# The Martiny Chain and Haymarsh, nearby

_Two public tracts a short drive from Chippewa Lake: a lake chain to fish and thousands of acres of game land to walk._

Six in the morning at the Haymarsh dam, and the marsh is louder than any lake gets. Red-winged blackbirds working the cattails, a heron lifting off with that prehistoric complaint they all make, and back in the flooding a truck door slams — somebody beat you to the launch. This is north of Chippewa Lake, the next block of country over. A different kind of water entirely.

Chippewa Lake is the reason you came. Seven hundred and ninety acres, the biggest lake in Mecosta County, forty-two feet down at the hole, and enough bluegill and walleye and pike to fill a week without trying. But a week is long. The second thing this corner of the county does — the thing nobody puts on a brochure — is hand you somewhere else to point the boat, or the boots, when the home water goes flat.

### The Martiny chain, east toward Barryton

Drive east and the map stops making sense. Eight lakes, or eleven, depending on who is counting and how they count Bullhead, Big Evans, Tubbs, Saddlebag, Boom, Lost, Dogfish, the Evans lakes stacked three deep, all of it stitched into one system behind the Winchester Dam. The state closed that dam in the mid-1950s and backed the water up over a scatter of separate lakes and the low ground between them, and what drained toward the south branch of the Chippewa River became the Martiny Chain of Lakes. The USGS gauge out there carries a flat label: Martiny Lake near Chippewa Lake. That is the whole relationship, in a label.

You can run a small boat out of one lake and into the next through the channels without ever pulling the trailer. That is the appeal. Drowned timber breaks the surface where a forest stood before the water came up, and you learn to read the black stumps the way you would read rocks in a river, because a lower unit costs more than the whole trip. It smells like a swamp because it is one — warm, green, a little rank off the weed beds. The DNR runs all of it as the Martiny Lakes State Game Area. Bass, bluegill, northern pike, crappie, perch, and the old bowfin the locals still call dogfish, the same name one of the lakes carries. Nobody drives here for one big fish. They come for a hundred small ones.

### Haymarsh, north of the lake

Haymarsh is the bigger, quieter animal. About 6,700 acres of state game land sitting on the map quad directly north of Chippewa Lake: upland hardwood, lowland cedar, open marsh, and Haymarsh Lake itself, a shallow impoundment of around 375 acres held behind its own dam. Trails cut all through it. None of them are marked. That is not an oversight, it is the arrangement — this is game land first, and the people who use it are hunting grouse and deer in October, chasing morels through the popple in May, or standing still with binoculars trying to turn a far shape into a bird worth the drive. The marsh edges and the Featherbed Marsh hold species you will not see off your own dock.

Walk it anyway. Bring a paper map or a downloaded one, because the two-tracks fork and rejoin and lie to you, and the cell signal quit somewhere back on the county road. Go quiet. Go early. And wear orange in the fall — all of it — because the other people out there are carrying shotguns and they are not looking for you.

### Getting on it

Both places make you work a little, which is the filter. The Martiny chain has six public launches ringing the water — gravel, most of them, cut back off roads that do not announce themselves, and the first one you drive to will be the wrong one. A Recreation Passport on the plate is the price of admission. First come, first served, no booth, no attendant. Tubbs Lake carries two rustic state forest campgrounds, an island grounds and a mainland grounds, 33 sites between them, vault toilets and a hand pump and the end of the list. Haymarsh keeps its own rustic campground off 140th Avenue — near 19 sites, two boat launches onto Haymarsh Lake, and the same deal. No reservations at either one. Show up early on a summer Friday or make other plans.

### When

May and October are the two weeks to steal. May for the morels and the marsh coming back to noise and the bluegill sliding shallow. October for the color: the hardwoods around Haymarsh run their reds the second and third weeks of the month, and the crowd that clogs the northern overlooks never once turns off for a game area. And for the grouse, and for a launch to yourself. Summer is fine. Summer is for the panfish and the kids and the warm water off Chippewa. The shoulder weeks are when these two places are most themselves.

Base on the big lake and both are a short drive. [Golden Shores Retreat](https://roamstays.com/properties/golden-shores-retreat/) sits on Chippewa Lake with its own water off the dock — the panfish in the morning, the game land in the afternoon, and no need to move the car between them. The rest of what the village is and isn’t lives on the [Chippewa Lake guide](https://roamstays.com/location/chippewa-lake/).

Wear the orange. All of it.

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