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The Great Outdoors

Porch Notes

The Great Outdoors notes

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Wolf Lake hatchery: where six-foot sturgeon live near MattawanThe state fish hatchery west of Mattawan has been raising Great Lakes fish since 1927, and its free visitor center includes a show pond where lake sturgeon glide along the bottom.
You can paddle the Shiawassee River right through downtown LindenThe Shiawassee River Heritage Water Trail runs for miles across mid-Michigan, and one of its mellow, warm-water stretches slips right past the old mill in downtown Linden.
Barry State Game Area: thousands of public acres west of HastingsA sprawling state game area of forest, marsh, and small lakes west of Hastings, open to public hunting and fishing, with a DNR shooting range on M-179 near Yankee Springs.
Bertha Brock Park: stone bridges over a trout streamTwo miles west of Ionia, Bertha Brock Park has been a wooded county park since 1931, with a trout stream, three stone bridges, and rustic camping.
Diamond Lake's island, and the barge that serves itDiamond Lake near Cassopolis covers 1,020 acres. Its private 40-acre island has 99 cottages and houses, with a private barge carrying authorized vehicles across.
Feeding a giraffe by hand south of Battle CreekAt Binder Park Zoo's Twiga Overlook, you can offer zoo-prepared romaine to a giraffe that chooses to come to the feeding deck.
Lakeport State Park and its Depression-era beach houseLakeport State Park hands you more than a mile of Lake Huron shoreline in the Thumb, with a beach house and campground built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s.
Pierce Cedar Creek Institute: 850 acres a retired couple set asideBill and Jessie Pierce founded an 850-acre nature preserve and biological field station south of Hastings in 1988; its ten miles of trails are free and open dawn to dusk year-round.
Sister Lakes: a Chicago resort town that grew a monsterSister Lakes, a cluster of resort lakes straddling three counties near Dowagiac, drew Chicagoans by rail from the 1880s — and made global headlines in 1964 over a Bigfoot scare.
The Paul Henry–Thornapple Trail: a railroad that took 170 years to finishThe Paul Henry–Thornapple rail trail follows the old Grand River Valley Railroad grade through Middleville and Irving, with a stretch carrying the North Country National Scenic Trail.
1,100 acres of woods that started on Halloween, 1960North of Kalamazoo, the Kalamazoo Nature Center protects about 1,100 acres of woods and trails and keeps the 1800s DeLano family homestead alive as a working farm.
Algonac State Park's lakeplain prairieAlgonac State Park guards a stand of lakeplain prairie and oak savanna, two of the rarest habitats left in Michigan, on flat ground beside the St. Clair River.
Belleville Lake: the reservoir that drowned a village in 1925Belleville Lake in Van Buren Township is not natural — it formed in 1925 when a dam on the Huron River backed up the water, flooding the old village of Rawsonville.
Brighton Recreation Area: glacier hills, Bishop Lake, and miles of trailThe Brighton Recreation Area covers nearly 5,000 acres of glacier-carved hills and lakes near Howell and Brighton, with hiking, mountain biking, equestrian, and camping options.
Cannonsburg Ski Area: a ski hill 15 minutes from downtown Grand RapidsCannonsburg Ski Area has run lifts on the rolling hills of Cannon Township, northeast of Grand Rapids, since 1965 — close enough for an after-work run on machine-made snow.
Coldwater Lake State Park, the quiet oneAn undeveloped 400-acre state park on Coldwater Lake's south shore in Kinderhook Township, kept rustic for walk-in hunting and fishing.
Dr. T.K. Lawless Park's international dark-sky designationDr. T.K. Lawless County Park near Vandalia earned an International Dark Sky Park designation after upgrading its outdoor lighting and documenting night-sky conditions. Check current park hours before visiting after dark.
Edsel Ford's country retreat is now a state park: Haven HillThe Highland Recreation Area in northwest Oakland County wraps around Haven Hill — Edsel Ford's former estate and a National Natural Landmark of rare Michigan forest.
Flowing Wells Park: free artesian water on the grave of a logging hamletA small White Cloud park on the White River where artesian wells push cold spring water to the surface with no pump, on the site of a vanished timber community.
For-Mar: a donated dairy farm that became Burton's 383-acre preserveFor-Mar Nature Preserve in Burton — named for donors Forbes and Martha Merkley — protects 383 acres of woods, meadows, and trails on a former dairy farm.
