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.

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.

Took a personal day and drove up to the Rogue River, just north of Rockport, MI. Book’s list the Rogue sizable Michigan trout stream nearest to my house. I had great visions of trout as I parked the car at a lot near 12 Mile and Summit Roads in Rockport. As I crossed the street to the river I noticed a turtle making the same trip.

Turtle on Summit Road

I tied on a spinner and started wading upstream, fishing across. The river was 15-30 yards wide and fairly shallow. The bed was mostly gravel, some areas were rocky and other muddy. As I waded upstream I passed an engine on the bank that had been retrofitted from some large piece of machinery to pump water from the river up to a nearby farm.

There were lots of fish jumping, but they were pretty small. Sometimes I could see them darting through the water, and those ones were even smaller. Once, a fish rose to my spinner as it broke the surface, but didn’t get hooked. Saw to farm hands one the stream, soaking their shirts to cool off, and two kayakers.

The river wasn’t as remote as I would have liked, there were houses along it and I could here traffic all the time, first from Summit Road to the east and then from US-131 to the West. I waded upstream for about an hour and then returned. I didn’t catch anything. When I climbed out of the river and crossed the road, the turtle was also returning from the river, easing onto the pavement in the direction opposite from which I’d seen it before, this time covered in mud.

Matt and I went to Lake Delta on Saturday, May 22. Nestled nestled between state and interstate highways a few miles southwest of Lansing, in Delta Township, Lake Delta’s got a fairly industrial feel. Stonehouse told us he’d been out a few days earlier and caught a number of small sunfish and crappie on a worm and bobber rig. We parked in the parking lot off Canal Road, at te northwest end of the lake. There are two fishing platforms, which had a number of people on them, so we followed a trail around the west side and fished a few spots from the bank. We got a lot of our bait stolen by some very small fish (I could see them swarming around the hook and picking the worm off it, could set the hook. It was a really unpleasant place to fish, as the noise from the highway was really loud and unceasing. There were some good-sized deer tracks on the path, but I didn’t really notice anything remarkable in the way of wildlife. We fished for about an hour before deciding to head for another spot.

We drove straight north on canal road up to Hunters Orchard Park, also in Delta Township, but in a more picturesque area. The Grand River runs through the park, which is beautiful and sports picnic tables, a platform out over the river, and a paved walkway about a quarter-mile long. The river was very high due to the recent rain, and there wasn’t much bank from which to fish. We managed to find two spots where we could actually get up to the water with enough space to cast, but we ended up spending more time redressing snags and pulling lures out of trees than actually fishing. Matt lost a nice crankbait in a tree. There was poison ivy everywhere, which always makes me nervous. The city parks I go to have a lot more poison ivy than the state game areas. Anna says poison ivy thrives on disturbance.

This was a nice day to spend with matt, but the fishing was terrible.

Haslett is a fancy town to the north east of Lansing. I met Jeff in the parking lot at the middle school and he drove us over to his friend Jim’s place. Jim’s got a real nice pond behind his house, maybe an acre big. It looks like the sort of pond that would hold all kinds of fat and eager bluegill and bass, but we caught nothing. We fished it for about an hour and a half and then went up to say hello to Jim. Jim was disappointed we didn’t catch anything. He found a number of dead fish when the ice thawed and he’s worried the winter kill might have been severe. Pop’s mentioned that there were lots of tadpoles for fish to eat and Jim said that made him think there weren’t any fish to eat tadpoles.

After striking out at Jim’s we went back over to the school to fish Mud Lake, a spot I’d never heard of before Pop’s hipped me to it. We waked about a quarter mile behind the high school on a cross country trail and then another quarter mile east on a very muddy foot trail. We came out on a fairly large pond, about 5 acres. The shoreline was all packed vegetation, very wet and spongy, and there were lily pads covering most of the shoreline, out to about 20 yards. Jeff caught 4 large mouth bass in a row, very fast action. He was using a tandem spinner, in black and red. I tried a black and red Mepp’s spinner, and a pink Mister Twister on a yellow jig, and finally a yellow Hula Popper. I got nothing. After those four bass, Pop’s went dry.

There were two deer carcasses on the shore, picked pretty clean but still gross. They were too complete to have been dragged out of the woods by dogs. I wondered if they had been wounded by a hunter, since wounded deer tend to head for water, from what I understand. I walked about Mud Lake to the east side. Along an inlet at the south-east corner, I saw turtle in a hole. It was pretty big, about 16 inches across, and dove into the water in the hole as I was getting my camera out.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources maintains a research area about 15 minutes north-east of Lansing at Rose Lake. It’s a pretty diverse area, with some managed areas and some natural, more topography than we normally see in mid-Michigan and lots of wildlife. Anna and I go there every few weeks; she decided on a trip last winter that she’d like to return to one specific area regularly throughout the year to see how one specific area changes through all four seasons. An added task was that Anna had told a DNRE guy she works with that she’d send hm the GPS coordinates of any garlic mustard stands so he could see that it gets eradicated (Anna asked if she could just kill it herself, but that job’s assigned to union labor).

Yesterday we parked the car on Woodbury Road and followed a thin trail into the woods. I was hoping we’d be able to cut around the south-east corner of the lake, but it was too wet, so we headed back to the car and drove around to the lot on Bath Rd. We walked around the west side of the lake, between the lake and creek, and then split up. I headed around the south side of the lake, through some managed pine forest and a spot that had been burned. Anna waited and saw no fewer than 15 different insects including: a treehopper, a parasitoid, several different caterpillars, aphids, and a bumblebee.

“What was amazing was that there were so many within several feet of me, in a spot where I didn’t really think any would be,” Anna said. “It points to incredible diversity and abundance of insects in that area.”

We also looked for morels but didn’t see any. We ran into a lady on horseback who said she saw a dude with a shopping bag full of morels, but hadn’t seen any herself. She also called garlic mustard a “wildflower,” and pointed out a “beautiful honeysuckle,” and Anna did a good job not giving an invasive species clinic, mostly because the lady on horseback was really nice and didn’t deserve that trip.

Went to Portland State Game Area today for fishing and hiking. Stopped to pick up Jeremy at 10 am but he opted out. Parked at the first lot on Towner Rd. And followed the creek to the river. The creek was dry when I was here last week, but with the recent rains it was ankle deep. I saw recent deer and raccoon tracks in the mud along the creek. The skunk cabbage was really thick along the creek and made it difficult to see where I was walking.

When I got to the Grand River, I put on my waders and fished at about three different spots on the south side of the river stretching up to the island. I didn’t catch anything. I saw an unidentified bird in a nest and, in one of the clearings, a lot of yellow warblers. On my way back, I stopped nearby the creek inlet again for one last try. I caught a decent size smallmouth on a black Mepps spinner. I released it, and then caught a fairly large smallmouth on the next cast. I released that one, too. I didn’t get any more action.

On the hike back to car I skipped the creek and trail and just headed southeast. After about 30 min I came out at the road, right nearby the car. There was a truck in the lot and two guys who didn’t see me walk out of the woods because they were loading a .22 rifle. As I walked by, they started firing into the woods, in the direction from which I’d come. This event was disconcerting.