Shedder and Shorts

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.

Tags: backpacking, manistee, nct, north country trail

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under 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.