Fort Custer: a WWI Army camp turned 3,000-acre playgroundThe Fort Custer Recreation Area near Augusta sits on a former World War I Army training camp; today it offers three lakes, a stretch of the Kalamazoo River, and dozens of miles of trail.
Fred Russ Forest, and the 40 acres that never met an axeFred Russ Forest near Decatur is an MSU research forest and Cass County park that protects Newton Woods, a rare old-growth oak-hickory stand in southern Michigan.
Hess Lake: 755 acres, mostly knee-deep, full of fishA 755-acre natural lake straddling Brooks and Grant townships — shallow, weedy, warm, and one of the easiest places in Newaygo County to launch a boat and actually catch bass and bluegill.
How a railroad's initials became the Polly Ann TrailThe Polly Ann Trail runs about 17 miles up northeast Oakland County on a former railroad bed, from Orion Township through Oxford and Leonard toward the county line.
How Muskegon Lake got off the toxic listAfter a century of lumber and industrial pollution, Muskegon Lake was named a Great Lakes Area of Concern in 1987 — and in 2025 it was officially delisted as restored.
Howell Nature Center: 200-plus acres and a busy wildlife hospitalThe Howell Nature Center, on Triangle Lake Road in Marion Township, runs a wildlife rehabilitation clinic plus trails, camps, and outdoor education on its wooded acreage.
Maple Lake was built on purposeThe lake in the middle of Paw Paw isn't natural — the village made it in 1907 by damming the Paw Paw River for hydroelectric power.
Millennium Park: a 1,400-acre park dug out of gravel pitsKent County turned roughly 1,400 acres of spent gravel and gypsum mining land southwest of Grand Rapids into Millennium Park, with a beach, miles of trails, and six miles of Grand River frontage.
Newaygo State Park: what rustic camping means at Hardy PondNewaygo State Park has 99 rustic sites above Hardy Pond, plus a launch, swimming area, shore fishing, and a two-mile piece of the Dragon Trail.
Paint Creek Trail: Michigan's first nonmotorized rail-trailThe Paint Creek Trail runs about 8.9 miles from Rochester to Lake Orion on an old rail line — the state's first non-motorized rail-to-trail, open since 1983.
Pinckney's old rail line is now the Lakelands TrailThe trail through Pinckney follows a former Grand Trunk branch line, now the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park, named for the philanthropist who helped fund it.
Portland, where the Looking Glass meets the GrandPortland sits where the Looking Glass flows into the Grand, and a paved riverwalk links its parks and century-old iron bridges along both waters.
Stepping Stone Falls: the built waterfall that holds back Mott LakeA built dam-and-spillway on the Flint River backs up Mott Lake and steps the water down in tiers, lit with colored lights on summer nights northeast of Flint.
Tamarack Lake has its own little governmentThe 330-acre all-sports lake at Lakeview is tended by a lake improvement board — the small, dull, county-organized body that keeps the weeds down and can show up on a lakefront tax bill.
The cereal man who built a refuge for swansCereal magnate W.K. Kellogg fenced off the land around Wintergreen Lake near Augusta in 1927 as a bird sanctuary and gave it to Michigan State, which still runs it.
The Dragon Trail at Hardy Pond: choose a segment, not all 45 milesAll 45 miles of the nonmotorized Dragon Trail are open around Hardy Pond. The useful first step is choosing a segment, trailhead, and parking pass.
The Grand River fish ladder doubles as a sculptureAn artist-designed concrete fish ladder below the Sixth Street Dam in Grand Rapids lets salmon and steelhead climb the Grand River, and a raised platform puts you a few feet from the fall run.
The Lapeer State Game Area: thousands of public acres on the Flint River bottomlandSeveral thousand acres of state land assembled in the 1940s along the Flint River — working habitat open to hunters, hikers, and birders, with a staffed public shooting range off Roods Lake Road.
The Mill Creek trestle on the Wadhams to Avoca TrailWest of Port Huron, a rail-trail crosses the Mill Creek valley on a 640-foot wooden trestle that once carried Pere Marquette trains sixty feet above the water.
The national forest that grew back on failed farmland north of White CloudMuch of northern Newaygo County, around Bitely and Lilley Township, is federal Manistee National Forest — land the loggers wrecked, the farmers gave up on, and the government replanted.
