Yankee Springs and Gun Lake

The northwest corner of Barry County is one of southern Michigan’s best stretches of outdoors: the Yankee Springs Recreation Area, thousands of acres of woods, trails, and lakes wrapped around big Gun Lake. The name goes back to the 1830s and a stagecoach-stop innkeeper called “Yankee Bill” Lewis; long before that, the land was home to the Ottawa and their leader Chief Noonday, whose name is still on a lake, a road, and a trail here.

Gun Lake — close to 2,700 acres — has been a summer destination for generations, ringed with cottages and year-round homes and busy with boats all season. Inland, the recreation area offers campgrounds, miles of hiking and mountain-bike trails (the North Country Trail passes through), and a famous geologic oddity called the Devil’s Soup Bowl, a deep bowl-shaped hollow left behind by the glaciers. Right next door, the Barry State Game Area opens thousands more acres for hunting and hiking.

Yankee Springs Recreation Area is in the county’s northwest, off Gun Lake Road; the Michigan DNR handles maps and campground reservations.