Most likely, I could fight off a pack of flesh-craving timber wolves in the thick forests around Lake Superior in winter.
That’s what I reasoned with mass delusion, as I drove towards the largest freshwater lake in the world, the one that “never gives up her dead,” Lake Superior.
When there’s four feet of snow on the ground you can barely walk, even in snowshoes, let alone dodge a Raptor-like side attack from a massive wolf and skimper up a tree while fighting off the rest of the savage beasts with your hatchet, as I imagined it.
I just felt hunted. That “Art of War” overused example about the battle being won before the fighting starts was dancing in my mind. The quiet still of the woods enveloped me as it got darker from the canopy, even in late December, snow hiding the real ground. I saw my deep breath exhales blanket the air.
The feral brutes have the super ears and smells and I just tripped over a sprig hidden under the powder. They are gonna have an effortless lunch.
“Tahquamenon Falls State Park encompasses nearly 50,000 forested acres and stretches 13-plus miles in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” according to Michigan’s DNR website.
It features endless acres to hike, but it’s tough to cover much ground, even with somewhat packed-out snowshoe trails.
The highlight of the park was the 200-feet-wide “Upper Falls.” They look like the color of melting pennies turned into foam at the bottom washout. The Tahquamenon River is dyed amber by the tannins from the trees lining the always-S-curving flow.
I hiked all day, hitting both Lower and Upper Falls, and was completely exhausted from the cold, and the extra effort each step took. My poles were useless because I forgot the baskets at the bottom — they would just stab through the snow halfway up the shaft.
I barebooted the first trail and there were ice patches so it took double time. Then it was time to switch to microspikes to hike down to the Lower Falls. The snow was thick and I needed snowshoes.
The park boundary was only eight miles from Lake Superior, so it gets hammered by “lake-effect” snow every year, measured in terms of feet not inches.
When it was time to set up camp, I couldn’t shake the chill. Old Man Logan and I just needed to add my puffer coat and get moving and I’d warm up. That triggered a hike back to the car instead — just going to turn the heater on for a second. Twenty minutes later the car was heading back to Lake Huron.
Two days before, the venture began early Saturday morning with a farms-on-both-sides drive from Mifflin Heights (an hour north to the west side of Cleveland) to Huntington Beach, on the shores of Lake Erie.
For the past 13 years, I’ve done some winter climb or expedition. But not this year. As a result, the belly fat multiplied without a training camp and with the state highpoint quest completed in the lower 48, I was without purpose.
So, it wasn’t quite clear as to what my quest was. But I knew I needed to take a solo trip to the Great Lakes to face the bitter wind and frozen land to battle my own boredom and bolster a fake sense of self worth.
Huntington Beach had a simple lake hiking route along eroded golden “cliffs.” I met two old college friends that I climbed Guadalupe Peak in Texas with and the only challenge was throwing my Muck Boots across an inlet / stream’s mouth so shoe-boy could cross.
It was 55-degrees and patches of stratus skies poked through the blue. People were wearing T-shirts as no ice covered the lake. There was a hint of emerald in the water, like a pirate bay.
Lake Erie has received a bad rep, but it’s still massive, with over 800 miles of shoreline and is the 11th largest lake in the world. You either know about partying on Kelley’s Island and Put N Bay and doing things like wrecking golf carts or your don’t.
From Huntington Beach the route wound due west along Lake Erie (I took the turnpike but you can take the “293-mile Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Scenic Byway”). Then it’s a right turn into Michigan at the corner of Lake Erie beginning a 300-plus mile gas-on plight towards the North Pole to the Mackinaw Bridge.
I was cruising in a 2015 artic blue Nissan Rogue with over 200K miles that has highpointed all over the U.S. This is not some fancy sprinter van with a hot tub that rolls out at night. It has all-wheel drive and amazing gas mileage and I can sleep in the back in an emergency (like the blizzard in Minnesota which forced a pull-over-and-huddle ‘til morning scenario). It has a camp stove and water and I could live stranded for a week, comfortably.
With every hundred miles on the interstate there were fewer neon lights and rest areas. The highway eventually split and the woods median was so tree saturated you couldn’t see cars on the other side.
The real fear was the deer and elk. The herds ruled the dusk. The deer owned the night. Glowing eyes on the edge of the concrete berm, waiting for suicide by car, which as a species is apparently their preferred method of death.
The bars in Mackinaw City were still illuminated as I hopped on the best bridge in America (according to 2025 Doc Fox world bridge rankings).
Miss me with your red Golden Gate, that could never handle the ice let alone the gales.
Miss me with your Brooklyn Bridge, never seen anything of so little length. Well, OK, no jokes about my anatomy, please.
