Ogemaw Hills Pathway: hiking a glacier's leftovers

The hills you climb on the Ogemaw Hills Pathway aren’t really hills in the usual sense. They’re a moraine — a long ridge of sand and gravel that a glacier shoved into a pile and left behind when it melted. Geologists call this one the West Branch Moraine, and it was built by the Saginaw Lobe, a tongue of the great ice sheet that covered Michigan in the last ice age. When the ice stalled here and began to rot in place, it dumped everything it had been carrying along this line. Walk the ridge and you’re walking the front edge of a glacier, frozen as a landscape.

The pathway itself runs about 15 miles in loops through forest just north of West Branch, with trailheads off East Clear Lake and Sage Lake roads. It’s a foot-and-bike trail in the warm months — hiking and mountain biking over rolling, well-drained ground — and in winter it’s groomed for cross-country skiing, which is when those moraine grades earn their keep. Volunteers with the Ogemaw Hills Pathway Council keep the loops cut and signed.

There’s a deeper bit of history under your boots. This ridge marked the northern shore of a vanished lake — proglacial Lake Saginaw, a body of meltwater that pooled in front of the retreating ice before draining off toward what’s now Saginaw Bay. So the same line of hills that makes a good ski trail also drew the edge of a lake that no longer exists, ten thousand-odd years ago.

It’s an easy thing to take for granted, a wooded trail an hour off I-75. But the climb that gets your legs working is a souvenir of the ice, and the view from the top looks out over a lakebed that dried up before anyone was here to name it.