The nature center that teaches you how a dune worksInside P.J. Hoffmaster State Park in Norton Shores, the Gillette Sand Dune Visitor Center explains Lake Michigan's living dunes — named for a woman who helped build Michigan's park system.
The old rail line you can now walk: Van Buren TrailVan Buren Trail State Park is a 14-mile path on a former railroad bed from South Haven to Hartford, running through farms and blueberry fields.
The paved trail beside Michigan's AdventureThe Fred Meijer Berry Junction Trail is a roughly 11-mile paved route from North Muskegon toward Whitehall, with connections to the Muskegon Lakeshore and White Lake pathways.
The Polly Ann Trail: a railroad that locals couldn't stop nicknamingA 20-mile non-motorized state trail on the old Pontiac, Oxford & Northern railbed, running through Dryden and Imlay City — to a trailhead on a street named P.O. & N.
The Sauk River and the chain of lakesThe Sauk River drains Branch County's Coldwater chain of lakes from Marble Lake's outflow, eventually feeding the St. Joseph River and Lake Michigan.
Trenton's Elizabeth Park: the oldest park in the Wayne County systemElizabeth Park in Trenton, a 162-acre island park donated to Wayne County in 1919, is the oldest unit of the Wayne County park system.
Van Buren State Park: dunes and a mile of beach south of South HavenA 400-acre state park on Lake Michigan a few miles south of South Haven, with forested freshwater dunes, a mile of sand beach, and a big campground.
Versluis Park: a barrier-free beach on an old gravel lakePlainfield Township's Versluis Park wraps a no-fee swimming beach, a fishing pier, and a mile of paved loop around a 50-acre man-made lake — and it was built so wheelchair users can reach the water.
Vestaburg State Game Area: 2,900 acres that belong to youRoughly 2,900 acres of public fields, brush, and wetland near Vestaburg, managed by the DNR for pheasant, turkey, rabbit, and deer — and open to anyone, hunter or not.
Why a state park near Laingsburg is named Sleepy HollowA naming feud between rival towns near Laingsburg ended when a former landowner's surname — Crane — handed the new state park a literary name.
10,000 wild acres on Saginaw's doorstep: the Shiawassee refugeThe Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, five miles south of Saginaw, gathers four rivers into a marshland so vast that locals call it Michigan's Everglades.
Bear hunting in Michigan: how the drawing (and the waiting) worksMichigan's black bear hunt runs on a preference-point drawing — here's how points work, when to apply, and the rules drawn hunters need to know.
Bears, coyotes, wolves, and cougars: the encounter pageWhat to actually do about Michigan's big animals — bear attractants, coyote hazing, wolf law, and the real (calm) story on cougars. Written to lower heart rates.
Bewabic State Park and the lakes the CCC lovedJust west of Crystal Falls, Bewabic State Park sits on a beautiful chain of glacial lakes -- a 1930s gem hand-built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the only Michigan state park with a tennis court.
Beyond hook and line: spearing, bowfishing, netting, and smelt dippingMichigan's regulations make honest room for the old ways — bowfishing, spearing, smelt dipping, minnow traps — with species lists and water lists that matter.
Bond Falls: six boardwalk views near PauldingMichigan DNR's Bond Falls site pairs a roughly 50-foot total drop with an accessible boardwalk and six viewing spots. Vehicle access is seasonal; the trail remains open year-round.
Canyon Falls: the easy US-41 gorge stopAbout eight miles south of L'Anse, a short trail from an MDOT roadside park reaches the Sturgeon River's rocky shelves and box canyon. The remote wilderness gorge is a different trip.
Copper Harbor, the end of the roadAt the very tip of the Keweenaw sits Copper Harbor -- Michigan's northernmost town and the spot where US-41 finally ends, nearly two thousand miles from its other end in Miami.
Copper Peak, where skiers flyJust north of Ironwood stands Copper Peak -- the only ski-flying hill in the Western Hemisphere and the tallest artificial ski jump on Earth, now being rebuilt to host the world's best again.
Crisp Point Lighthouse and the Shipwreck CoastLuce County's remote Lake Superior shore holds Crisp Point Lighthouse, the Two-Hearted River, and Muskallonge Lake State Park along the old Shipwreck Coast.

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