Trail Talk

Editor’s Note: Jim DuFresne has long since departed the Manitou Islands of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore  but he filed one more blog entry for MichiganTrailMaps.com since his return to the mainland.

Mark your calendar for a pair of Jim DuFresne presentations in November. DuFresne will be in Traverse City to give his new presentation Alaska Marine Highway: High Adventure and Easy Travel on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. at the Backcountry North store, 2820 N. US-31. See the Backcountry North web site for more information. On Nov. 20 DuFresne will be at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor to present Wondrous Wilderness: Tramping in New Zealand at 7:30 pm. For more information see the Huron Valley Chapter of the Sierra Club web site.

By Jim DuFresne

Thoughts from the trail at the end of the hiking season:

Jim DuFresne

On my fifth day on North Manitou Island I departed the meadow they called Crescent City on the west side of the island and headed south. My eventual destination was the sweeping beaches in the southeast corner of this wilderness island where I plan to camp for the night.

But at lunch time I decided to take an extended break at Fredrickson Place. The old farm is now a grassy clearing where from the edge of the shoreline bluff you can view South Manitou Island and Manitou Passage that separates the two islands.

On this particular day, Manitou Passage was wicked. I didn’t need the Weather Station to know that there were small craft warnings. I could look down and see four- and five-foot waves sweeping across the passage and crashing into the beach just below me. At times you could hear the wind roar between the two islands.

Powerful stuff.

If I was in a kayak or even in the Manitou Island Transit ferry I probably would have been clinging to the gunwales. But I was on solid ground, high above the stormy sea, practically alone on a 15,000-acre island, out of reach of cell phones and the Internet and editors and those endless campaign messages from robocallers. I was as content as I had been all summer.

I unfolded my small camp chair and plopped down to see what was left in my food bag. I found a can of sardines in mustard sauce, a piece of pita bread, a good chocolate bar that my German friend gave me just before I departed on this trip, enough water so I didn’t have to trudge down the bluff to filter another quart in four-foot waves.

Life was good.

A backpacker pauses along a beach on North Manitou Island.

I ate the sardines, nibbled on some of the chocolate and read a few pages from a novel, my sole entertainment. But mostly I just sat there and took in the scene that surrounded me. I was in the lull just before Labor Day when the ferry will deliver boat loads of backpackers to the island for the extended weekend.

Right now, however, I was alone and had been since breaking camp two days ago. But I hardy felt isolated in the middle of Lake Michigan, rather invigorated by the seclusion.

Backpacking is a tonic for me. It allows me to get-away and slow-down … uninterrupted. It provides me opportunities to think and ponder. To sort out my life and get back on track with what’s important to me.

Even a couple of days in the woods is beneficial but spend an extended amount of time on the trail, like eight days on North Manitou Island, and soon you fall into that rhythm where the watch becomes irreverent because the only deadline you have is to pitch your tent before dark.

It’s the simplified life on the trail that I find so appealing. Everything I need is strapped to my back. This is when you discover what’s really important in life; clean water, food, a dry fleece pullover for when the temperature plunges at night.

And you discover what is a true luxury; a seat with a back on it, a warm shower, a flush toilet.

Eventually I return to what they call The Village on the island where the ferry dock, ranger station and the only spigot for drinking water is located. The next day I was on that dock waiting for the ferry to take me back to the mainland.

At first I’m like everybody else. I’m looking forward to a cold beer, a soft bed, even some sinful junk food like a Taco Bell burrito.

But by the end of my first night off the island I’m thinking, even planning, my next wilderness adventure. It’s how I survive the winter, trying to figure out where I am going to pitch my tent the next summer. By the time I nod off to sleep that night I’ve already made an important decision.

The next time I hit the trail I have to pack more of that German chocolate.

Editor’s Note: This is Jim DuFresne’s third Trail Talk blog in a series from the Manitou Islands in Lake Michigan, where he was working recently on a mapping project for MichiganTrailMaps.com.

By Jim DuFresne

Chipmunks I have no fear of. These small, striped rodents are so numerous on South and Manitou Islands that they have become an overly aggressive pest to anybody setting up camp. Turn your back on them and they have been known to chew through duffel bags and packs when they get a whiff of anything that might be edible.

Jim DuFresne

We were told to hang our food as if we were in bear country.

