Surging through Lowell - Home Base of the North Country Trail

NCT trail headquarters building on a quiet early Sunday Morning

I stormed into town on a Saturday with the streets jammed.  The town of Lowell was abuzz.  The streets were packed with tourists and celebrants.  It was their annual Riverwalk Festival.  Every parking spot downtown was full.  The only spot I could find was 'Fifteen minute parking only'.  But that was enough, because in the heart of all the swarms of people - the town's biggest attraction of the summer - the North Country Trail Headquarters office was closed.  Their office hours are 1-4PM M-Th., 10AM-4PM on Friday, and they apparently saw no reason to make an exception for the festival.

Maybe they had a vendor booth that I didn't notice in my allotted fifteen minutes.  But as circumstances worked out, I never did get a chance to return to town when the offices were open.

It would have been just for talk - just to check in - a feel good moment.  I already have the t-shirt and hat (number 24 in my rotation)

I already have all the maps I need, and I'm already a member.  My only questions were answered on their web site. (They have had just sixteen end-to-end hikers in the trail's history.  They offer a patch and a rocker to long distance hikers at various mileage levels and state completions.)  If I just wanted to look around, then I think I managed to do it all by peering through the windows on the quiet Sunday morning when the photo up top was taken.  The space inside was small.

The Lowell Riverwalk itself is small -- only three blocks long. (Note that the on-the-ground trail blazes and the 2013 handout map from the NCT web site [shown below], tell the hiker to skip one of those three blocks, between High Street and King Street.  The online interactive map includes that extra block.)

The best of the North Country Trail hiking in the area starts a mile north of town and goes through some hilly landscapes with deep woods.

There is a high bluff above the river with what can only be described as a knife-edge ridge walk

And there are a few high barren spots where the soil is too sandy to support vegetation.

Hat number seventeen got to pose for both of those cameos.  But this report starts two days earlier when I was wearing Hat fifteen and coming out of the north end of Barry State Game area.  This looks like an old nursery or Christmas tree farm.

Next, coming into Lowell from the south there is a walk along the Paul Henry Rail Trail along the Thornapple River through Middleville.

Everything looks peaceful and normal in the Friday morning downtown market scene above, but it's deceptive.  All the power in town was out and it would stay out until Sunday.  Just before dawn on that Friday morning a horrendous severe squall came through.  Fifty-five mph winds had ripped down dozens of trees.  I had to crawl through several major blow-downs like this in a few miles of paved rail trail.

After the Paul Henry Trail, there is a short section of really pleasant woods trail through the Middleville State Game Area, then there are nine miles of road walk to Lowell - corn fields with blue sky and roadside sky blue cornflowers for hat number sixteen to pose with

This road walk includes a little dip into Dolan Preserve, with a section of dead end trail beside the Coldwater River

and it includes an inexplicable bypass of the considerable boardwalk trail through Maher Audubon Sanctuary.

With a little bushwhack from Woodschool road along the ridgeline between wetlands I easily included Maher Sanctuary in my hike.  NCT could easily build trail along that ridge.  I'm surprised that they haven't already.

All in all an eventful and variety-filled three days along the North Country Trail.  For another perspective I present the screenshots of the GPS tracks.

And for the more inquisitive, you can delve into as much detail as you wish on the interactive map below.

Powered by Wikiloc

Now, I don't normally do this, but I have built up some concerns about the NCT management.  It seems to me that there is a disconnect between the North Country trail leadership and the trail hiker experience.  If they can't even correctly blaze the trail within three blocks of their headquarters, it tells me that something is wrong.  If they don't care enough to open their doors one Saturday out of the year when the festival named after a section of the trail is taking place, then to me, there is something wrong.  What?  My impression is that management is too focused on managing the trail on "paper".  Too much time in the office.  Too much emphasis on talking the talk - on the bureaucracy and politics associated with managing a National Scenic Trail, and not enough about 'being there' on the trail for hikers.  Just my two cents.

Happy 200th Birthday, Thoreau

1938 portrait of Thoreau by Dwight Case Sturges

Who speaks for the silent?  Amidst our harried, frenetic, modern, gadget-addicted existence, who has the courage to remind us of our humble, simple roots?

