Lost Nation: 2,400 acres of game cover and a shooting range

The name alone is worth the drive. Lost Nation State Game Area scatters across roughly 2,400 acres of southeastern Hillsdale County, spilling over Jefferson and Pittsford townships in several pieces that don’t all touch — a patchwork of woods, brush, and field that the state has been stitching together a parcel at a time since 1951, back when it went by the plainer name of the Pittsford game area.

It’s working land for wildlife, not a manicured park. The soil runs to clay, which means the two-tracks turn slick and gummy after a good rain, so anyone heading in to hunt deer, turkey, or small game learns to read the weather first. The cover is the point: thick, varied, and good enough that the hunting holds up year after year. About five and a half miles of the North Country Trail thread through the property too, the long footpath that runs all the way from North Dakota to Vermont, so a walk here can put you on a trail that doesn’t really end.

There’s also a shooting range on the ground, run by the Department of Natural Resources, with lanes for rifle and handgun at twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred yards, plus setups for shotgun and a hand trap. It’s the kind of place a deer hunter sights in a scope the week before the season opens.

One quirk of the rules is worth knowing if you’re the type to throw a tent down: camping is allowed only in the off months, roughly mid-September through mid-May, so the cover stays undisturbed through the warm half of the year. Come fall, the orange caps show up in the parking pull-offs and the lost nation, whoever they were, has the place mostly to the hunters again.