Pinckney State Rec Area (5/30/10)
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.
Tags: bikes, bluegill, erosion, losee lake, pinckney, poison ivy, turtle
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 9:06 pm and is filed under fishing, hiking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.