Trail Talk

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.

I’m driving a new car. No, let me re-phrase that; I’m driving a newer car.

I picked up a Saturn Vue that is three-years old and has 43,000 miles on it. It’s high tech. For the first time I can use my IPod in my vehicle. It has remote start for those mornings when the windows are all frosted up and during those cold winter drives I can flick a switch and the seats warm up.

Jim DuFresne

I like the Saturn but it can never fully replace the car I just gave up; Father Jack’s Buick, a.k.a. the Priestmobile.

My wife’s uncle was a Catholic Priest and after he died I purchased his car from the estate, a 1998 Buick Regal with 110,000 miles on it. I only paid $1000 and figured I could squeeze a couple of years out of it. But this car was blessed because eight years and 140,000 miles later I was still driving it.

It took awhile to warm up to Father Jack’s Buick. You sat low in the seats so getting in and out was always a monumental effort. The trunk was poorly designed. I could barely squeeze my belly boat in and could only carry my mountain bike if I left the front wheel hanging out. And there was something wrong with the tape player. No matter what cassette I put in, it was always like I was listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks sing.

Plus it was Buick. Drive a car like that and you might as well slap an AARP sticker on the bumper. People who saw me on I-75 in December probably thought I was just another snowbird heading to Florida for the winter.

But that car had the character and perseverance of its pervious owner and eventually I came to realize that Father Jack was somewhere in the Buick. Maybe sitting next to me in the front seat.

Father Jack's trusty Buick Regal

This was a man who didn’t dilly-dally. He was famous for his 40-minute masses that attracted church-goers from surrounding parishes. He had little patience for excessive ceremonies and when it came to his sermons he told you what you needed to know without a lot brow-beating or biblical references.

This is how you should live your life, now go home and do it.

Naturally the clock in his car was fast. I would reset it at the beginning of every month and it would be off by 15 minutes at the end of it so I’d reset it again. This went on for eight years. It was hard to be late in Father Jack’s Buick.

After a couple years the trunk no longer locked. No doubt he was letting me know I was becoming too attached to worldly possessions. What was important wasn’t my flyrods in the trunk, rather the journey and certainly the destination at the end. That can be hard lesson to learn sometimes.

 Most of all, that car, like Father Jack, was dependable. No false fronts or pretentiousness. You knew what you were getting. It wasn’t a model I’d ever choose at a dealership but it was always there when I needed it. That Buick never stranded me in the woods.

And I spent a lot of time in the woods in that car. For two years I drove around the northern half of the Lower Peninsula trying to find and fish obscure rivers and creeks while working on my book, 12 Classic Trout Streams of Michigan.

Beginning in 2009 I was crisscrossing the state researching trails for www.MichiganTrailMaps.com. Sometimes it sputtered, sometimes near the end it hesitated but it always started up.

Once last year I was deep in the Pigeon River Country State Forest, a good hour from the nearest tow trunk in Gaylord. After spending all morning on the Green Timbers Pathway I jumped in the Buick, turned the ignition and nothing happened.

I was probably looking at a $300 towing bill, if I could even find somebody to come out there, when I decided what I needed to do was pray. But not to God.

“Please Father Jack don’t let the Buick strand me here. Please!”

He was in that car with me, he heard me. I got out and opened and closed the hood a few times, rock the car a little from behind and tried the ignition again. This time the engine roared to life.

I’m going to miss that car, maybe more than I miss Father Jack’s sermons.

On the day of Greg Hokans’ funeral I was hiking in Emmet County, recording trails for MichiganTrailMaps.com and enjoying a beautiful September day in northern Michigan.

At the Elk Rapids Library that evening, my Internet connection when I’m in this corner of the state, somebody emailed me condolences to the loss of my friend and upon further searching of the web I learned that he had died a few days earlier in Cheboygan and was buried that day.

Jim DuFresne

I missed it all because I was out in the woods. I wasn’t shocked because I knew he was gravely ill, he told me when I visited him a couple weeks earlier he had less than a month, but the grief that swept over me was profound and the guilt I felt for missing the end was even worse.

 The only thing that got me through the evening was the knowledge that Greg would much rather have me out on the trail celebrating his life than in a church praying at his funeral.

