Love Note to a Michigan Forest

Drew Youngedyke, manager of sporting communications for the National Wildlife Federation, writes about a very special forest in northern Michigan.

There’s a place in Michigan where you can hear bull elk bugle and catch brook trout in a river where Hemingway camped a century ago. The approximately 106,000-acre Pigeon River Country State Forest, known as “The Big Wild,” offers something for everyone: from backpacking, birding, mountain biking, and horseback riding to hunting, fishing, and trapping.

For me, it’s a place of wildness and solitude when I’m solo bowhunting with my recurve, winter camping, and a place of friendship and tradition when I’m in our canvas tent deer camp or standing around a campfire at trout camp. For more than twenty years I’ve been exploring its wildlife, waters, and woods, ever since my parents moved to nearby Gaylord during my freshman year of college. For the last few years I’ve also helped advise on its management by serving on its citizen advisory council to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

This weekend would normally have been one of my favorite times of the year in The Big Wild: the Michigan trout opener. We were scheduled to have our spring quarterly meeting at the forest headquarters, a rustic log building evoking all the ambiance of the early conservation movement from which the forest was born.

The forest is the largest contiguous block of state public land in the Lower Peninsula, and not by accident. P.S. Lovejoy, the state’s first game commissioner and a contemporary of Aldo Leopold, pieced together the public forest in 1919 from tax-reverted cutover lands and by purchasing in-holdings with game license revenue. He described the wild character he wanted the forest to embody in his unique vernacular:

“I’d like to see the Pigeon opened up to insure really good fire protection and damn little else…so that it isn’t too easy for the beer-belly gents and the nice old grandmaws to get to, set down and leave their fin cans at. I figger that a whole lot of the side-road country should be left plenty bumpy and brushy and some so you go in on foot — or don’t go in at all.”

Elk, once native but extirpated, were released nearby in 1918 and now form a herd of about 1,000 with the forest as the heart of their range. In the 1970’s, controversy over proposed oil drilling led to a lawsuit, a compromise allowing some responsible development in part of the forest but not in others. That lawsuit also inspired the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, which uses oil and gas royalties to fund public land acquisition, and a concept of land management that guides our decisions as a council. For a conservationist, being part of these meetings is a chance to delve into the big themes of conservation history in our state and country boiled down into one forest, and to help write the story of its conservation future.

Ah, but then it’s trout camp. For the last couple of years, I’ve been invited to a trout camp organized by a friend of mine from nearby Gaylord. He picks a secret spot on one of the forest’s three blue ribbon trout rivers — the Sturgeon, the Pigeon, or the Black — and sends us the location a couple days before. As a young man, Ernest Hemingway camped and fished in “the Pine Barrens,” as he called the forest then, with his friends, too. The experience hasn’t changed much since he described it in a letter to a friend in 1919:

“Picture us on the Barrens, beside the river with the camp fire and the tent. And the full moon and a good meal in our bellies smoking a pill and with a good bottle of Grog. There will be some good singing.”

The fishing is great in the Pigeon River Country, even for a below-average fly angler like me. Native brook trout and introduced brown and rainbow trout in the Sturgeon, Pigeon, and Black Rivers make the forest an angler’s paradise. Finding a place to fish with elbow room is limited only by your ambition to hike. Last year a friend and I put our waders and rod cases in our backpacks and ran a trail parallel to the Pigeon River so we could fish it upstream back to the trailhead. He caught a couple rainbows and I got skunked before a storm came but along the way we saw a black bear mother and cubs, giving them a wide berth.

There’s no trout camp or spring advisory council meeting this year due to COVID-19, and it’s too far from my home in Ann Arbor to drive to while still practicing responsible recreation and staying local. This is temporary, though, and I’m tying flies for later in the summer when I can hopefully cast a foam hopper to a brook trout on the Black River. I’m looking forward to hunting ruffed grouse and woodcock in the fall in ten-year-old aspen clearcut (it’s a working forest), still-hunting October deer with my recurve while watching bull elk spar, and playing euchre with my dad, brother, and cousin at deer camp.

I’m going to miss trout camp and I miss the Big Wild, but it will be there for generations to come, let alone when the quarantine is over. That’s what conservation is about: ensuring that public lands like this, and the fish and wildlife they harbor, thrive in this changing world for future generations. I’d love nothing more than for my future great-grandson or great-granddaughter to be gathered with friends around a riverbank campfire in the Pigeon River Country a century from now, finding that Hemingway’s words still ring true for them.

So many of our country’s parks and public lands written about in these love notes would not exist but for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It’s why Congress should fund the program permanently. Follow the movement along at #FundLWCF. Learn more here.

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Would you like to write about public lands that you cherish? Please email Mary Jo Brooks at brooksm@nwf.org for guidelines.