Michigan's Oldest Forest Is Also Our Best Inland Camping Spot

Grayling — After about a six-year hiatus, I returned to my church’s annual father-son canoe trip at Hartwick Pines. What I hadn’t realized was I had spent much of my life camping on the edge of one of Michigan’s oldest forests.

Americans generally love old things. Every town has a “historic district” featuring brick buildings from the 1850s. In Europe, it seems every building has a history dating to long before America’s oldest structures.

We’ve only been around 250 years as a country, and 400 as settlers. But our trees also reflect the youth of our nation.

According to Forest-Features Michigan, the average age of 63% of Michigan trees is between 40 and 89 years old. Only 0.2% of Michigan is covered in old growth forests—woodland regions dominated with mature trees that are hundreds of years old. It’s all because of the logging industry.

Michigan’s loggers primarily cut down white pine, and the largest concentration of these logs was north of a line drawn from Muskegon to Saginaw. White Pines could be over 200 years old and possibly 200 feet tall. A “log” was usually 16 feet, and because of the weight, loggers made icepaths to slide the lumber on sleds to the frozen water. They stacked the logs until the spring thaw then dumped them to float to the mills.

The volume of logs increased with the advent of the steam engine. Logging became a year-round tradition.

Grayling was at the heart of Michigan’s white pines. During the 1890s many Finnish and Scandinavian immigrants came to join the German and Irish immigrants in the work. Logging camps dotted Up North, but none of them are still standing today.

Without the logging industry, we wouldn’t have America. But we also would still have old-growth forests all over the north of our state. There are only eight old growth forests in the Mitten State. Four in the Upper Peninsula and four in the Lower.

In 1927, Karen Hartwick bought 8,000 acres from her father’s lumber business, Salling-Hanson, after her father died. Her husband, Edward Hartwick, was a lumberjack who died in World War II. She wanted to honor him with the land. Once she donated the land to the state, she made sure that there was a memorial building and a logging museum to honor the legacy of her father’s and husband’s profession.

But she also wanted to preserve an 86-acre section of old-growth forest where some trees were over 160 feet tall. The old-growth trees were diminished in the 1940s because of a wind storm, losing 37 acres. In 1992, another storm damaged the most beloved tree in the forest, known as the Monarch, a 155-foot white pine. But there are many Monarchs in the forest. The trees are all as tall as the pines of the Pacific Northwest. The moss is thickly laced in the cracks of bark, and the forest floor is covered in fallen trees.

Today, there is a path winding through the forest. When I walked it, I was walking in what Michigan once was. One can imagine every place having 200-foot trees. The skyline would be covered in green.

The recent bout of Canadian wildfire reminds us that even if we never logged a single acre, God cuts down forests. Just like the Monarch fell, so do Monarchs burn.

There are now 9,000 acres of Hartwick Pines State Park. It’s a park that has by and large been preserved. I’m biased, but I believe it is the best place to camp in inland Michigan. You smell white pine, feel the wet moss on your ankles, soak in pine smoke from your fire, and happen upon lakes for swimming.

In prior years, my annual trip to Hartwick Pines State Park was adjacent to a 49-acre forest. I remember my father and grandfather bringing me and my brother up on our father-son canoe trip as a young boy. We camped Thursday and Friday and canoed the Au Sable on Saturday. But we never visited the old growth forest.

We spent most of our time running through the pine trees with the other boys. I led one army of boys with sticks against a group of older boys with steel swords.

Even though we weren’t waging these battles in the old growth forest (because we may have knicked them with our swinging), we were in an archaic setting. Moss carpeted the ground so thickly that we would bounce on it. And the trees were old. Not 200-feet-tall old, but older than Monroe County’s trees. When we boys transported back to medieval times—hacking and slashing at one another with sticks—we did so in an old, unadulterated woodland.

This summer I watched my oldest son grab a stick and disappear into those same woods. Those trees he ran through will grow to the same height as the Monarch. Some will burn or blow down. Watching boys who are but saplings rush through those old trees makes me think that one day, I’ll blow over too. But unless a seed falls to the ground, whether by wind or flame, it cannot rise into a majestic white pine.