The Marsh They Built: Haymarsh State Game Area

Cold October morning, and the marsh is louder than the parking lot. The red-wings are gone for the year, but something is still working the cattails, a rail maybe — or just wind dragging water through dead stems. The smell is the tell. Iron and rot and cold, the particular breath of a wetland that’s been standing in the same low ground longer than anyone alive.

That low ground is Haymarsh, and it’s bigger than it has any right to be. The state game area runs to more than 6,700 acres of Mecosta County, upland hardwood and lowland forest and open water and the flooded flats that give the place both its name and its job. The lake in the middle of it is younger than it looks. In 1949 the state dropped a dam six feet deep where beavers had already done most of the engineering, and six small ponds became one — 375 acres of surface water now, some of it 18 to 30 feet down in the old lakebeds, most of it four to six feet, warm and green and full of things that bite.

Fish, mostly. Northern pike run the shallows in real numbers, and nobody’s going to call them big, and everybody catches them anyway. Bluegill sit in the flats. Largemouth hold the weed edges for whoever has the patience. This isn’t trophy water. It’s the kind of water you learn a lake on, in an aluminum boat that smells like last summer, with a coffee can of worms and no particular plan.

The lake is only half of it. Around the main pool the DNR keeps three more impoundments wet on purpose — Featherbed and Pickerel Creek and the Little John Flooding — holding the levels so the marsh stays marsh and the ducks keep finding it. Two of those flats have earned their own names on the birding maps. Featherbed Marsh and the Haymarsh dam both show up as eBird hotspots, which is the polite modern way of saying people stand there in the cold and count.

And walk. The dikes that hold the water back double as the only honest trails out here, raised gravel and grass running the seam between open flat and standing timber, and you can put a few miles on your boots without meaning to. No trailhead sign. No loop map bolted to a post, no mileage. You go until the two-track ends or the water does, and that’s the whole system.

The way in is the part nobody writes down. The campground sits at 20500 140th Avenue, leased and run by the Mecosta County Parks Commission for about as long as anyone remembers — rustic sites and two boat launches on the lake, one of them barely a launch at all, more a place where the gravel quits. Take the improved ramp if you’re dragging a boat. The other will hold you by the axle and think about it.

The roads out here are numbered and plain and they cross each other at hard right angles — like the surveyors had a train to catch, which they did. Two-tracks peel off into the game area and most of them go somewhere and a few of them go nowhere in particular. Bring a paper map. Your phone will lie to you or die trying, and the marsh doesn’t care which.

Come in the fall. Not for the leaves — though the lowland maples do their work — but for the water going quiet and the birds moving through and the smell sharpening as the temperature drops. Morel people work these woods in May and won’t tell you where. Deer and grouse hunters own the uplands in November, so wear orange and know the season dates before you wander. October is the seam between the two. The bugs are done, the crowd was never here, and the marsh does what a marsh does when nobody’s asking anything of it.

The wet edge of all of it is the back forty of Barryton, whatever the brochures say about lakes and golf. The closest bed we keep to the dam is one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Blue Ox Retreat, and the trade for the short drive is that you’ll carry the marsh back into it — mud and duckweed and that iron smell, on your boots and in your hair.

Bring boots you don’t love. The mud keeps them.