As I'm fond of saying, we are the ape who left the jungle to explore the world.

Henry David Thoreau sends us back there - into the woods - to live deliberately, to reconnect with the very marrow of life.

To be sure, there are others who have done the job well.  John Muir is a true icon.  But for me, there is no better spokesman for the wild than Henry David Thoreau.

Excerpt from "Walking" as it appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1862.  Thoreau considered this his seminal work.  He said of it "I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter."

Today, July 12, 2017 is the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth.

We remember Thoreau today because he was an eloquent spokesman, a pathfinder in a world of followers, and a man of principle, willing to live his beliefs.

Two hundred years from now, if Thoreau is still remembered, we will be able to say that we have not yet lost our way.

Some well-kept Trail - a hero who keeps it so, and the frightful road walk to get there

"Carry on Bravely" is Mick Hawkins' signature valediction..  Mick is a trail maintainer and active member of the Chief Noonday local chapter of the North Country Trail Association.  Dedicated trail-loving volunteers like this are the Heart and Sole of every good Trail.

Situated halfway between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, Michigan, Yankee Springs State Recreation Area is a popular destination for outdoor activities, including hiking.  It's trail through very pretty mature woods.  Here's Hat number 14 with proof.

This is the spiritual core of the Chief Noonday Chapter of the North Country Trail Association, one of 40 local chapters and affiliates that are the National organization's 'boots on the ground' when it comes to making the trail work.

Whenever I run into a maintainer on the trail, I go out of my way to thank them for their work, and that was the case when I met Mick Hawkins in Yankee Springs doing a trail reroute around a sensitive habitat area for a newly Federally Listed threatened rattlesnake, the Eastern Massasauga.

We had a nice chat there, and then met again a couple hours later as I was finishing up a trail leg and Mick arrived to replenish brochures in the Kiosk.

Mick is low-key, but he's a mover when it comes to his local club.  And his local club's section of the trail stands out among the others as being better maintained.  Best of all, they have blazed their road walks.  Here's Hat number thirteen with an unusual trail marker, placed by a local enthusiast who actually lives on the route.

Of the North Country Trail sections I've hiked from central New York to here in SW Michigan, only one other local chapter has stood out as head-and-shoulders above the rest.  That's the Wampum chapter in far western PA.

The North Country Trail through Yankee Springs Rec Area features a close encounter with Hall Lake with its two significant islands and water lilies in bloom.

And just north of there it features a significant climb to Graves Hill overlook.  It was about 125 feet according to my GPS.  The actual overlook is on a side trail, and it's overgrown so that it no longer has a view, but just the climb was something significant for me after 400 miles of flat hiking.

These hills are made up of glacier-deposited piles of sand and gravel.  And unfortunately where there is a resource like that just sitting there ready for the taking, there are people ready to exploit it.  On my road walk approaching Yankee Springs from the south, I was regularly blown off the road by the monster tandem gravel trucks.

The roads here have little or no shoulders.  There's no place to hide.  Can't blame the local chapter for this, unless it's for not finding off-road trail options--a nearly impossible task through privately held land.

So I just clenched my jaw and 'Carried on Bravely.'

Here's the GPS Tracks of the approach road walking and a topo map with the route through Yankee springs showing the many various gravel and sand hills, many with geometrical shapes from having been dug up and hauled away.

If you want more detail of the route, zoom in on one of the maps below - the segment through Yankee Springs, and my overall Personal Continuous Footpath track.

Powered by Wikiloc

Powered by Wikiloc

Walkin' in the Woods again - and back on the NCT

North Country Trail (NCT) spans Augusta Creek on this elaborate footbridge.

The big Michigan cities of Battle Creek and Kalamazoo are closing in on one another.  A couple more decades and they'll squeeze together into one big megalopolis.  But for now there's still some country between them, and still some laid-back small town flavor too.  The comfortable little town of Augusta splits the distance between its big neighbors east and west.  And the North Country Trail uses Augusta to launch the hiker on his/her northward quest into the heart of the state.

I like little towns - towns that aren't growing and sprouting suburbs, towns that feature a block or two of businesses, where you can see one end from the other.  In the case of Augusta the trail passes just three blocks east of downtown and that's enough to keep you in a residential neighborhood for barely four blocks.  Heading north from town there is rural trail that skips what there is of a downtown, following the edge of a cornfield instead.

