Stand Among Trees That Were Already Giants Before America Existed

Most of Michigan was once blanketed in towering white pine — a forest so vast and valuable that loggers cut nearly all of it down between 1840 and 1910, making Michigan the greatest lumber-producing state in the country. (Fun fact that puts it in perspective: more money was made off Michigan white pine than was pulled out of the entire Klondike gold rush.) By 1910, almost none of the old forest was left. But a few precious acres escaped the saw — and you can walk among them.

Hartwick Pines State Park, near Grayling, protects a 49-acre stand of old-growth white pine — the largest such stand in the Lower Peninsula, and one of the last anywhere in the state. These are the trees that show you what Michigan looked like before the loggers came. Some are 350 to 375 years old — meaning they first took root in the 1600s and were already old, towering trees long before the United States was born. The tallest reach 150 feet or more, with trunks over four feet thick. Walking the paved Old Growth Forest Trail beneath them is a genuinely humbling experience; people describe the grove as mystical, almost church-like.

There’s a touching origin story, too. The forest was saved by a woman named Karen Hartwick, who bought over 8,000 acres in 1927 and donated the land to the state as a memorial to her husband, Major Edward Hartwick, who died in World War I. She specified that the old pines must never be logged. A 1940 windstorm sadly knocked down some of the grove (shrinking it from 86 acres to today’s 49), but what remains still stands, exactly as she wished.