BACKPACKING: Ottawa National Forest North Country Trail Segment (Magical Backwoods Mabon)

Escaped the noise of the city (and not a day too soon, with an obnoxiously loud music festival in our neighborhood, and fighter jets from the Air and Water Show roaring ominously overhead…) and drove up to Ottawa National Forest in the Michigan UP for 3 nights of relatively remote backpacking on the North Country and Hacking Site trails.

Where better to spend Mabon than watching the full sturgeon moon rise, blood red, over the rim of the bluff you are camping on, and up through the dancing trees? I didn’t even try to get a picture but it was stunning.

We were winging it- the USGS maps I ordered a month before the trip showed up at our house a few hours after we left (doh!), so we just had the free maps from the visitor center, and Gaia GPS on my phone to rely on… The trail is well marked, but we didn’t have materials to study in advance as I’d planned, so I let the geographer pick a section and we just went with it…

And apparently the fella picked one of the most difficult sections of the entire NCT. Oops. Up and down and up and down, rock scrambling with heavy packs… We didn’t do as many miles as it felt like, but vertical feet- hooboy. We definitely earned these sweeping vistas (and our pit stop for Culver’s curbside & New Glarus on the way back home)… Also, knowing that after the fact, I feel way better about how hard this was? We both need to work on getting in better trail shape (especially after everything the past year+) but good to know it wasn’t *just* us.

Tormod was a total trooper, charging ahead all day on the trail (and passing out as soon as we got to camp, and the whole way home). We had to hold him back so he didn’t overdo it (and also, so we could keep up). This boy has so much GO… His drive to work is incredible! He surprised us and flushed a grouse from his tie-out line, while we were making breakfast, while camped on a windy rolling ridge the second day… Luckily for our chickens, he has almost no feather drive but he was laser focused on that bird (and every squirrel and chipmunk we saw, of course). G’boyyyyy. I think he likes Michigan too, which is a good thing, because we are in LOVE.