HIKING PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS - JULY 4TH - JULY 8TH, 2018

Early morning on July 4th, we headed up to do some hiking in the Porcupine Mountains.

We drove all the way to White Pine, Michigan..which is just a few miles from the East side of the Porcupine Mountain's park headquarters where you check in and get your permits. 

The Konteka is a very unique place...it's a hotel, a bowling alley, a bar, a restaurant, a gift shop and a convenience store all rolled into one!

I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of this, but one of the things that the Konteka does is attract bears.  They they take all their leftover food scraps and dump it in a pile at the back of the restaurant.  Bears will come of the pile and eat.  The restaurant has a wall of windows so that you can eat and watch the bears feed on the pile.

It really wasn't a bad place at all!

Map showing our route

The next morning, we checked in at the east side park headquarters.  Gary parked the car at the lake of the clouds parking lot where we would finish in 3 days.  He then walked to meet up with me and our gear at the Lake Superior Trail head about 1/2 mile away.

The hike started out totally normal.  The trail was great.  No flies or mosquitoes.  It was very pretty and relatively easy until we got to Buckshot cabin.

View of Lake Superior from the trail

They had boards down where it was swampy and muddy....but that didn't last long

As we progressed along the trail, the mosquitoes did get worse.  We had gone about 2.5 miles and we were near Buckshot cabin when we decided we wanted to take a quick break, apply more bug spray and eat a snack.  We thought that if there was no one at Buckshot cabin, then we could just use it for about 30 minutes.  We arrived to the cabin and it looked like no one was there.  There was no camping/hiking gear anywhere outside.  We were standing there chatting and I told Gary, "Why don't you just quick look inside to see if anyone has their stuff there".  Gary opened the door and all of a sudden he was said, "Oh I'm sorry...we didn't think anyone was here".  He walked back to me slightly perplexed and we continued our way on the trail.  I said, "There was someone inside??"  He explained that as soon as he opened the door he saw 2 DNR rangers in there....a girl who was laying on the bed pretending to 'sleep' and a guy who jumped up and quickly greeted Gary as fast as he could scurry to the door and straighten up his clothes.  We both rolled our eyes....there's are tax payer money hard at work!  DNR rangers having sex in a cabin that they aren't supposed to be in.  Awesome.

Anyway, after that weird encounter, we continued to walk and we just ate our snack on the trail.  It was at this point that things really started to go downhill.

The picture below does not do it justice, but the trail turned to mucky mud.  I mean foot deep, over the boot, mud that will pull your shoes off mud.  Now, I can handle dirt and mud....it's expected when your hiking.  But this was by far the absolute worst trail I had ever hiked in my life.  We kept thinking, "Ok, just a little bit farther and we will get out of the mud".  For about 5 miles we said that.   We tried to walk around the mud, but the foliage was so thick in the woods that there really was no way to walk around the trail.  After a while we just gave up and trudged through the mud.  We encountered some hikers going the opposite way and they looked defeated as well.  It.  Was.  Miserable.

Later on, we talked to some other hikers and they said that they thought the trail was horrible too and that's the way that particular trail always is.  I don't know how one of the most popular trails in the Porcupine Mountains could possibly be that horribly maintained. 

This picture does not explain how muddy the trail was.

Again, this picture does not do it justice, but my shoes and legs are just covered in mud and here I stand absolutely pissed at this stupid trail and trying to figure out how much more misery do we have before we get to our campsite for the night.

FINALLY, after around 9 miles of horribly muddy trails, we finally reached the Big Carp River Trail. Our campsite for the night was just down the trail about a mile and it was right on the river.  

After all that misery on the Lake Superior Trail, we at least had an AWESOME campsite on the Big Carp River trail.

We had easy access to the water and we were able to rinse our boots off and play around in the water a little bit to cool off and rinse the mud off.

The best part of this campsite was that a bald eagle flew right down the length of the river.  It was amazing!  

The next day we started out on the Big Carp River Trail.  This trail was perfect compared to the other trail.  There was one section of mucky mud on this trail that was maybe the length of a football field.  It was kind of a pain, but since it was deep in the woods, there was no foliage to try and bushwhack your way through.  You could fairly easily walk around the muck and get back on the trail.  But that's not a good thing to do either...you should always stay on the trail because what happens is when people wander off the trail to walk around mud then you create 'new' trails and it can become very confusing as to where the real trail is.  Anyway, we continued the 6-7 miles down Big Carp River trail with no real issues all the way to Mirror Lake where our second campsite was. 

