J.W. Wells State Park, where the old forest survived

Here’s a lovely twist of history. This county floated ten billion feet of pine down the river — yet its prettiest state park is built around trees the loggers never cut. In 1898 a logger named Sam Crawford bought tens of thousands of acres of cutover stumpland along Green Bay. Within it, he deliberately spared a five-hundred-acre stand of virgin timber. The land later passed to John Walter Wells, a Menominee lumberman who served three terms as the city’s mayor. In 1925, after his death, his children donated the old forest to the State of Michigan as a park in his name.

Today J.W. Wells State Park stretches along three miles of Green Bay shoreline on M-35, roughly midway between Menominee and Escanaba. It looks across the water toward Wisconsin’s Door County. The park is about seven hundred acres of big trees, sandy beach, and easy comfort. There’s a modern campground, rustic cabins you can rent year-round, miles of trails with old stone-and-timber shelters, and a swim beach for hot afternoons. Much of what you see — the buildings, the landscaping, even the water systems — was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and ’40s. The work was fine enough that the park is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

It’s a four-season park, with skiing, snowshoeing, and ice fishing once the snow comes. Cedar River State Harbor, a couple of miles north, puts boats and anglers onto the bay. A Recreation Passport gets you in.