Staying in Mecosta: the lake country of Mecosta County

Count the lakes before you count the people. You will run out of people first — 386 of them at the 2020 census, packed into a village of a little over one square mile, and within a fifteen-minute drive there is more water than anybody at the gas pump could name without stopping to think.

That is the whole proposition out here. Water, and the space between water.

The drive in

US-131 runs up the spine of the Lower Peninsula, and to get to Mecosta you have to leave it. Two ways off. Exit at Big Rapids, the county seat, and take M-20 east — about 17 miles of two-lane past the edge of town and out into the low country between the lakes. Or come off farther south at Stanwood and drive up through Canadian Lakes, the golf-course sprawl, and arrive from underneath. Those 17 miles of M-20 are nothing to look at doing 55 — tree lines, a cornfield, a tractor you will sit behind for a mile and a half with nowhere to pass. Settle into it. Either way you fetch up at a crossroads where M-20 is the main street and the main street is a few short blocks. A gas station. A post office. The Potawatomi name over all of it — Mecosta, recorded in English as Big Bear, a chief born near Big Rapids who put his mark on an 1836 treaty that shipped his own band west of the Mississippi. The county took the name in 1859. The village kept it. That is most of what it kept of him.

The shape of the place

Mecosta sits in the northeast corner of Morton Township, and the map around it reads more like a fish’s ledger than a town plan. Start with the Tri-Lakes, chained together southwest of the village — Lake Mecosta at 316 acres, Blue Lake at 221, Round Lake at 156, the better part of 700 acres of connected water and 50 feet down at the bottom of Blue. Then School Section Lake to the north, 126 acres and 33 feet at its deepest, with a county park on it — a sand beach, a group camp, better than 160 campsites and over a hundred of those seasonal, claimed before the season opens. Chippewa Lake off to the southwest, its own small town wrapped around it. None of it is far. That is the strange arithmetic of this county. You are never more than a few minutes from somewhere to put a boat in.

And then there is the Martiny chain, which is the one to know about.

What it is for

The Martiny Chain of Lakes runs east of the village — Lost Lake, Tubbs, the three Evans lakes, Saddlebag, Boom, Bass, Dogfish, all of it strung together and backed up behind old flooding structures into a state game area with five public accesses. The water is dark and weedy and warm by August, and it smells the way a lake is supposed to smell, which is to say a little green, a little like the underside of a dock. People come for panfish. Bluegill the size of your hand, bass, pike if you are fishing for numbers more than trophies. You go out at six because the wind is down at six and the coffee is still hot, and you come in when it turns bright, and that is the day. That is the whole day. Some people drive four hours for exactly that and call it a fair trade.

Winter turns the same lakes into a different sport. Shanties go out on the Martiny water and on School Section once the ice is thick enough to argue about, and the fishing keeps on through the cold months for anybody willing to sit over a hole and wait for a flag. Big Rapids, 17 miles back the way you came, is where the real grocery store is, and the hardware, and the bait when the closer places run dry. Plan on that drive. You will make it more than once.

I will not oversell the rest of it, because there is not much rest of it. No nightlife to speak of, no district of anything, no reason to pack a second pair of shoes. What Mecosta has is quiet — the kind with a temperature to it, cold off the water at dawn and heavy by mid-afternoon — and it has more surface water per resident than almost anywhere you could point at on the map. If that reads thin, it is not for you, and that is fine. The lakes were not dug with you in mind.

The Canadian Lakes question

South and west of the village the numbers change. Canadian Lakes is a planned resort community — 7,000 wooded acres, sixteen lakes, several golf courses, better than 3,000 residents, and an actual castle a developer put up on one of the higher points in the county in 1971. It is a different animal from Mecosta proper. More paved, more gated, more organized around a tee time. Some people want that, and the two places sit a few miles apart pretending not to notice each other. Know which one you are booking. They are not the same weekend.

Where to stay

Stay on the water if you can. The home we keep one of our Michigan cottage rentals, Three Shores Retreat, on one of the lake chains sits close enough that you hear it before you see it — coffee on the dock by six, the reason to make the drive instead of running out from Big Rapids for the afternoon. There is a second one Michigan waterfront rentals, Three Shores Retreat, set back in the trees, for people who would rather have the quiet than the shoreline and do not mind a short walk to a public access. Both of them, and the rest, live on the Mecosta page with their open dates. Book early for July. The campgrounds are not the only thing that fills.

Eat, do, and when

For where to eat — and it is a short, honest list out here — the companion piece Where to eat around Mecosta covers what is actually open and worth the stop. For the fishing, Fishing the Martiny Chain gets into the accesses and what is biting when. And if you are trying to time it, Mecosta after Labor Day makes the case for the shoulder weeks, when the water is still warm enough for the stubborn and the campsites have emptied out. Read that one before you book July out of habit.

Come for the water. Leave the phone in the car — the signal helps with that.

Bring a rod.