# The Dead Stream Flooding and the Reedsburg Dam

_A Depression-era dam turned the upper Muskegon into a shallow, stump-filled flooding thick with pike, bass, and bluegill._

Call it a lake and somebody will correct you. It is a flooding — a river talked into holding still. The Muskegon leaves Houghton Lake and runs about six miles of shallow, tea-colored water before it hits the Reedsburg Dam and quits being a river for a while. Backs up. Spreads out over close to a thousand acres of drowned timber and pondweed. The Civilian Conservation Corps threw the dam up in 1940, and not for any of the reasons you would come now — not the pike, not the herons, not the campground. They built it to keep Houghton Lake from flooding the towns downstream. The reservoir was a side effect. Most of what is worth anything out here is.

The stumps are the whole story. When they raised the water in 1940 they drowned a standing forest, and the better part of a century on those trunks are still down there — softened, black, patient, set at about the depth to find the lower unit of an outboard run by a man in a hurry. This is not water you open the throttle on. It stays shallow across most of its spread, the color of strong tea from all the tannin bleeding out of the bog, and the whole 1,024-acre Dead Stream Flooding State Wildlife Management Area sits across Missaukee County and Roscommon both, which tells you nobody drew this place on purpose. It happened. The state fenced a name around it afterward.

The dam itself is nothing to look at. A low concrete sill with water sliding over it, loud in spring runoff and near silent by August. Stand on it and you can hear the difference between the two sides. Above, dead-flat water and the ticking of redwing blackbirds working the cattail. Below, the Muskegon remembering it is a river and hurrying off to be one for the next two hundred miles. In fall the swamp fills with duck hunters and the woods around it with deer hunters, because the state wildlife area is exactly that — managed for the animals first and your recreation second, which is the correct order and rarely the advertised one.

What the stumps and the weed do is grow fish. Northern pike, mostly. They lie in the pondweed and the drowned brush and wait, and in a shallow flooding like this one the water warms weeks ahead of the deep lakes, so the pike are moving and mean while everyone else is still fishing cold. Largemouth and smallmouth both. Bluegill and pumpkinseed thick enough to bore a serious angler and make a seven-year-old’s whole summer. Perch, crappie, the odd bowfin that will straighten your hook and your afternoon. You do not troll this water. You paddle it, or you idle a jon boat through the timber at a walking pace and read the surface for the one gap in the weed where something is holding.

Getting on it is the rustic kind of easy. The Reedsburg Dam State Forest Campground sits off M-55, and the boat launch is inside the campground — 38 sites, 15 of them on the water, a hand pump for drinking, vault toilets, no electricity, no reservations, first come and mostly first served for around twenty dollars a night plus the Recreation Passport on your plate. That is the whole infrastructure. Bring what you need or drive back to town for it, and town is not close. Cell signal is a rumor. The launch will put a canoe or a small tiller boat in the water without trouble — anything bigger and you are back to thinking about those stumps.

Come in late May. The flooding warms first, the bluegills pull up onto their beds in the shallows, and the pike hang the weed edges before the summer heat drives them down. The bugs are coming but they are not there yet, not the first week. Mornings the fog sits on the water past eight and the whole place smells like wet iron and cut cattail, and the only engine you hear is your own, idling. It is a short drive from [our house near Merritt](https://roamstays.com/properties/paradise-pines-retreat/), close enough that you can be on the water by six and back for breakfast, far enough that the dark out there is real dark. Everything else the town holds sits in the [Merritt guide](https://roamstays.com/location/merritt/), and the paddling water gets its own write-up in the Things to Do near Merritt notes.

The stumps were a forest once, a stand of timber that saw daylight. They are still down there. Watch your prop.

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