 So the next day I did that. I threw my mountain bike in the back of my car and drove to the Wildwood Hills State Forest Pathway near Burt Lake. Once there I spent the morning pedaling among the pines, trying to make sense why somebody like Greg would be told at the age of 46 that he had stage 4 colon cancer.

I met Greg in the late 1980s. He was the new executive director of the Marquette Country Convention and Visitors Bureau and had put together his first familiarization tour for the media. I was a freelance writer, generating travel and outdoor stories for newspapers and guidebooks.

 He invited me up for the tour and we hit it off the minute we met. He was a lifelong Yooper. I loved the U.P. He needed to get the word out how wonderful Marquette was. I needed material to sell. We both had a passion for the outdoors and adventure.

After that I didn’t need to wait for a media junket to visit Marquette. For the next eight or nine years I would just drive north and walk into his office, often unannounced. Didn’t matter. Greg would drop everything, tell the receptionist he was gone for the day and we’d take off to “research stories.”

Greg Hokans at Fort Mackinac

 We’d swing by Jean Kay’s Pasties & Subs Shop in town to pick up lunch and then Greg would hand me a media kit, a large envelope stuffed with the latest visitor’s guide, brochures, press releases. With a media kit in the hands of a media person, it was now official. We could go and play without worrying about board of directors, editors or wives.

We’d climb Hogsback Mountain, paddle Craig Lake, spend an afternoon following old two-tracks looking for moose, hike into the Rocking Chair Lakes Wilderness, try to catch a brook trout in front of a waterfall because it would make for a great photo.

He’d promote, I’d publish. Marquette and the surrounding region never received so much good press.

It was a Friday when I arrived at the trailhead of Wildwood Hills and, despite a car in the parking lot, didn’t see another soul on the trail which I was thankful for.

Wildwood Hills was developed in the 1970s primarily for Nordic skiers but the mountain biking boom of the 1980s turned the trail into a popular weekend destination for off-road cyclists. The pathway is actually a 12-mile system of three loops with the perimeter of it forming a natural route of almost 9 miles.

 It’s not overly scenic but not technical either and that’s why I chose it. The trails are old forest roads and even railroad beds left over from turn-of-the-century logging, making them wide paths with gentle curves and climbs. It’s also well posted. I could pedal through the woods while my mind wandered and it did.

I thought about life and the end of it. I thought about my purpose here and why a God would take away somebody as young, honest, hardworking and good hearted as Greg. Mostly I just thought about our times together.

We would work on stories and sometimes even create them. I once showed up Dec. 1 because that’s when the snowmobile season begins in Michigan. Only nobody snowmobiles then because there’s not enough snow to ride. Or so they think.

In Marquette, Greg borrowed a trailer and an old station wagon to pull it, we loaded two snowmobiles on it and off we went north of the city to spend the day driving around the rugged Huron Mountains looking for enough snow to snowmobile.

It took a while but we certainly were in no hurry. Nether one of us could think of a better way to spend an afternoon. Finally late in the day we found an area with a base of 10 or 12 inches on the backside of a ridge so we jumped on the sleds and rode through the woods, breaking our own trails. The entire ride, including stops to stage photos, probably lasted less than 40 minutes before we were back at the car, breaking out the still-warm Jean Kay’s pasties and a couple of beers.

Here’s to the start of the snowmobile season!

I was thinking about that when I realized I had taken a wrong turn somewhere on the pathway. I backtracked a quarter mile to the last trail sign, saw the missed junction and continued on, letting my thoughts wander again.

The time spent alone in the forest worked. I emerged at the trailhead feeling less burden by grief and sadness. I realized that more important than a funeral or being at his deathbed was the fact I was able to see him just weeks before at Mackinac Island where Greg’s final job was as the marketing manager of Mackinac State Historic Parks.

From his office at Fort Mackinac we walked over to the Tearoom Restaurant and sat outside to that incredible view of the island and the Straits of Mackinac. We talked about jobs and kids and our adventures together. When I asked about the cancer and his feelings, it became emotional so we pulled back to reminiscing.

The last thing Greg did was hand me a media kit for Mackinac State Historic Parks and pick up the tab for lunch. “Have to keep it official,” he said but we both knew it never was.