What had me truly scared heading over to North Manitou was much smaller; deer ticks. Officially known as the Black-Legged tick (Ixodes scapularis), this is the species that spreads Lyme disease. I have a friend who has suffered from Lyme disease for years and it is something I absolutely want to avoid.

I was told by a maintenance worker on South Manitou to be careful, North Manitou was having a bad tick summer. Researchers were finding large numbers of deer ticks on birds with a high percentage of them carrying the disease. On the National Park Service web site for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was a red flagged “Park Alert” that stated “ticks are common throughout the Lakeshore with a high population located on North Manitou Island.”

All this had me in a panic mode when I stepped off the ferry for a week of backpacking on the 15,000-acre island. This tiny insect had managed to instill more fear in me than the 900-pound brown bears I have encountered in the Alaska wilderness.

An adult deer tick is the size of an apple seed.

Despite being sunny every day and in the low 80s I wore a long-sleeve shirt and pants that were tucked into wool socks. As instructed I chose light colors for my clothing, stayed in the center of the trail while hiking and even packed along a small collapsible chair so I could avoid sitting on the ground or logs.

I began each morning spraying my pants and shirt with insect repellent that contained concentrations of DEET ranging from 25% to almost 100%. That was part I hated the most, dousing myself with chemicals to ward off a tiny insect.

In the evening I’d climb into my solo tent and attempted to search my body for a tick climbing up my leg or trying to burrow into my skin. I am anything but petite and in the small tent I struggled with my head lamp to search my “underarms, belly button, and back of knees” as the NPS web site advised.

It wasn’t easy and more times than not I just gave up and crawled into my sleeping bag.

Worse of all I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. Ticks are blood-feeding parasites that are often found in tall grass and shrubs where they will wait to attach to a passing host. Physical contact is the only method of transportation for ticks as they do not jump or fly but often simply drop from their perch onto a host.

The nymph form of the deer tick is most often responsible for transmitting Lyme disease and at this stage the insect is the size of a poppy seed. Good luck finding that at night while sitting in a cramped tent with dying batteries in your flashlight.

Backpackers on North Manitou Island.

It was a researcher that I met on the trail one day that finally eased some my fears. True, the nymph is often responsible for the disease but exposure to them usually occurs in the summer. I was there in early September. The adult form also transmits the disease but they don’t appear until October and are the size of an apple seed.

“You can clearly see them on your skin,” he said.

In the end, I realized I needed to be vigilant about deer ticks but not so overwhelmed by the fear of Lyme disease that I stop hiking and backpacking.

I needed to be outdoors, as often I can, and I realized if it meant hanging my food up at night and then checking my belly button … that’s a small price to pay to spend a night on a wilderness island.

Editor’s Note: Here is the second blog in a series based  on Jim DuFresne’s recent research trip on South and North Manitou Islands, part of  Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

By Jim DuFresne

There are two former U.S. Lifesaving Service boathouses on South Manitou Island. The largest is at the head of the wharf and is where newly arrived campers gather with the park ranger for backcountry orientation.

Jim DuFresne

Next to it is a smaller boathouse.

“Welcome to the South Manitou Island Fitness Club,” said ranger Sean Campillo as he lead me inside. I was still trying to adjust to the darkness when Campillo flung open the surfboat doors at the end of it.

In the flood of sudden sunlight I realized he was right, this was a fitness club hiding in a historic boathouse. There were weight racks and benches and jump ropes and mats and a bicycle machine.

All of it, but particularly the speed bag and bench press rack, were strategically positioned in front of the large doors at the end. When opened, the gray, weathered doors framed an incredible scene; Crescent Bay harboring a few anchored boats, the golden dunes and beaches that surround it, North Manitou Island just three miles to the north and all around a blue sky that on the horizon is absorbed by an even bluer Lake Michigan.

This is where you’ll find Campillo before he puts on his park ranger uniform every day. Early in the morning he squeezes in a workout, often while watching the sunrise over Crescent Bay. An hour of lifting that strengthens the muscles and sooths the soul.

Sean Campillo , park ranger on South Manitou Island.

Let the day begin.

“I’ve been in a lot of weight rooms,” said Campillo, who played rugby for Indiana University. “But this is the best one I’ve ever worked out in.”

The job that goes with it isn’t bad either.

From April to November, Campillo lives and works on a South Manitou, a 5,000-acre island in the middle of Lake Michigan that has no cars, no convenient stores, no cable TV and only mediocre cell phone service from the back side of the island.

