Bois Blanc, the island time forgot

Just a mile from busy Mackinac Island sits its complete opposite: Bois Blanc Island, a big, wild, wooded island that most people have never heard of. Locals call it “Bob-lo.” At about thirty-four square miles, it’s the largest island in the Straits of Mackinac — roughly twelve miles long — yet only around a hundred people live here year-round. The name is French for “white wood,” after the basswood trees whose bark the Ojibwe and French fur traders once used for rope and snowshoes.

There are no traffic lights and no paved roads here — just one main dirt road and a web of two-tracks winding through the pines, some of which tower two hundred feet tall. Much of the island is state forest, and there are six inland lakes for fishing and paddling. You get here by a ferry from Cheboygan, on the mainland five miles to the south, or by small plane to the island’s little airport. In summer the population swells with cottagers; in winter, in a good freeze, islanders have been known to drive across the ice to town, following a path marked by old Christmas trees.

For buyers, Bois Blanc is about as far off the grid as Michigan gets without leaving the map. It has a general store, a tavern, a post office, and a one-room school — and not much else but quiet, forest, and shoreline. If your idea of paradise is a wooded lot on a remote island where the loudest sound is the wind in the pines, this is the place.