a “temporary connector”on the map). Turned around and walked back to the car, then kept going north for another 20 minutes to a parking area at M37. Walked back to the car and left. If I ever decide to section hike the NCT, I will really appreciate having already completed this part.

Drove back down through Newaygo, which seems like a very nice place. If I had this to do over again, I bring Anna, hike some spots further into the forest, and get lunch in Newaygo. As it was, I just cut east and headed for home. Made a brief stop at at Marl Lake on M46 near Edmore. Lots of small bluegill in there, caught one. Saw a guy with a stringer of five/six fat bluegill and a nice looking kit-built kayak from Chesapeake Light Craft. Helped him load the kayak into his Econoline and then drove home.

Today’s plan was to go to Sleepy Hollow State Park, rent a boat and fish Lake Ovid. Things changed, tough, when I found that the boat rentals at the park were being handled by a party store on Round Lake in Laingsburg. Once I drove back down to Round Lake to rent the boat, a 12 ft. aluminum rowboat, I figured I might as well just fish there.

Round Lake is fairly small and lined with houses on about three sides. There scenery from the boat was not very pretty. I rented the boat from Don’s Party Store (sign says “beer, boats, bait and pizza”) and also bought some red worms. I liked this store a great deal, it reminded me of the markets in central Maine where I grew up. The weather was a bit grim, hot and humid and threatening to rain. I was on the water for two hours, fished worms, spoons, spinners, and twisters, and caught three fish, each on worms.

Bowfin

I wasn’t fishing for long when I hooked something large. I was using a worm and bobber rig, and after it hit the worm the fish surfaced. I had to work it for several minutes before I could get a look at it, at which point I realized I had no idea what kind of fish it was. It was about twenty inches long and had a very long dorsal fin. It fought pretty hard; when I had it close to the boat it would dive deep under the boat. As I was working it in, two guys in a Lund pulled alongside, offered to net it for me, got it under control and then gave me some education.

They said it was a dogfish. This was interesting to me, since in Maine a dogfish is a small shark. I think they call it a dogfish as a variant on catfish. They pointed out to me that there were no barbs like a catfish has on this fish. They also said it was an undesirable fish in the lake, as it outcompetes popular gamefish like bass and pike. Once home I found that a more accurate name is bowfin, and that it’s a prehistoric species, not generally valued as a gamefish. After the bowfin I caught the smallest bluegill I’ve ever seen, and then a good-sized largemouth. I decided to keep and eat the bass.

I hiked south along the North Country Trail in Manistee County and then crossed the Manistee River and hiked north along the Manistee River Trail. I spent one night backcountry camping. This is commonly listed as one of the best hikes in Michigan, especially in the lower peninsula.

I left Lansing on Saturday morning and got to the Seaton Creek campground south of Mesick at about 10:30 a.m. At the beginning of a long hike, I’m always kind of jittery and I want to make good time, so it’s usually pretty intense right off the bat. There’s no such thing as a leisurely first day of hiking for me. Within 30 minutes I’d arrived at the cable suspension bridge that connects the Manistee River Trail on the east side of the river and the North Country trail on the west side. In this area there were a lot of people, but I quickly found it easy to convince myself I was in wilderness as I headed south along the NCT (in the ten miles I hiked saturday, I saw only three groups of backpackers).

Manistee River

The terrain along the North Country Trail is really quite spectacular, with lots of topo, lush ravines, and alternating pine plantation and hardwood forests. There was none of the scrubby invasive understory that is so familiar in southern Michigan. There isn’t a lot of water on the trail, though (about seven dry miles between Red Bridge and Eddington Creek), and the three scenic vistas that Dufresne mentions are completely obscured by trees. Despite this, it’s really quite beautiful and offers a feeling of genuine wilderness. By 4pm it was threatening to rain, so I set up the tent on a ridge to the west of the trail. There were no mosquitoes, but there were huge black flies as I ate. Once the rain started I lay in the tent as it came down until it was time to sleep at 8pm. Adding the spur from Seaton Creek to the NCT trail, I had hiked 10 miles.

When I woke at 6am, it had stopped raining, but everything was still very very wet. I rolled up the tent, hoping the sun might come out later and give me a chance to dry it out. Then I started hiking. Within an hour I arrived at Red Bridge, where I ate breakfast at a Park Service picnic area and filled my water bottles. Then I started north on the east side of the river. The Manistee River Trail skirts high bluffs along the winding river, offering phenomenal views and ocassionally dipping down into ravines and crossing creeks. It’s really a beautiful trail, although obviously more well-traveled than the NCT across the river. There was drizzle off and on through the day, but no rain. It never got dry, but windy enough that when I stopped for lunch at an oxbow in the river I was able to get the tent dried out.

I had intended to stay a second night on the Manistee River Trail, but at 4pm I was just 2 miles from the car and it was looking like rain again. I figured I could spend three hours sitting in the tent in the rain, or I could make for the car and spend those three hours driving back to Lansing. I chose to head home, and the rain started just a few minutes after I’d started up the car and headed out of the campground.

