Will the Tunnel of Trees Ever Get Fixed?
Our most iconic road has had four washouts already, with more to come
Good Hart — M-119, the Tunnel of Trees, is falling apart. It’s down for the count. It’s on the brink of collapse, and it’s not clear how much worse it’s going to get before it gets better.
I know all that might sound alarmist, but I assure you it isn’t. You might remember that back in April we covered the disintegration of the M-119 just south of Cross Village. It looked like a barrel full of C-4 went off and the entire road was blown to smithereens with a full break more than 15 feet wide making it impossible to get from Good Hart to Cross Village.
Well, that gulch near Division Road is still there and more segments of M-119 are crumbling with every hard rain. According to MDOT and my peering eyes, there are four additional places where the Tunnel of Trees is closed due to washouts. There are closures south of Middle Village Road, north of South Lamkin Road, and at Horseshoe Bend and Devil’s Elbow.
As of July, the worst washout is still the big one near Division Road, up by Cross Village. But the others aren’t great, and the problem at Devil’s Elbow could end up being even worse than the full break at Division. Currently, a majority of the road is still technically intact or connected at Devil’s Elbow, but it’s not at all safe to drive and another hard rain could wipe it out.
Rains have caused a huge gully to open up to the west of the road, and the earth where the guardrail used to be planted is now absent with the steel suspended in the air. The ground under the edge of the pavement has been eroded and little cracks are appearing. One real bad rain and I could see the whole road collapsing into the gully below. And the truth is, even if Devil’s Elbow doesn’t completely break, repairing this section of the road is going to be a Herculean task. How exactly they are going to shore up enough dirt to reinforce the road is not at all clear to my non-engineering mind. It’s hard to imagine anything other than a bridge solving the problem at Devil’s Elbow.
The washouts all over M-119 are a pain for the residents stuck between them. The detours are annoying. But for Phil and Mary Allore, the owners of Trillium Woods, they are devastating. There is a washout to the south and the north of their lovely shop, and they’ve had to close for the summer.
Phil told me, “We are saddened by the disaster and grieve with our community for the destruction we’ve undergone. But at the same time, we are buoyed by the love and support our people have shown us through this abrupt disruption.”
Allore added, “These events have shown that us that our roads and adjacent properties are under-engineered for the storms of today, and it is not only critical that we rebuild, but that we rebuild with an eye towards resiliency and long term thinking. We need to continue to uplift the story and encourage our government to make funds available for MDOT to prioritize the reconstruction of M-119.”
Allore is right. M-119 is, in my opinion, the most beautiful road in all of Michigan, but it obviously isn’t capable of handling the weather it needs to handle, and long-term thinking about how to rebuild and reinforce the road needs to have happened yesterday.
I know that M-119 matters a lot to us up here and less to you down there. You have your own poorly maintained roads riddled with potholes that should have been fixed years ago by the incompetent road commission. But the Tunnel of Trees is, objectively, an iconic Michigan landmark, and landmarks deserve to be kept up whether they are in Detroit or in the northwest corner of Michigan where trees outnumber people.
Families live on M-119 with houses right next to washouts, Phil and Mary have the only coffee shop there that’s had to close for the summer, and thousands of tourists come every fall just to drive the the Tunnel of Trees when the leaves are the color of the sunset. The Tunnel of Trees matters even if it’s not packed with billboards for lawyers, semi-trucks, traffic jams, and road rage-filled commuters smacking their steering wheels on their way to the office.
We have to keep up the pressure on the people who are in charge of maintaining our failing roads. Back in April, I wrote that the collapse near Cross Village must be fixed by summer. That was wishful thinking to say the least. Call me naive, but I suppose I thought we lived in a first-world country.
Beautiful places and beautiful things only remain that way if we keep them so. And people can only enjoy them if they are able to see them. That’s obvious. The Tunnel of Trees is one of those beautiful things, and it happens to be free. There is no cost at all to pass north through Harbor Springs, drive on the bluffs high above Lake Michigan with your windows down on a summer’s evening, the sweet smell of the fresh air in the car, the sun tanning your forearm on the edge of the door, the glittering diamonds on the water in the west.
We deserve those moments on the most beautiful road in Michigan. But we can’t have it this summer, because M-119 is falling apart. And if we want it in the future, the road needs to be fixed right. We need to implore the government to do its job, a most basic job, and fix the most beautiful road in Michigan.
