The River Road byway: 22 miles of bluffs above the Au Sable

The drive starts about seven miles northeast of Hale, where M-65 meets Rollways Road, and from there it follows the Au Sable River for 22 miles to Oscoda and Lake Huron. That’s the River Road Scenic Byway, named a National Scenic Byway in 2005 — and for most of its length you’re up on the bluffs, looking down at the river the loggers once ran.

It threads through the Huron National Forest, so the views stay green and the towns stay scarce. The best stops are the overlooks. At Rollways, a deck looks out over the wide pond the dams backed up. Farther along, pull-offs at the hydroelectric ponds — Loud, Five Channels, Cooke — let you see the river spread into still water above the concrete. The high bluffs put you eye-level with the treetops, which is where the bald eagles are; this is good eagle country, and patient drivers spot them riding the air over the valley.

Halfway along stands the reason a lot of people make the trip: Lumberman’s Monument, the three bronze loggers on the bluff, with a Forest Service visitor center and a long stairway down to the water. Every July the byway turns into a finish-line corridor when the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon — running since 1947 from Grayling down to Oscoda — sends paddlers past in the dark, headlamps bobbing on the water below.

You can drive the whole thing in under an hour if you don’t stop. Don’t do that. The byway is built for stopping — for the overlooks, the trailheads down to the river, and the long quiet stretches where the loudest thing is wind in the jack pine and, somewhere below, the Au Sable still working its way to the lake.