Trail Talk

Editor’s Note: It’s been a busy speaking season this winter for Jim DuFresne but his last gig is this Saturday when he will appear at the author’s table at 11:45 a.m. at the Midwest Fly Fishing Expo at Macomb Community College Sports & Expo Center, 14500 E.12 Mile Road, in Warren. After that you’ll find Jim out on the trail. For more on the expo see the show’s web site.

By Jim DuFresne

I’ve spent a lot of time in National Parks, national forests and other parcels of federally-owned land and twice I’ve met the person responsible for their upkeep and protection; the Secretary of the Interior.

Jim DuFresne

The first time was in 1981. I was living in Juneau, Alaska and a friend who was newscaster invited me to join him at the state capitol where James Watt was going to to address the Alaska legislature.

President Ronald Reagan’s choice for Secretary of the Interior was a controversial and polarizing figure. He endorsed the rampant development of federal lands by foresters and ranchers, sought to eliminate regulations for oil and mining companies, and once directed the National Park Service to draft legislation that would have de-authorized a number of National Parks. He accepted the position saying “we will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.”

A 1981 demonstration against James Watt in Juneau, Alaska, complete with chainsaws.

The day he arrived in Juneau hundreds gathered outside the capitol with their chainsaws and just when Watt stepped up to the podium inside they revved them up and held them high in the air. You couldn’t hear yourself think much less Watt speak.

The second time was in 2008 when I was invited to a reception celebrating the opening of a new REI store in Ann Arbor. Addressing a crowd of local environmental groups, outdoor clubs and conservation organizations that evening was Sally Jewell, president and CEO of REI.

Later, when Jewell was inspecting the displays of outdoor equipment while sipping a glass of wine, two of us walked up and struck a conversation with her.

She had never been in Michigan before other than to change planes in Detroit and immediately engaged us in where we go to hike, kayak and mountain bike, activities she said she thoroughly enjoys. She was impressed with our descriptions of wild places like Sleeping Bear Dunes and Isle Royale National Park and laughed when we told her that the Upper Peninsula was such a wonderful outdoor playground we call it “God’s Country.”

We chatted for more than 15 minutes, she was that approachable.

Sally Jewell, President Barack Obama’s nomination to be the next Secretary of the Interior, is not James Watt. For that we should all be thankful.

While Jewell’s background includes stints as an oil company engineer and a commercial banker, since 2005 she has served as chief executive of REI and has earned national recognition for her support of outdoor recreation and habitat conservation. Supporters say she is an ideal candidate to balance the agency’s sometimes conflicting mandates between promoting resource development and preserving the nation’s natural heritage.

If nominated, she has her work cut out for her. She will take over a department that has been embroiled in controversy over the regulation of oil and gas on public lands and in the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic Ocean. She also will be the steward of hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, from the Everglades of Florida to the Cascades of Washington State.

I hope she is nominated for the simple reason she’s one of us, somebody who heads outdoors to unwind from urban stresses or challenges herself to new heights. Literally, because Jewell is also a mountain climber.

Sally Jewell, President Barack Obama’s nomination to be Secretary of the Interior.

A native of the Seattle area and a graduate of the University of Washington with a degree in mechanical engineering, Jewell has been a lifelong outdoors enthusiast. As a child she sailed with her family in the Puget Sound and camped throughout the Pacific Northwest, as an adult said she has climbed Mount Rainier in the state of Washington and Vinson Massif, the highest mountain in Antarctica. She bikes to work.

But what impressed me the most that evening in Ann Arbor was Jewell’s passion for getting children outdoors as a way to save the environment. The younger, the better. Wait too long and they rarely develop that enthusiasm for the outdoors when they are adults.

Thus she doesn’t see other outdoor shops scattered across Michigan as competitors, rather cohorts in an effort to promote trail development and outdoor recreation and to encourage support of public lands and parks. We’re all in this together.

“Our competitors are TV, video games and kids who are over scheduled,” Jewell said.

That’s something I never heard James Watt say.

Editor’s Note: It’s been too hot to hike so Jim DuFresne has been hanging around his cottage in Elk Rapids the past week, trying to stay cool, and filed this blog for MichiganTrailMaps.com. For more on the Ride Around Torch see the Cherry Capital Cycling club web site.

On Sunday there will be hundreds of bicycles in and around Elk Rapids along with spandex shorts, colorful riding jerseys, Camelbacks and aerodynamic helmets, not to mention a lot of serious cyclists.

Jim DuFresne

The reason for the two-wheel festival is because this small town in southwest Antrim County is the start and end of the Ride Around Torch, a 63-mile ride that encircles Torch Lake. Staged by the Cherry Capital Cycling Club, this event is often called the most scenic bike ride in the state, where more times than not you looking at water while pedaling.

On Monday Elk Rapids will be back to normal but bicycles will still be there. Only the 21-speeds and all-carbon bicycles will be gone and the fat tire, clunkers will be back.

