Steve and Steffi's Fall Weekend, 2009

This year, we wanted to go for a hike or two in the national forest. The nearest of which is the Huron-Manistee National Forest, about three hours drive north of Ann Arbor. The plan was to drive up one morning, hike in the afternoon, spend the night in a suitably picturesque place, preferably a cabin, and then hike in the morning and drive back.

Saturday was not availale, so we drove up to Oscoda on Sunday morning, and extended our weekend to include Monday. This consumed a vacation day from my day job, but had the benefit of reducing competition for lodging. In fact, we found a cabin on the Lake Huron beach in Oscoda with no difficulty for Sunday night, although they were full on Saturday.

So we got an early start and arrived just after noon, depositing our stuff and quickly heading to the forest by driving west on River Road, paralleling the Au Sable River, paste the Lumberman's Monument to the Iargo Springs parking area.

It's not like this is where the color tour really begins. It began when we left our driveway, because the whole trip was filled with the beautiful sights of trees along the highway turning gaudy reds and yellows. We had been enjoying these sights all along the way, but it was at this point that we started walking and using the camera, so the color tour web site starts here, at Iargo Springs, on the high bluffs bordering the south bank of the lower Au Sable River, in the heart of the Huron-Manistee National Forest.

Across the river on the north bank the land is much lower. There are hardwood forests there, and they are all turning colors, creating this magnificent commanding view from above.

Note the bright areas in the distance on the right. These are exposed sand of the bluffs on the right bank, where the river turns to the left. The bluffs go even beyond this point. These spots with exposed sand are where we are going to hike to.

Adjacent to the viewing platform there is a wooden stairway that descends through the forest to the river bank far below. Before we went hiking we wanted to get down to river level and find the Springs themselves.

As we hiked through mostly evergreen woods, we would get occasional views out to the river through the woods. Before we reached the halfway point at the Canoers Memorial, we found a great view and snapped this picture.

During this portion, the woods were pretty, but there were no more great views across the river. When we reached the monument, a whiteboard outside the Visitor Center suggested continuing east along the Highbanks Trail for good fall color viewing.

Allowing time to retrace our steps all the way back to the car, we still had time to go a little further, so we continued east. The river turns left here and very soon we came to a place where the the sand of the high banks is exposed. This was one of the bight spots in the distance in the very first picture.

The view back upstream from this vantage point was worth taking another picture, and this is what it looked like from here.

We were by then out of time to go any further, so we retraced our steps almost 4 miles back to the car, and drove to Tawas City for dinner, then returned to the Cabin on the beach.

It was now Sunday night, and while there had been plenty of people at the cabins when we arrived in the afternoon, they had now all gone home for the weekend and we found that ours was the only cabin occupied.

The Reid Lakes area contains five interlinked loops of trails, and the intersections are well marked. We had walked almost 8 miles the day before and so we were planning to walk a bit less today, and planned our loops accordingly to include three of the five loops available. This route would take us past a few lakes.

If the first mile was any indication, we were in for a lovely hike with lots of color, but it is always hard to appreciate fall color from inside the woods themselves. It's beautiful, but you are too close to get any spectacular views.

After a mile of walking through the woods we came to a trail intersection at the shore of Reid Lake itself. Here we found the spectacular view we were looking for, by looking across the lake. It was a wide panorama of fall color, so I had to take several pictures and combine them for a panoramic shot.

From here, once we could tear ourselves away from the view across the lake, we followed the "Fanny's Marsh Loop". This loop extends west of Reid Lake and comes to the shore of Big Marsh Lake. This lake is just as beautiful, and the lighting was even better than at Reid Lake. In fact, the whole thing looked like an unbelievable painting. So we took another panoramic suite of photographs.

The loop continued along the shore of the Lake, before looping back behind Reid Lake. From there we followed the "Mossy Bog Loop". We found that the hiking was very easy and so we were going to return earlier than we had intended, unless we extended the hike. At the intersection of the "Headwaters Loop", which we had not intended to use because of its length, we decided that we could walk a mile of it out-and-back to Little Trout Lake because of this extra time we had. The walk was delightful, but Little Trout Lake was not worth the trouble.

Well, we certainly weren't going to complain, having found such spectacular views at two of the three lakes we found. We continued the Mossy Bog Loop and returned to the car, then drove south on M-65 and returned home on US-23. The 150 miles that separated the forests we had enjoyed in the north from our home in Ann Arbor made a big difference. We had color at home, too, but it was much less advanced.

A week later, though, the large pin oak tree on our lawn extension went from green to red-brown nearly overnight, and so when the sun shone brightly on it, I took a picture showing our house with the great red pin oak on the right and the smaller yellowish tulip tree in the foreground, and all of the colors of Eberwhite Woods in the background.

We have wonderful places in Ann Arbor to see color every fall, including even our own place, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't get an early start by going north. We are glad we did.

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