He lives in the restored U.S. Lifesaving Service Station from the turn of the century and works a schedule that calls for 10 days on South Manitou and four days off on the mainland.

On the island Campillo is everything. As South Manitou’s only ranger, he is law enforcement, the emergency medical person, the search and rescue guy, and occasionally the historian who gives lighthouse tours.

“Take a good look at this face because if you have a problem out here this is who you need to find,” Campillo tells the new campers.

South Manitou may be a remote, isolated island but at times it’s surprisingly busy. On the day I arrived the ferry was full, 150 passengers including a group of 60 senior citizens on a day trip from Grayling.

Others were day hikers and families, who arrive with the ferry at 11 a.m. and leave when it returns to Leland at 4 p.m. There were also campers outfitted with everything they need to spend a few nights, kayakers arriving with their own boats and backpackers planning an extended walk around South Manitou.

The South Manitou Island Fitness Club

Already on the island was a small maintenance staff  for National Park Service (NPS), researchers conducting a water quality study of Lake Michigan and my favorite group; park volunteers.

More than 20 volunteers, most of them retirees ranging in age from mid to late 60s, were there for up to two weeks, restoring the historic barns and homes leftover from South Manitou’s heyday as an agricultural center a century ago.

In return for their labor, the NPS gives them transportation to the island and room-and-board once they are there. “How long do you work?” I asked one volunteer. “Six hours,” he said without hesitation, “and they pretty much hold you to it.”

Still we were sitting on the shady front porch of the ranger station, watching the ferry depart for the day, drinking a cold beer from the private stash he brought with him. Then we headed over for the dinner volunteers stage nightly at one of the historic cottages. This was Tuesday so it was Fajitas Night and somebody was mixing Margaritas in the kitchen.

Not a bad way to spend a week or two.

This is Campillo’s world, an island with up to 300 people on it during the day, maybe less than 100 at night. A place where the most common medical mishap is a blister on the back heel and most emergencies are hikers who just missed the ferry.

For the suddenly marooned day visitor, Campillo lends them a tent and a sleeping bag – there’s no turning the ferry around – and shows them a chest in the large boathouse filled with Ramen Noodles and instant oatmeal that departing backpackers have left behind.

Then he calls it a day on a remote island in the middle of Lake Michigan.

Backpacking in Michigan

Editor’s Note: Jim DuFresne is on the Manitou Islands of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore for two weeks working on a MichiganTrailMaps.com mapping project. Here is his first Trail Talk blog entry. For more on the islands, check out Backpacking In Michigan available from our e-shop.

By Jim DuFresne

One of the most anticipated port-of-calls occurs almost daily during the summer when the Mishe-Mokwa pulls up to the wharf on South Manitou Island. The 5,000-acre island, part of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, lies 17 miles west of Leland on the mainland and is the site of three campgrounds, numerous shipwrecks, a restored lighthouse and a wonderful trail system.

Jim DuFresne

But no cars, motels, outlet malls or even a Starbucks.

For most visitors the only way to reach this island is onboard the Mishe-Mokwa, the Manitou Island Transit ferry that cruises across the Manitou Passage, an historic shipping lane scattered with 19^th century shipwrecks. The trip takes 90 minutes and the vessel is often packed with backpackers, day hikers, families ready for an afternoon on an exotic beach. Everybody on the boat is eager to set foot on what they perceive as a paradise isolated from the madness at home.

On the island’s wharf there is another large group also anxiously waiting for the Mishe-Mokwa. These were the campers who had stayed overnight on the island, some as long as a week, and, while a get-away paradise is nice, they are now longing for a hot shower, a cold beer, food that doesn’t require two cups of boiling water and, heavens forbid, a peak at their Facebook page to see what they have been missing.

I was part of the influx of new campers. We waited for our packs and duffle bags to be unloaded and then headed up to the Boathouse at the head of the dock. This building was built to store the rescue boats as part of the U.S. Lifesaving Station stationed here in the late 1800s. Today it’s where park rangers give their camper orientation.

It’s takes about 15 minutes to go over the dos and don’ts and when it is over the ranger hands you your backcountry permit and you’re free to hike out to a campground and stake a site. You can tell who’s there for the first time. They take their time gathering up their gear, they study campgrounds maps to decide where they might want to go, they’re in no hurry.