Elk Rapids; the retro bike capital of Michigan.

In the late 1800s Elk Rapids was challenging Traverse City as the economic powerhouse of the region, today it’s a sleepy village that has become a haven for retro bicycles, cruisers, beach bikes, urban bikes or, in my case, a bicycle that was actually built in the 1960s.

I ride around town in a single-speed Schwinn that still has the registration sticker Grosse Isle Township made me purchase and display in 1965 as if kids on bicycles were part of a communist plot to take over the world.

When you want to slow or stop on my Schwinn, you pedal backwards. How cool is that? 

Retro bikes at the Elk Rapids Lower Marina during a sunset on Lake Michigan.

Retro bikes dominate this town with locals and visitors a like because clunkers are much more practical. This is a place that demands you to ride slowly and stop often, making clip-in pedals a hassle to say the least.

Elk Rapids is incredibly scenic as it is literarily surrounded on three sides by water. Elk Lake nudges into it and from there Elk River splits the town in half before emptying into Lake Michigan. Oh, and on the northside of town is Bass Lake.

There is a spot downtown where you can look to your left at the East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay and see the skyline of Traverse City. To the right you can see the coastline wind north to Little Traverse Bay and due west is the end of Mission Peninsula and the blue, endless horizon of Lake Michigan.

Stunning.

This is also a small town, population 3,000, so you need to stop at the bakery before they run out of hand-cut donuts or the library to pick up a novel for the beach or to catch up to Joe so you can ask him what the movie is next week at his single-screen theater.

The marinas also contribute to the town’s retro craze. Blessed with a watery location, the village has two of them; the Lower Marina overlooks Lake Michigan and its slips are filled with large sailboats and cruisers. The Upper Marina is on Elk River and the pontoons and speed boats docked there have access to the Antrim County Chain of Lakes that includes Torch Lake, Bellaire Lake and Clam Lake.

The marinas maintain an army of bikes – retro bikes of course – that any boater can borrow to ride around town. If you arrive without one, you can rent a retro bike at the new Right Tree Adventure Rentals Shop  just off Main Street.

Add it all up and this up-and-coming trendy town with great restaurants and wide beaches is like a Mackinac Island with vehicles in the summer. Cars replace the horses-and-carriages and everybody drives, pedals and walks cautiously and courteously with drivers always waving through two-wheelers and pedestrians.

Let’s face it, if you’re driving through this trendy beach community, marveling at the beautiful scenery or the historical buildings on Main Street, the last thing you want to do is cause an eco-friendly cyclist to have a header on an old clunker like mine. Would not be cool.

 So on Sunday a lot of us will enjoy the beginning and end of the Ride Around Torch and a small town overwhelmed by top-of-the-line road bikes.

On Monday we’ll be back on our clunkers.

Editor’s Note: At both ends of the river weekend festivals are staged as part of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon Race. Grayling calls it’s event Au Sable River Festival and it includes the Black Bear Bicycle Tour, a 100-mile bicycle ride to Oscoda on Sunday that finishes near the end of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. For more information check out Grayling Visitors Bureau, the Oscoda Visitors Bureau or the Black Bear Bicycle Tour web site.

If you are heading to Grayling for the July 28 start of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon don’t forget that at MichiganTrailMaps.com we just completed our coverage of Hartwick Pines State Park with the addition of the park’s mountain bike trails.

By Jim DuFresne

I was concentrating on a trout that was rising in the middle of the Au Sable River, trying to float a drag-free dry fly over it, when suddenly there was a canoe within arm’s reach of me.

“Whoa!” I said as they totally caught me off guard but before I could add “you guys are quiet paddlers” they were around the next bend and out of sight.

Jim DuFresne

Must be marathon time.

The two paddlers were obviously veteran racers training for the annual Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. They were flying down the river in a slim and low-riding C-2 canoe, paddling with determination and almost mechanical precision. No stroke was a wasted motion.

Effortless effort.

It’s how you train for what some call the most grueling sporting event in North America. This summer the 65^th Au Sable River Canoe Marathon will be staged July 28-29 in Grayling, the starting point, and Oscoda, the finish line.

In between 20 to 30 teams will compete in a 120-mile race that lasts from 14 to 19 hours and consists of some 55,000 stokes. It’s why organizers call the all-night run down the Au Sable the longest non-stop professional canoe race in the United States.

They also call it “The World’s Toughest Spectator Race!” During the event more than 40,000 spectators are expected to converge on the two towns and the river in between.

An estimated 12,000 people will witness the start in Grayling when at 9 p.m. paddlers dash “LeMans” style down Main Street carrying their canoes into the Au Sable at the Old Au Sable Fly Shop docks. Others spectators will gather along the final 14 miles of the river to its mouth on Lake Huron in Oscoda on Sunday morning to watch the canoeists wrap up their ordeal.

