The Inland Waterway

Cheboygan sits at the mouth of the Cheboygan River, where it empties into Lake Huron, and that river is the doorway to something special: the Inland Waterway, Michigan’s longest chain of connected lakes and rivers. Running close to forty miles, it links the Cheboygan River to Mullett Lake, then up the Indian River to Burt Lake, and on through the Crooked River to Crooked Lake. Mullett and Burt are among the largest inland lakes in the whole state.

People have been traveling this route for a very long time. For centuries Native Americans and later fur traders used it as a sheltered shortcut across the tip of the mitt, avoiding the rough open water of the Straits of Mackinac. In the lumbering days it floated logs, and after a lock was built on the Cheboygan River in 1869, steamboats carried passengers and freight along it until the railroads took over.

Today it’s purely for pleasure. You can still lock your boat up the fifteen feet from Lake Huron and spend days working your way inland, lake to lake. One quirk: even though the far end at Crooked Lake comes within a couple of miles of Lake Michigan, the water trail never quite connects the two Great Lakes, so a boat that starts on Lake Huron has to come back the way it came.