Proud Lake: 3,000 acres of state land where the Huron River slows down

Wade into the Huron River out here and it’s still young — a clear, twisting stream barely wide enough to swing a canoe paddle. This is far upstream of the wide river it becomes near Ann Arbor. At Proud Lake the river slows, spreads out, and pools into a string of small lakes. The state of Michigan wrapped about 3,000 acres of woods and marsh around it to keep the whole thing wild.

Proud Lake State Recreation Area sits in Commerce Township, just east of Wixom. It’s one of a ring of big recreation areas the state set aside in the 1940s, to give crowded southeast Michigan somewhere green to breathe. Roughly twenty miles of trail thread through it, past marshes, oak ridges, and stands of pine. In winter those same paths become cross-country ski tracks. The slow stretches of river make easy paddling for people who want current, not whitewater.

The river is the real draw. The Huron runs cold and clean through the park, and the state stocks the upper stretch with trout. So in spring you’ll find anglers standing thigh-deep, casting where the water riffles over gravel. Canoeists put in and drift the slow bends between the lakes, watching for herons in the shallows and turtles stacked on every fallen log.

It feels much farther from the freeway than it is. You can be parked along I-96 one minute, and twenty minutes later be standing alone on a riverbank in Commerce Township — hearing nothing but moving water and a woodpecker working somewhere back in the oaks.