At one point on the trail we came across a deer.  We thought that we would spook her, but she didn't even care that we were there.  We walked right by her talking and she just continued to graze and walk along.

Big Carp River Trail

Our second campsite at Mirror Lake was awesome!  The lake has several easy access points to water and there was a little creek nearby that we could get water from too.  It was perfect.

View of the lake from our campsite.  There were quite a few people camping in the area

We made fire!!

Last day of hiking. We only had 3-4 miles to go....or so we thought.

On the trail from Mirror Lake to Lake of the Clouds, we encountered more mud...not as bad as Lake Superior Trail but we were pretty much done with the flipping mud

There was a campsite right near here...It seemed pretty cool but the water was WAAAY down below over the cliff and would have been practically impossible to access.

Once we reached Lake of the Clouds, we followed the trail on the South side of the lake to our campsite.  We were campsite #2.  The campsite was ok, but we didn't see immediate access to water.  So, we decided to continue down the trail towards campsites 3 and 4 to see if they had easy access to water.  Campsite 3 was meh...they sort of had an access trail to water.  But then we got to campsite #4.  It was like something out of a movie.  Campsite 4 was on this tiny little peninsula that jutted out into the lake.  The cool breeze was blowing from the lake and the water was right there with no bushes or downed trees or muck in the way.  Gary and I stood and stared...we looked at each other and said "We NEED this spot!!".  It was early afternoon and no one had set up camp yet.  We debated as to whether or not we take a chance and set up our camp here...even though we did not have reservations for that particular site.  We decided that that since we were only about 1/2 mile from the car, we would leave our gear at campsite 2, walk to the car, drive to the park headquarters and see if this campsite was available for the night.  The plan would be that if that particular site was available, then we would stay the night.  If it wasn't available, then we would hike back and grab our stuff and be done.

We made it all the way back to headquarters...I was so hoping that this site was available but alas it was not.  I think Gary was secretly happy it wasn't.  So, we hiked back, got our gear and hiked to the car.

On the way out, we sort of ended up walking with this couple.  They had encountered the same problems that we had and they were leaving a day early too.  They thought the Lake Superior Trail was horrible.  They weren't happy with their site at Mirror Lake and they decided to walk out.  I was kind of bummed for them about their site at Mirror Lake...we had such a great site and really enjoyed our night there.  Anyway, talking and walking with them helped with the hike back to the car.  Even though it was only 0.5 miles it was all up a very steep hill and it was pretty taxing now that we had all our gear with us.  Once we got to the top, we said our good byes and good lucks, found the car and took off.

Lake of the Clouds - The foliage was really thick all around, which did not make it each to access water.

We are smiling because we know we are done and get to have a refreshing shower at the nearby Union Campground about 15 minutes after this picture was taken.

After we reached the car, we drove to Union Bay campground, took showers and then decided to head to Marquette for the night.

The next day was Sunday and we got an early start because we knew that we had a long ways to go to get home.  As we were driving along, it dawned on me that we would be driving by Newberry where the Oswald Bear Ranch is.  We decided to take a side trip to the ranch and see the bears since neither of us had been there before.

Entrance to the bear ranch

Bears! This place is definitely NOT a zoo.  It's a huge, sprawling ranch where the bears have acres and acres of area to roam around.  I believe that the family works with the DNR and they have bears there that cannot be put back out in to the wild because they are injured or something. 

Just a bear chilling in a tree

For 10 bucks you can feed a little bear.  The guy puts jam on a wooden spoon.  You hold the spoon and the little bear cub climbs up the tree stumps and eats the jam off the spoon.  He was so cute!  But his fur wasn't as soft as I had imagined it would be...it was quite coarse.  And the bears are very musky....I guess I have never been around bears to know what they smelled like.  And yes, we are wearing Crocs...but I don't care. Our feet are tired and sore from hiking! haha

The little bear thinks he's tough...it was cute because he was playing with the kid with the broom. And the kid was booping him on the head and playing around with him too.

We hung out at the bear ranch for a bit, then kept heading South.  Once we got within 5 miles of the bridge, traffic was backed up.  We had hit the swarms of people heading back South after the holidays.  Once we got through the traffic and over the bridge, we took a lunch break in Mackinac City to enjoy the view of the bridge.  We then bought the obligatory 3 bricks of fudge and kept heading home to get back to reality.

Until next time!