River Road: the drive, the monument, and Iargo Springs

The air changes about forty steps down. Colder, wetter, mineral — the smell of a cellar that never dried, except this is a hillside over the Au Sable and the water seeping out of it has been underground a long time. You hear it before you see it. Then the boardwalk flattens and there they are, the springs, bubbling up through sand and running off toward a river that floated white pine to Lake Huron for the better part of fifty years.

This is Iargo Springs, a stop on the River Road National Scenic Byway — roughly 22 miles of pavement that follows the Au Sable through the Huron-Manistee National Forests, from Oscoda inland toward South Branch. The name is said to come from a Chippewa word for many waters. People drank from these springs before there was a road, before there was a byway, before anybody thought to bolt a staircase to the bluff. The loggers dammed them and diverted the water to their camps. The Civilian Conservation Corps cut the first real trail down in 1934. What sits there now is a wooden boardwalk that runs the base of the hill past spring pools, low weirs, and a few decks that put you level with the current.

Getting down is the easy part. It always is. The staircase runs close to 300 steps — call it 294, call it 300, nobody is recounting on the way up, and the way up is the whole story. You feel it in the backs of your legs somewhere around step 180. There are landings. Use them. I told myself I was stopping to look at the river, and I was stopping because my heart was doing something I did not care for, and those are two different reasons wearing the same fleece.

A few miles west, on a bluff over the same water, three bronze men have stood since 1932. Lumberman’s Monument. Robert Ingersoll Aitken cast the fourteen-foot statue in 1931 — a timber cruiser holding his compass, a sawyer with the saw slung over one shoulder, a river rat leaning on a peavey, the hooked tool they used to roll logs off the ice and into the drive. It cost $50,000. The idea came around 1928 from R.G. Schreck, a former superintendent of the Huron National Forest, who wanted something for the men who did the work and mostly went unremembered for it. The Forest Service runs the site still. The visitor center — rebuilt in 1982 — is staffed May through October, and there is a long staircase here too, dropping a couple hundred steps down roughly 150 feet of hillside to the water, where a replica wanigan sits: the floating cook shack that fed the drives.

The monument is easy to be cynical about. Bronze usually earns it. But stand at the rail and read that drop — the river below narrow and quick and cold in a way you can smell — and the cynicism thins. A lot of those men were nineteen. A lot of them drowned. The statue is not subtle, and it does not need to be.

Practical stuff. River Road runs west off US-23 just north of Oscoda — you turn inland, away from Lake Huron, and the traffic falls off inside a mile. Both sites have paved lots, vault toilets, and no admission. The overlooks stay open year-round. The staircases are not always cleared in winter, and the visitor center goes dark after October. If you would rather walk than drive between the two, the Highbanks Trail runs the bluff — the scenic stretch from Iargo Springs to the monument is about four miles one way. Bring water you can carry down and back. Bring shoes with a real sole. The boardwalk at Iargo turns slick when the leaves come down and start to rot.

Which is the argument for October. Color on River Road peaks in the first two weeks of the month most years — maples and oaks coming off the hillsides right down to the waterline, and the overlooks at Iargo and the monument aimed straight into it. Come on a Tuesday. The byway is a different road on a fall weekend, all brake lights and phones held out car windows. Midweek and early, the cold still sits in the river valley and your breath shows. Our one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Barefoot Beach Cabin #1, puts you twenty minutes from the turnoff, close enough to run the whole byway before lunch and be back with wet boots by one. For the timing, read “Come to Oscoda in the fall.” For the water itself, read “Paddling the Au Sable.”

Count the steps going down. You won’t coming up.