Toward Cadillac: bigger water and the trail north

The canal freezes before the lakes do. Then — once Mitchell and Cadillac lock up hard around it — the canal quits, thaws back open, and runs ice-free the rest of the winter. A third of a mile of moving water in a country gone solid. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not put the mystery in print. The men who cut the channel in 1873 were not thinking about any of that. They were thinking about logs.

George A. Mitchell wanted a way to move felled timber from the big shallow lake to the mills on the smaller one, so he had a channel dug between them — forty-eight feet wide, about a third of a mile long, finished in 1873. The big lake took his name. Lake Mitchell runs 2,580 acres, most of it shallow enough to stand in, a maximum depth of twenty-two feet and an average closer to eight. Lake Cadillac is the smaller one, roughly 1,150 acres, the town wrapped along its shore. The Clam Lake Canal still joins the two, and it has done that job for a century and a half. Nobody floats logs through it now. People run bass boats.

From the town of Lake, the water you’ve got is small and low and quiet, which is most of the reason to be in Lake at all. The town keeps its own counsel. But some mornings an inland pond isn’t enough of it, and the fix is a short drive north. Cadillac holds two lakes and the canal and a state park stitched onto the neck of land between them. William Mitchell State Park — 660 acres, a boat launch on each lake, and a modern campground of just over two hundred sites where the best spots line the canal. Tie the boat to your site. Step off it into the tent.

Behind the park runs a trail most people drive past on the way to the ramp. The Heritage Nature Trail goes about two and a half miles out from the Carl T. Johnson Hunting and Fishing Center — wood chips underfoot, boardwalk over the wet parts, the marsh coming up warm and green and faintly rotten by July. Herons work the shallows. The beavers have opinions about the boardwalk. It is not a hard walk, and that’s the point of it. Bring the kids and a slow hour.

For a real walk you keep going, into the Pere Marquette State Forest, where the North Country Trail comes through. The NCT runs across eight states, and Michigan carries more of its miles than anybody — over five hundred through the Lower Peninsula alone. A long run of it threads the forest around Cadillac. The Baxter Bridge-to-High Rollaways stretch follows the Manistee River on glacial sand, some of it packed hard, some of it the loose kind that eats a mile of you per actual mile. Closer in, the Cadillac Pathway stacks 11.3 miles into six loops through hardwood. Walk it in October. Ski it in February. Bring water — there’s plenty to filter, and in the warm months plenty of mosquitoes to remind you that you filtered it.

Come in the shoulder weeks. Late September the hardwoods along the Pathway turn and the campground thins out and the water stays warm enough to swim if you’re stubborn about being cold — the High Rollaway overlook, off the Baxter Bridge stretch, throws the hardest color in this part of the state. If you’d rather wake up on the big lake than drive to it, Foxfire Lodge sits on Lake Mitchell itself — four bedrooms, a pontoon in summer, the groomed snowmobile network out the door in winter. The canal, the campground, and the trailheads are minutes off the porch.

The canal is the last thing frozen and the first thing open. Watch for it.