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

Here’s a lovely twist of history: in the county that floated ten billion feet of pine down the river, the 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 — and deliberately spared a five-hundred-acre stand of virgin timber within it. The land later passed to John Walter Wells, a Menominee lumberman who served three terms as the city’s mayor, and 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, looking across the water toward Wisconsin’s Door County. It’s about seven hundred acres of big trees, sandy beach, and easy comfort: 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, work 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, and Cedar River State Harbor a couple of miles north puts boats and anglers onto the bay. A Recreation Passport gets you in; details at michigan.gov/dnr.