The rest of us grab our packs and run as if this was the Oklahoma Land Rush.

Backpackers heading off to Bay Campground on South Manitou Island.

Sites are handed out on a first-one-to-reach-it-first-one-to-get-it basis. The two closest campgrounds, Weather Station and Bay, are also the most desirable because each has strip of seven or eight sites that are primo, some of the best places to pitch a tent in Michigan, possibly in the Midwest. Maybe the country. Who knows? All I know is these are sites worth hustling for.

I was slated to be on the island for a while and really wanted to stay at one of those beach-front sites at Bay Campground the entire time so I picked up my gear, a backpack and duffle bag, and the race was on.

Bay Campground is the closest campground to the Boathouse but it’s still a good  half mile trek. It was obvious there were five groups who had been here before and were intent of securing a primo site. I easily passed the first two groups on the trail without breaking a sweat and caught the third one, a husband and wife, when they stopped to fill their water bottles.

That left only the leaders, a husband, whose cap said he was a veteran of Desert Storm, and his wife who had no problem maintaining his military pace. They were shouldering monster packs and carrying two kayaks between them, the end of one in each hand.

And I still had a hard time closing the gap between us. Then I noticed their Achilles heel; two young sons, one six and the other four, and when the four-year-old announced he had to go to the bathroom I caught up and zipped around them on the outside corner of the trail.

I entered the campground ready to stake out the best site available. But when I went down the side trail to site No. 10, standing in the middle it, grinning from ear to ear and not even breathing hard, was Military Mom.

I was stunned. “How did you get here so fast?”

“We dropped the kayaks and while my husband watched the boys I took to the beach.”

I tipped my hat to her gold medal performance and headed over to site No. 12.

It wasn’t a bad consolation prize. Like site No. 10, it sits in the fringe of pines that line the Crescent Bay shoreline. I pitched my tent in the shade but from a pair of benches in my site had a view of the beach, Lake Michigan and the mainland to the east. Every morning I woke up and watched a stunning sunrise take place over the bay without ever leaving my sleeping bag.

This was my home for almost a week and when it was time to go – while I longed for that cold beer, hot shower and soft mattress – I knew I was leaving a place worth racing to.

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.

I received two emails recently from what only can be described as “extreme trail users,” people who push it to the limits and then some.

The first came from Roy Krantz of the Midland Hiking Club. In 2003, Roy and a friend hiked the entire Lakeshore Trail in Pictured

Jim DuFresne

Rocks National Lakeshore – 42.4 miles from Grand Marais to Munising – in one day. Or 14 hours and three minutes to be exact.

Extreme or just plain crazy? Before I could decide Roy dropped me a line with his latest challenge:

 In an effort to figure out the next hardest thing to try, my crazy buddies and I are planning a non-stop yo-yo hike of the Lakeshore Trail at Pictured Rocks for this fall. This year, we’ll be starting in Munising hiking to Grand Marais and then back to Munising in 28-30 hours (hopefully).  I want to make sure that I go far enough to make it official but not any farther than I have to.  A woman at the park told me that the official starting and ending points are Munising Falls and the Grand Sable Visitor Center.  Is that your understanding? Can you help?

Roy

My reply: Roy, you are crazy but if I can help with that insanity, I’ll try.

I then went on to say it has always been my understanding that the Lakeshore Trail went from the Grand Sable Visitor Center to Munising Falls because it was set up soon after the park was created in 1966, meaning it predates the North Country Trail, which connects to it at each end.

A backpacker on the Lakeshore Trail.

If you’re crazy, Roy has posted a You Tube video,  inviting other hikers to join him and his buddies. It’s pretty funny but I’ll pass.

A few weeks latter Eric Charette sent me an email with questions about the 42-plus mile Greentsone Ridge Trail on Isle Royale National Park:

As an ultrarunner and having grown up in the UP and graduated from MTU, I have been fascinated with running the Greenstone Ridge Trail. From my research, it looks like the fastest known time (FKT) from Windigo to Lookout Louise is 10 hours 17 minutes. Having just run rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon for fun in 11 hours (41 miles) I think that I can run the GRT in well under 10 hours.

Anyway, my questions are numerous, but to start I need to know if this travel schedule is possible. I have researched the options a hundred times over and as an engineer this is a complex problem to solve!   