A day after the Great Lakes Cyclone, when winds were hitting 60 mph and stronger, I was in the Pigeon River Country State Forest following the 10-Mile Loop of the Shingle Mill Pathway for http://www.MichiganTrailMaps.com. It was still windy, but otherwise the afternoon was cool, clear and crisp, the perfect day to be out in the woods hiking a trail.

The Shingle Mill winds past some of the best scenery that Northern Michigan has to offer, but what occupying my thoughts wasn’t views of steep-sided sinkhole lakes or the Pigeon River, but all the logs and trees that the high winds had blown across the pathway.

Jim DuFresne

Who was going to remove them?

In mid-October the Forest Management Division of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment announced that due to another cut in general funds all maintenance work would be suspended on the 60 non-motorized pathways in Michigan’s seven state forests.

That includes plowing parking areas in the middle of the winter and grooming pathways for skiers. Or pumping out vault toilets at the trailheads. Or repairing bridges and signage along the trails. Or even painting an occasional blue blaze on trees.

Or removing a tree that has fallen across the trail and stops everybody dead in their tracks.

The only exception, said DNRE officials, are state forest trails where the state has signed contractual agreements to groom them or pathways that have spawned volunteer groups to oversee their maintenance.

“We’re going to have to go in a different direction,” Lynn Boyd, chief of the DNRE Forest Management Division, told the Grand Rapids Press. “We had another cut in general fund. They took $300,000 out of the forest recreation budget. That money went to ski trails and non-motorized trails with no funding source, plus campgrounds.”

The decision affects not only cross-country skiers this winter but hikers and backpackers, mountain bikers and equestrians. Everybody can expect pathways in rougher condition next year with a cloudy future beyond that. This affects some of Michigan’s most popular trails; Jordan River Pathway, Sand Lakes Quiet Area, Mason Tract Pathway and the Sinkholes Pathway.

Some hope that Michigan’s new Recreation Passport program will provide funds to the state forests as well as the state park system. Passports went on sale Oct. 1 and are designed to replace motor vehicle entry stickers at state parks and boat launches.

Some funds will eventually trickle down to the forest recreation program, but not be until 2012 at the earliest and nobody, not even the people who created the program, know how much it will generate for state forest pathways.

Meanwhile trees keep falling on the trails.

A fallen tree on the Warner Creek Pathway.

It’s seems to me that the funding model we have for state forests recreation is badly outdated and no longer meets our needs. The only thing we pay for are campgrounds and despite fees being raised to $15 a night, the DNRE still  had to close 12 more state forest campgrounds last year that may never be re-opened.

Some have advocated turning a portion of the campgrounds and pathways to local units of government but they don’t seem much more endowed with recreation funds than the state. Others urge donation canisters at every trailhead. Maybe some will give, maybe some won’t.

It’s seems to me if we, the mountain bikers, hikers, skiers, the morel mushroom hunters, the birders, want state forest pathways, we all need to pay for it. What we need is an annual state forest permit, priced at $10 or $15 a year and required anytime you enter a state forest.

The suggestion of such a permit will have many screaming “tax increase” but I’ve never equated user fees as taxes. If you want to see a movie, you have to purchase a ticket. If you go out to dinner, you pick up the tab at the end of the meal. You drive across the Bluewater Bridge to Canada, there’s a toll booth waiting for you at the other end.

If you want a pathway that’s been cleared, marked and equipped with toilets and drinking water at the trailhead, there’s a price to pay. If you don’t want to pay the price of admission, you can’t see the movie. That’s not a tax, that’s a ticket.

I don’t have a problem paying for outdoor recreation. This year alone I spent $104 for annual passes to Sleeping Dunes National Lakeshore, Huron-Manistee National Forest, Michigan State Parks and Oakland County parks. Funding the places where I hike, ski and camp is far less expensive than what it costs me to visit them in terms of gas, lodging and equipment.

And if a national forest is worth $30 a year to me or the Sleeping Bear Dunes $20, then surely 5 million acres of state forest land, blessed with more than 700 miles of trails and 133 campgrounds and preserving trout streams and lakes, is worth $10. Or more.

Sadly, in this era of no-new taxes this would be a hard concept to push through Lansing.  But the alternative to doing nothing is a dwindling number of state forest campgrounds and trailhead facilties … and a growing number of trees laying across the pathways.