Porcupine Mountains Backpacking

There are only a few small stands of old growth forests left on this continent. I have been to couple of smaller old growth stands — one in the west, one in the south — but I’ve never really spent much time in them. When I found out that the Porcupine Mountains were the second largest old growth Hemlock forest left in the U.S., I knew we had to go.

This time I wanted to spend some time, so I put together a another family backpacking trip. We left the bus in its site in Washburn and headed up into the mountains of Michigan¹. Well, elsewhere they might be called hills, but up here they’re mountains.

We drove a couple of hours around Superior to the Porcupine Mountains, picked up our permit, and hit the trail.

The kids were able (and wanted) to carry more weight compared to our last trip in North Carolina, but of course what they think they can carry and what they can actually carry depends on the distance.

We wanted a destination to hang out at, so we opted for the trail around Mirror Lake — three miles in from the east, three miles back out to the west. We started with the eastern portion of trail, which went over Summit Peak. We wanted to get the hard stuff over with at the start. For about a half a mile it was straight up — about half of that was stairs — to a tower that brought you above the tree tops for a view of Lake Superior.

It wasn’t until we were almost to the lake that we finally stepped into the old growth Hemlock. Much of the old growth forest in the Mirror Lake area was knocked down in a storm in 1953 when 5,000 acres of old growth forest — thousands upon thousands of trees — came down in a matter of hours. Two high school kids out fishing near Mirror Lake got caught in the storm (and lived), which must have made for an exciting morning. Wind shear like that is not unheard of up here, but that’s a pretty extreme example (that is weirdly undocumented online, you can read about it at the visitor center though).

It was dark and cool in the old growth, little sun made it down to the forest floor, which was a deep bed of needles. The thing that really jumped out about the old growth though was how quiet it was in those portions of the forest. I noticed the silence before I really registered anything else. I’m not sure why, but I have never been anywhere so utterly silent. The birds were mostly gone, headed south for the winter, that was definitely part of the silence, but it was also just quieter among the Hemlocks than in the younger stretches of forest we passed through.

We made it to camp by mid afternoon. I will confess I am fascinated by the modern hiking crowd who seem to love nothing better than 20 mile days. If the people I see on YouTube and Instagram are in fact representative of modern hikers. I am just about the opposite. Even if I didn’t have kids… I like three mile days and lounging around camp, swimming, fishing, birding, cooking. The walking part? Meh, it’s fine, but it’s not why I am here. Walking is just the necessary ingredient to reach the last few spots on earth with some solitude.

Whatever the case, we set up camp, and spent the afternoon lounging around.

I have two regrets from this trip. The first is that we did not bring the hammock. Always bring the hammock. Well, if there are trees around.

My second regret is that we did not bring more real food. Five steaks really would not have added that much weight to our pack and would have 100 percent been worth that added weight. I am done with the whole dehydrated food thing. Some is fine when you’re doing longer walks, but there’s nothing like a steak in the backcountry. At least in my imagination there is nothing like a steak in the backcountry. Which isn’t to say that we ate poorly, just that, well, steaks and bacon and eggs would have been better. Next time.

At least we got to have fires, something that’s increasingly rare, not just in the backcountry, but everywhere. Long periods of poor forest management, combined with dry weather, have left much of the west forced to ban open fires. I am working on a longer piece about the importance of the fire, especially the outdoor fire, but suffice to say that it was very nice to have one in the backcountry. We even almost got something like a decent family photo. Almost.

The next day we did a little day hiking around the lake and a little swimming when we got back to camp.

The next morning we packed it up and hiked out via the other half of the loop. This time the trail followed a stream that wound through a lot of country that looked very much like the alpine meadows you see in the Sierras or Rockies. A little reminder that in the absence of altitude, high latitude creates a very similar ecosystem.

Before we headed back to the bus we did a quick drive around the rest of the park, to check out the larger, more famous, Lake of the Clouds. We ate lunch at the overlooks and then two hours later, we were back at the bus.

It was a good trip overall, though I think I lost my enthusiasm for ultralight hiking somewhere out there. Next time we go backpacking there’s going to be hammocks and steak involved.