Eric

I answered the questions as best I could and I think Eric is, pardon the pun, off and running.

His plan is to run from Windigo along the Greenstone Ridge Trail to its east end at Lookout Louise this July. Because Lookout Louise is a rather isolated spot in the park, his support crew is going to rent a canoe and paddle across Tobin Harbor to meet him at the finish and take him back to Rock Harbor Lodge where they have booked a room for the evening.

His main concern will be how much weight he’ll need to carry while running, particularly water. He plans to carry have 130 ounces of fluids but will also have a water filter in case he runs out.

I’ve hiked the Greenstone Ridge Trail almost a dozen times. It is truly one of Michigan’s classic trails. But I’ve always hiked it, taking the usual four to five days to complete the foot path that spans from one end of Isle Royale to the other and hauling along some 40-pounds of gear to spend the night in the backcountry.

To me, the beauty of either the Greenstone or the Lakeshore Trail is the length of them that allows you to escape into the backcountry for days at a time. Only then do I slip into the natural rhythm that is long distance hiking, where there are no deadlines other then setting up your tent before dark (and sometimes not even that).

You eat when you’re hungry; you take a break when you’re tired. You move at your own pace because all you have to do by the end of the day is to reach the next backcountry campsite. Only by being out in the woods for so long do I feel spiritually refreshed when I return home.

 But my hat is off to Roy and Eric and I’ll be following their escapades closely to see how they do.

You can too by checking into Roy’s web site (www.roykranz.com) and Eric’s (www.ericcharette.com) to keep tabs on them and then cheer them on at the finish line.

Editor’s Note: Jim DuFresne has covered both these trails in his guidebooks; Isle Royale National Park: Foot Trails & Water Routes and Backpacking in Michigan. You can order the books through the MichiganTrailMaps.com e-shop at www.michigantrailmaps.com/store.html.

Editor’s Note: Don’t forget on Tuesday, April 24, Jim DuFresne will be giving his presentation Michigan’s Top Ten Backpacking Treks at 7 p.m. at Backcountry North, 2820 N. US-31 South in Traverse City. Advance registration for the show is required and can be made by calling Backcountry North (231-941-1100). The $5 admission includes the new Jordan River Pathway map from MichiganTrailMaps.com. If you’re headed to Grand Traverse area for the weekend and need accommodations check with the Traverse City Convention and Visitors Bureau (800-872-8377).

By Jim DuFresne

A friend and I were hiking the Manistee River Trail, that classic trek 30 minutes south of Traverse City near Mesick, when we paused to watch a drift boat floating the Manistee River below us.

 There were three in the boat; a guide manning the oars and a client at each end casting large streamers towards the bank. They nodded, we asked them how they were doing and in the middle of the discussion about fly fishing and giant brown trout, the angler in the front stopped casting and sat down to take a call on his cell phone.

Jim DuFresne

No, I’m sure it was a smart phone. Because this was a person, a CEO probably, who took a day off to arrange a guide and go fishing but couldn’t take a day off. In the middle of the Manistee National Forest, in a place so remote you could only reach it in a boat or on foot, he found it necessary to still conduct business. From a bluff above I called him out on it.

“Is that a cell phone?” I said. “You’re taking a phone call out here!”

 He looked at me, kind of sheepishly, and said “Stuff happens.”

            *                               *                                      *

Many consider the Michigan hiking season to be June through August and maybe in sheer numbers of people hiking then, it is. But to me the peak of the season is right now, this week.

How could you ask for better trail conditions? The weather is clear but cool. I don’t need hot weather and a brutal sun while I’m in the woods. There’s no bugs yet, at least not any that want to suck your blood or buzz annoyingly behind your head.

There’s also very few people out on the trail. The wildflowers were just beginning to bloom in the corner of the state we were in and if I was more knowledgeable I would have known if the morel mushrooms were starting to pop up.

A hiker on the Manistee River Trail.

If you’re backpacking, the nights are cool enough to justify building a fire but not so cold where you spend an evening shivering in your sleeping bag. If you’re not tenting it, then there are some great deals in Traverse City, resorts that charge close to $200 a night in July were trying to entice you last week with that same room for less than $60.

That’s a deluxe room with a Jacuzzi tub, something that might actually be useful after your first 13-mile hike of the year.

But the best part of April hiking is that the leaves had yet to unfurl. They’re coming but until then you can see for miles from a high point whereas often in the summer there would be no view at all.

