Trout rivers, the state forest, and the gas country

Most of Kalkaska County is big, quiet, rolling forest — nearly half of it is state land, part of the Pere Marquette State Forest — threaded with sandy two-tracks, snowmobile and horse trails, and dozens of small lakes. It’s classic northern-Michigan back country, prized for hunting, riding, and getting away from it all.

It’s also a place where great rivers begin. The headwaters of three of the region’s best trout streams — the Manistee, the Boardman (now also called the Ottaway), and the Rapid — all rise in Kalkaska County. The upper Manistee is a Blue Ribbon trout stream with wild brook and brown trout, and the Boardman ranks among Michigan’s top ten. That’s the reason the village down the road calls itself the Trout Capital.

There’s a second story under the surface here: oil and gas. From the 1960s through the 1990s, northern Michigan saw big drilling booms, and Kalkaska sat near the center of them — especially the Antrim Shale natural-gas play of the late 1980s and 1990s. The county is still one of the state’s more active producers, and you’ll see well-heads and tanks tucked discreetly into the woods. (Statewide, royalties from this kind of drilling helped fund Michigan’s purchases of parks and public land.)

For buyers, this is value-and-acreage country: wooded lots, hunting parcels, small-lake and river frontage, and modest homes well outside town. It’s rural and lightly populated, so check road access and utilities, and know that homes here are on wells and septic (see the well-and-septic note). On a vacant parcel, it’s also worth checking whether the mineral rights come with the land.