William Mitchell State Park, wedged between two lakes

Stand in the campground at William Mitchell State Park and you have a lake on each side of you. The park fills the narrow strip of land between Lake Cadillac and Lake Mitchell, the two big lakes that Cadillac grew up around, and a quarter-mile cut called the Clam Lake Canal runs straight through the middle to connect them. Lumbermen dug that canal back in 1873 to float pine logs from one lake to the mills on the other; today people in kayaks and fishing boats drift through it, and you can stand on the bank and watch them pass.

The park goes back to 1920, which makes it one of the first batch Michigan ever set aside. It started life as Cadillac State Park and was renamed for William W. Mitchell, who ran sawmills here in the 1890s, after his widow donated a chunk of the land. Its 660 acres hold a campground with a couple hundred sites, a swimming beach, boat launches onto both lakes, and a fishing pier — the connected lakes add up to thousands of acres of water famous for crappie and bluegill.

Tucked inside the park is the Carl T. Johnson Hunting and Fishing Center, a small museum of mounted animals and displays about how Michiganders have hunted and fished this country, with archery and pellet ranges out back. From there the Heritage Nature Trail loops off into the marsh on a long boardwalk, the kind of path where you can watch herons stalk the shallows and, in spring, hear the whole wetland come alive with frogs.

It is an easy place to underrate — a state park right on the edge of town, ringed by motels and the M-115 traffic. Then you paddle out onto Lake Mitchell at dusk, with the loons calling and the pines going dark on the far shore, and the town disappears behind you completely.