And just south of town is the Fort Custer State Recreation Area (FCSRA) with many, many miles of well groomed and well-marked trail, none of which the North Country Trail uses.

I chose the River trail, used mostly by horses.  It follows the east bank of the Kalamazoo River, connecting to roads at a gate on the far SW corner of the Recreation Area and emerging in the north at the Recreation Area's main entrance where my footsteps finally actually joined the North Country Trail.

I had planned my connecting road walk from Defiance, Ohio to reach the NCT here.  The climax of the road walk took me through another great little town named ... wait for it ... Climax.  Here I had a chance to let Hat number Eleven pose with their American Legion Post's memorial tank.

It was a long haul from Defiance, so it felt *so* good to be off roads and back on real trail.

The River Trail provides a nice view of the big lazy Kalamazoo river.

The trails in FCSRA are well groomed and meticulously marked with 'you are here' maps and directions to the next marker post.

It passed all too quickly, and I was in Augusta.  At the Augusta Road trailhead I finished the four block road walk and let Hat number twelve pose on the trail register box.

Then came the walk beside the cornfield and on into the Kellogg Biological Station with the covered bridge (photo up top), and I was back following the blue blazes.

That particular blue blaze had a matching companion - a dragonfly every bit as blue as the blaze.  It's called a Spatterdock Darner - Rhionaeschna mutata - and it's quite rare across most of its range.  I don't think I've ever seen one before.

Through the vast Michigan State U Kellogg Biological Station's holdings, the trail provides wonderful variety.  There was perfectly groomed footpath in the woods,

a walk beside Duck Lake,

and open trail through fields

including this oddly placed bench with a view of cows in a pasture.

It's good to be back in the good graces of the NCT, doing some more of their 'certified' trail.  I actually dislike that designation, because as a result, NCT seems much less committed to trail continuity.  Many of their road walks are not blazed at all.  The impression is that there's no real route connecting the certified segments.  That's one of the reasons that I feel free to choose my own route.

So here's the map of the day where my personal choice re-connected with certified NCT at Augusta.

And here's the hike of my own choice through Climax and into the Fort Custer Rec Area that I did the previous day.  It is a wide view that shows how I targeted the gap between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo

More certified trail to come!  Stay tuned.

SW Michigan Lake country - Bearing up through the Trail Drought

Hat number eight at Lake George.  It's a long slog, all on roads, but scenes like this help me bear it.

I'm hiking my own hike to bridge a big gap in the North Country Trail.  I sorely miss footpath in the woods.  If I had chosen to follow the suggested trail route, the wait would have been longer, I think, and taking my way I got to pass through a corner of Indiana.

But now I'm in Michigan, and as soon as I reached the state line, Lake George was there to greet me.  It's a medium-small lake with classy, well maintained homes and cottages packing every available inch of the shore line except for the public access boat launch where I took the headline photo.

Close behind Lake George was Matteson Lake, where I perched Hat number nine.

But most of my time has been spent prairie walking.

Yes, they call this prairie.  Michigan does not come to mind when I think of prairie.  But it's undeniable.  And to help convince me there are road names like Snow Prairie and Prairie Lake, and towns with names like ... well ... Prairieville.

The prairies are known for more than wide open spaces.  It's tornado country.  Fortunately it's not tornado season any more, but I did have to take shelter from a nasty thunderstorm.

You don't want to be caught walking these fields in a thunderstorm when you're the tallest thing around.

Back in Fremont, Indiana, just south of the Michigan line, at their nice new library where I met a kid willing to pose with Hat number seven,

they have a prairie garden

which proves that natural prairie is far more than just grass.  Here's hat number ten with some butterfly milkweed.

Unfortunately, so far, I've seen no monarch butterflies, which are practically symbiotic with milkweed.  I may be between generations here.  I'll certainly keep looking.

Here are the screen shots of the GPS tracks of the days I wore hats 7 through 10.

And for more detail, you can zoom in to SW Michigan on my Personal Continuous Footpath overview map from Wikiloc:

Powered by Wikiloc