That was particularly true where we were on the second day; the portion of the North Country Trail that is combined with the Manistee River Trail to form a 23-mile loop. The NCT is rugged and often we found ourselves skirting the edge of a forested ridge to a view of valleys, more ridges and acres of the Manistee National Forest to the east.

In my mind this is the best time to be out on the trail. But if you make the effort to escape into the woods, then escape.

No Facebook, or Twitter checks, or emails or ring tones that come from the movie “Top Gun.” If you pack along a phone, then turn it on only for an emergency or to arrange for transportation at the trailhead.

When you enter the forest alone, free of any communication with the rest of the world, it becomes a spiritual cleansing from the high-tech overload most of us live with.

Enter the woods and listen to nothing but the wild around you. There is no call worth disrupting the tranquility you find on a trail, there is nothing on the Internet worth reading while you hiking along a high ridge.

 Not even this blog.

On a day when the wind was nonexistent, when the woods were covered by a fresh inch of snow, when the sun was peeking out from behind the clouds every now and then –  in other words, a perfect day for Nordic skiing – I was on some of the best trails in Northern Michigan but nowhere near my skis.

Jim DuFresne

Instead I was chugging along in a Pisten Bully groomer. Dave Forush was at the controls, preparing his trails at Forbush Corner for the weekend crowd who would begin descending on the Nordic center early Saturday morning. I was in the seat next to him, measuring them with a GPS unit for MichiganTrailMaps.com.

By the end of the day I had been on every trail of his twice, all 24 kilometers of them, and recorded my coordinates. I was also given a lesson in the art of grooming.

Laying track is definitely not just pushing snow around. The art of grooming is part science, a touch of meteorology, some old fashion crystal ball gazing and in the end a steady hand around hairpin turns.

Dave studies various weather web sites, checks the temperatures, measures the base that’s on the ground now and the shape it is in. Then he tries to anticipate what snow might arrive Friday night before the crowds do on Saturday morning, plots a strategy and we hop in the Pisten Bully, one of two groomers at Forbush Corner.

A groomed track at Forbush Corner.

The first time around, he rolled the trails with a huge cylinder on the back of the groomer that weighed more than a ton. Powdery fluff might be an appealing image for downhill skiers but for Nordic tracks you want the base compressed and the snow consistent with as little air in it as possible.

Dave’s mission was to work a pair steering levers so he didn’t gouge the sides of the trail that would result in dirt and debris on the newly compacted base. At times he looked like he was playing a video game.

My mission was to hang on. At one point we were pitched at the edge of a bottomless hill called Screamer and it was like being in a roller coaster at Cedar Point, only we were in the middle of the woods. When we started down I instinctively grabbed the dashboard in front of me.

At 2 p.m., when we finished the first run, we went right back out again. This time we set the skater’s lane and the tracks for classic skiers.

At one point when the sun came out briefly we paused and looked at the artwork behind us. The trail was a thing of beauty with the unmarred corduroy-surface of the skater’s lane and the crisp edges and smooth sides of the classic tracks.

“That’s as pretty a track as you’ll ever see,” said Dave.

It was indeed.

We finished around 5:30 p.m. after having spent more than eight hours in the groomer. That evening three more inches fell and Dave was back out grooming at 6 a.m. on Saturday so when the first skiers arrived three hours later they found perfect tracks and lanes.

The Pisten Bully groomer at Forbush Corner.

That’s why it is so stunning when occasionally somebody enters the Forbush Corner lodge, sees that there is a trail fee to ski and then says thanks but no thanks and leaves to find some place to ski for free. As if perfect tracks and $180,000 groomers, not to mention Dave’s time, weren’t worth anything.

For too many of these people the sport of Nordic skiing is synonyms with shuffling along on the crusty surface of a golf course or breaking trail for an hour in the woods. Something you do for free or for a small donation tossed in the fee pipe at the trailhead.

I have nothing against backcountry skiing and do it often, particularly on the state forest pathways. But until you have spent a day on a well-groomed trail that allows you to discover the natural rhythm that is Nordic skiing, you haven’t been Nordic skiing.

You’ve been slogging it in the woods.

This winter stride instead of shuffle with a visit to any Nordic center that puts even a third as much effort into grooming their trails as Dave does. It’s more than worth the price of the trail fee.

You may never ski a golf course again.