But the real marathon fans, the spectator that has no equal in the world of sports, are the ones who hopscotch in cars and vans throughout the night to cheer on the racers as they paddle beneath bridges, pass public access points and portage their canoe around six hydroelectric dams.

C-2 race canoes at the start of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon in Grayling.

The first race was staged in 1947 when a pair of Grayling canoers finished the route in 21:03. Ralph Sawyer, who founded Sawyer Canoes in Oscoda, won the first of eight titles in 1956 when he and his partner broke the 17-hour barrier.

But the most amazing paddler was Serge Corbin of Quebec. Corbin won the race 18 times, including 15 out of 17 years from 1987 to 2003. In 1994 he and his partner broke 14 hours when they arrived in Oscoda in 13:58.08 and the mark is still the Marathon record.

For that brutal and record-shattering run down the Au Sable the pair of Canadians won $5,000. They’re professional canoe racers but they are clearly not in it for the money.

Most of the field isn’t thinking about winning, just finishing. Not all will. But in 1999 a 74-year-old Al Widing, Sr. teamed up with a “youthful” 54-year-old Robert Bradford to complete the run in 15:21:22, finishing 15^th overall.

And in the year that Corbin set his Marathon record, a pair of 15-year-olds from Grayling, Matt Ashton and Mo Hardwood, Jr., arrived in Oscoda in 15:30.46 to become the youngest team to have ever have completed the Marathon.

I suspect that for youths in and around Crawford County, ever just entering the Au Sable Canoe Marathon, much less finishing it, is as high a pedestal that you can step onto.

A half hour after the first C-2 race canoe flew past me in the Au Sable, a second one appeared, manned by two boys who appeared to be in high school. Shirts were off, youthful muscles bugling in their upper arms and shoulders, beads of sweat running down their backs.

They didn’t have the precision that that first pair displayed. Their strokes seem to be more of a struggle, not as nearly as fluid as their counterparts down the river.

But you could see the determination on their face to take on the Au Sable and survive a 120 miles of non-stop paddling.

That’s good. They’re going to need such resolve at 3 a.m. Sunday, July 29 when they have been up all night paddling and still have still have nine more hours of strokes in front of them.

Jim DuFresne

It was a Sunday when the new MichiganTrailMaps.com e-shop was launched and then those of us who had worked tirelessly for three months to build it … waited. Patiently.

What else could we do? The first order is always the hardest and as Sunday rolled into Monday and Monday rolled into Tuesday there were moments when I wondered if it would ever come.

I’ve waited painfully for other things of my life; for the birth of my first child (we named her Jessica), for an answer from the stunned girl I had just asked to Homecoming in 11^th grade (she said no), for the results of an exam in college I was pretty sure I bombed (I did).

But this time it was almost maddening. I’d be online, checking email every few minutes, looking for that Pay Pal notification. Any sign that the shop, with all its coding and links, was out there working.

As it turns out it was. On Wednesday at 2 p.m., the 15^th time I was checking the account that day, there it was, in the subject line: Notification of Payment Received.

Our first sale!

It was from woman named Lois and she ordered two books, requesting that the author (me) autograph them. On that particular day I was also the warehouse and shipping department so I packaged the books and then hand wrote her address on it because our tech person forgot to inform me I could print out the mailing label through Pay Pal.

Then I stepped outside to head to the post office. In all the excitement I didn’t realize that the clouds had cleared, the sun was out and in the middle of February it was in upper 40s. It’s been that kind of winter. I’ve yet to ski close to home but I’ve been cycling continuously since November.

The cycling has been amazing. A near snowless winter means the shoulders of roads, bike paths and sidewalks are clear. The temperatures have been ideal. I wear a light pair of wool gloves and a thin wool cap under my helmet and once I’m on my bike I never get cold or overheat.

Perfect equilibrium on two wheels.

I tucked Lois’ package in my bike bag and headed out on the seven-mile ride to downtown Clarkston. From my home I followed the bike path through Independence Oaks County Park, pedaling pass four lakes. When I entered Clarkston I passed four more lakes; Park Lake, Upper Mill Pond, Mill Pond and Deer Lake, and then crossed the Clinton River.

Pulling up to the post office I realized I may have just stumbled on a new slogan for the company, one with an eco-friendly theme:

MichiganTrailMaps.com: We Don’t Burn Fossil Fuels Delivering Your Book To the Post Office!

Match that Amazon!

When I returned home I did something else I doubt Jeff Bezos, founder of the giant online bookseller, had ever done; I wrote a personal email to Lois. I told her the books were on the way and thank her for the order. I even mentioned how agonizing it was waiting for that first one and thanks to her the wait was over.

The next day she wrote back to me:

I always looked forward to reading your Saturday article in the Ann Arbor News.  My kids were young then, and we followed many of your family trip plans.  All four kids are grown now but still enjoy outdoor adventures.  You have touched many lives.

Sometimes being small is better.