London Bridge? The Fergie song is good but the song is about that thing falling down.
The Mackinaw Bridge is the most magnificent human-made span in the history of the world. (I actually talked to someone in a time machine once and they said no bridge would ever be constructed that could compare to it, either.)
First, the bridge itself splits two Great Lakes, Lake Michigan to the west and Lake Huron to the east. As everyone says, picture the state as a left-handed mitten/glove, and those Lakes surround both sides of the mitten and come together at the tip of the middle finger.
Above the glove, there is a skinny rectangular patch of land called Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or “the U.P.” It’s over 16K square miles, about a third of the size of Ohio and is a wild frontier that’s entire northern border is Lake Superior.
Locals live south or “under” the bridge, so people in the U.P. call them trolls.
Trolls call people in the U.P., “Yoopers,” and believe they are all a little insane. And they are — you’d have to be to endure lake-effect weather that is some of the worst on planet Earth.
Anyway, across the Straights I spanned, away from the trolls and towards “da Yoopers,” heading along the Lake Huron coast towards Hessel.
My parents have summer vacation cottage rentals on the lakefront in this barely-could-be-called-a-village harbor town of Hessel, and I crashed there for the night.
One cottage was left unwinterized for easy access to snowmobiling and ice fishing, which were both part of my original plan. But year after year the ice freezes later, the snow falls less often.
If you continue east past Hessel, in another hour you’d hit Canada. But before the border and along the coast there are plenty of hiking trails, like the John Woollam Preserve Trail, and camping in DeTour State Forest and on Government Island.
Yes, off the coast in the U.P., along Lake Huron past Cedarville, you have a whole island to yourself, called Government Island. It’s one of 36 islands in the Les Cheneaux chain.
Needing knee-hugging snow, on Sunday morning I departed Lake Huron and Hessel and was off to Tahquamenon Falls where the story began. Along Lake Superior’s southeast tip, I ventured toward the little snowmobile town of Paradise.
Single-story motels with parking-lot-facing front doors and square diners and quaint grocery spots are scattered along the way. Each are unique in name and signage, like the lighthouse covered in Christmas lights and surrounded by high dirt-glazed snow banks.
And where I went weak, being chilled and bone creaky after a long hike; I could not venture forward to camp or go further north to Canada. Retreating back to Lake Huron seemed like the only play.
Another night of solitude, I stared across a half-frozen bay, peaking around the cabin blinds expecting to see civilization, but hearing only wind. Solitude is nothing new — most climbers experience it. But things were not right upstairs, and the meltdown was upon me.
I sipped some Woodford Reserve bourbon and paced and indulged in Michigan’s grow, but the same conversations replayed in my head, about my future, age, my children, how death has been circling my being.
A silver hatchet with blunt hammer end shared the bed with me and in the morning I knew I couldn’t stay. I had to get back to that road.
After hiking Erie, Huron and Superior, last on the list was Lake Michigan. (Apologies, Lake Ontario but you didn’t make the cut.)
Monday morning I retreated south across “the bridge” to the land of Grendel (from Beowulf) and other trolls, bearing along the pinky finger of the mitten, just below the fingernail, to Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
At the trailhead, the sign cautioned: “We may not always realize it, but hiking in sand uses more energy. Sand moving under our feet makes muscles work harder. Feeling tired? Turn back.”
It was bizarre to be hiking on desert-not-beach sand, but seeing water accompanied by polar-wind gusts.
70K plus acres made up the greater preserve of Bear Dunes, including 21 to 31 miles of coast along Lake Michigan, if you count the islands off the shore.
Children were sledding down one the infinite sand faces when I arrived, and with it being 30 degrees and windy, they were dressed like Ohio kids when they go out in the snow.
My poles were once again useless without baskets at the bottom, but having just come from snow, muscles remembered the extra slip behind the heel with every push off. I was able to guide a little up and down the persistent hills, over miles, to the coastline.
Sunset and seclusion and open water made original-for-a-day footprints in the sand, cream-colored circular rocks piled together from the surf.
It was past dusk when I got back to the trailhead parking lot. I think I’m a bit of a baby in nature these days.
That last mile, with how foreign the atmosphere was, landscape-sized bushes and always-engulfing sand cliffs and slow mobility, why I am so geared to be expecting an attack from humans or animals? It’s probably the safest place in Michigan.
After getting some sleep, I was driving back towards Ohio at 5 a.m. Tuesday.
A general rule that’s keep me alive for the last couple decades is when you start losing you mind, just run. Sprint far, far away and when you look back the madness will be further behind.
Just be careful; sometimes after looking back, when you turn and face the front, there’s a telephone pole of sanity waiting to smack you in the face — which can be much, much worse.