In all, I didn’t see much wildlife on this trip. I saw some trout in the river, and a doe in the woods. There were some cranes I couldn’t identify as well. I also saw a very large burrow (about 10 inches across) that appeared to be abandoned.

Anna and I went to Pinckney State Rec Area today. It’s a little ways northwest of Ann Arbor and the drive from Lansing in about an hour and fifteen. We brought a lunch and planned to make a hike or two, as there are lots of trails. One of the most interesting is the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail, which stretched out for 36 miles. Working from the book “50 Hikes in Michigan” by Jim DuFresne, we opted to take the Losee Lake trail first. This is a foot-traffic only trail and we joked about DuFresne’s anti-mountain biking hangups as we drove into the park, but the value of knowing which trail would be void of bikes became immediately apparent. The parking lot was full of chachis in super hero outfits, talking about their graphite frames, titanium seat posts, and how bad their balls hit the crossbar at that one race last summer. I was looking forward to being rid of them.

The first trail we took was a 3.5 mile loop through some wetlands and around the edge of Losee Lake. The first half was maple and beech forest. By the time we got to Losee Lake the habitat had turned to reclaimed oak woodlands. We stopped at the lake to fish. There were not a lot of access points, so we opted to fish at one just off Dexter Town Hall Road. The northeast side of the lake is private land, and there were folks out over there, but otherwise no one around and traffic on the road was sparse. We caught two bluegill on worms and a slip bobber. Both were very small. I also tried a hula popper. The ‘gills nibbed at it, but nothing big enough to get hooked showed itself.

Turtle Eggs

We got back on the trail and almost immediately saw a slew of broken turtle eggs. Whether they hatched or were predated, I don’t know for sure, but, we assumed some critter ate them. There were maybe two dozen at the edge of a sandy path about twenty yards from the lake and fifteen feet higher. Any potential hatchlings would have had to cross the road to get to water.

After the Losee Lake trail, we had lunch at the beech unit, which had gotten crazy busy while we were walking (about two hours). We found a shady spot and ate some snacks, then rested, and decided to take the Silver Lake trail to Pickerel Lake, about 2 miles, round trip. Mountain bikes are allowed on that trail, which requires some special erosion control measures. On many of the grades, there are combed mats sunk into the trail. For whatever reason, bikers tend to avoid these, instead riding just to the outside. I’m sure the erosion control measures make for a bumpy ride and offer unsatisfactory traction for climbs, but, the result is that the trail is often up to three feet deeper than the area immediately surrounding it, and, in some places, considerably more erosion is evident. This whole area was rife rife with poison ivy (and, in the wet places, sumac, too), with leaves growing to the size of dinner plates and climbing trees to greet us at face level. When the bikes went by, we had to step aside, inevitably exposing ourselves to the ivy, which was annoying (I realize I have a hang-up about poison ivy).

At Pickerel Lake there was a bridge and we could see a number of bluegills swimming about in the shallow water, but there was no decent access point for fishing. There was a beach from which boats could be launched, but all the rest of the shore, was wet and marshy. We looped back, and then decided to extend the hike by heading on the Potawatomi trail further southeast. The previously sweet habitat yielded a thick understory of nasty invasives and the third act of our day had all the tension of a Shakespearean play. The extension we’d selected added about four miles onto our walk, and we began to lose steam. By the time we got back to the parking lot at Silver Lake we were both tired and thirsty. Anna had a backpack full of garlic mustard she’d pulled, and said she’d “got rid of a number of populations.”

All in all, a great day.

Finished fishing the Rogue at about 1pm and still had plenty of day left, so I headed to the Ionia State Recreation Area in Ionia, MI, which surrounds Sessions Lake. I got there around 2pm, bought a park pass and got a trail map. Sessions Lake looked to be a smallish, irregularly shaped and shallow lake. I parked at a spot on the north east edge, near where the state runs a campground, and decided to hike around the lake on the 3.5 mile long trail. I brought my rod and camera with me. Walking along the lake, I could see the small panfish darting about in the shallows. The east edge of the lake has a fair bit of topo as the trail winds through a forest of beech and maple. There were a number of bridges constructed by the conservation corps and boy scouts spanning streams and ravines. This part was a very nice hike.

Sandhill Crane

At about the halfway point, the trail breaks out into reclaimed agricultural land. It’s a mowed trail at this point, and the vegetation includes a lot of autumn olive. It’s the kind of nature Anna calls “junky.” It was hot and the trail was all in the open, lots of sun. At one point, I came to an old parking lot and saw a deer hanging out on the pavement. A hundred yards down the trail, I startled the same deer again, and as it bounded off I spotted two sandhill cranes in the grass about twenty yards away. I’ve never knowingly spotted a sandhill crane before. These were pretty big birds and made a racket.

At the north edge of the lake there’s a spillway, which created the first adequate fishing access of the hike (the rest of the shoreline was far too shallow). Standing at the edge of the spillway retaining wall, I could see bluegill and sunfish nests in the shallows. I hooked a bass that spit the hook once I tried to land it and then caught another one. By this point, I’d been out for about three hours and I headed for home.