Wanderung 4

Toyota Tundra Tows Trailer!

Or: Following Fall Foliage with Family Flophouse Firmly Affixed!

September - October 2003

October 20 - Ludington State Park, Michigan

The weather held at clear and cool, so we went ahead and walked the Volksmarch in Ludington State Park. The big advantage was that we were already camped there and didn’t have to drive to the starting point. In fact, since the walk went thru the Pines Campground where we were located, we could just pick up the trail from our front door and walk it at our leisure.

The first segment of the Ludington State Park walk is an out-and-back to the Big Sable Point lighthouse. But the instructions say you can walk out either on the access road or the beach, so we turned it into a loop by walking out along the beach and back on the access road. The beach route was somewhat more difficult walking due to the soft sand, but in exchange for that it was much more scenic with views of the lake on one side and the dunes on the other. We saw the footprints of only one other person ahead of us but were otherwise alone with the gulls and sandpipers. The gulls would typically spook as we walked up to them and either swim off shore or fly around us, and I noticed that they almost always flew out to sea rather than on the beach side of us. Trying to get good pictures of gulls in flight occupied me to the extent I didn’t even notice that we were approaching the lighthouse until it appeared in my viewfinder.

Big Sable Point lighthouse had a gift shop and for a $2 admission we could view a short video presentation and walk up the 130 steps to the top of the tower. This tower had portholes at the landings where we could rest a bit, and they also framed very nice views along the beach and out to sea. At the top we walked around the circular platform that surrounded the glass windows and were rewarded with grand vistas in all directions. The bright blue sky and deeper, rippled blue of the lake extended in a sweeping panorama to the eastern horizons and was complemented by the lines of the great beige sane dunes marching from north to south. The one problem with these huge panoramic vistas is that it is quite difficult or impossible to adequately capture them with a normal camera. We also saw the shadow of the lighthouse in the sand below and the roof of the lighthouse from almost directly above it, a most unusual perspective unless you are in an airplane! Altogether the views were very impressive and well worth the climb up the stairs.

The gift shop had a 25% off end-of-the-season sale, so we browsed their offerings for another ˝ hour. I bought a nicely polished Petoskey rock to be sure that we had a real one—it turns out that these stones are in fact fossils of ancient coral reefs that had this particular hexagonal arrangement of the coral colony (Hexagonaria Pericarinata, Sloss to be scientific). I broke down and bought one partly because I didn’t want to repeat our utter failures to find amber on the shores of the Baltic Sea (see Wanderung 2)! The walk back on the access road was along the inside of the wall of big dunes, so we were sheltered from the wind and sound of the waves and the seagulls. In fact, it was rather boring compared to the walk out and I would recommend the route along the beach, assuming you like beach walks.

At the campground we paused for lunch before setting off on the second segment of the walk, an eastward loop that started along a small river. When we passed the salmon were spawning and the river was alive with fishermen—coincidence?—I think not. From the dam at the inland lake side of the river we turned north to a boathouse, which was our final checkpoint. The instructions said to take the bike path back to the starting point, but we felt like walking some more, so we decided to extend our route back by taking a loop up thru the forested areas.

The State of Michigan had really done an excellent job of marking these trails, numbering each intersection, and even putting complete maps of the area at most of the major trail intersections. It was not impossible to still get a little confused at some of the branches, but I thought it would be extremely difficult to get completely lost given all this information. Our particular route back was from the boathouse (intersection #12 on the map) to intersections 8, 7, 6, 3, and 1, which was at the north side of our campground. This gave us a nice, woodsy walk which was, however, slightly more hilly than we had expected. In compensation we had a soft path and really nice views of the woods including a couple of brave deer that were browsing down in a small valley.

I say the deer were brave because altho this was technically a “Closed to Hunting” area and clearly marked as such on all maps and at the boundary, we nevertheless heard gunfire just off to the side of us. More than that, I found two recently fired shotgun shells right on the path we were walking altho it was in the “No Hunting” zone. To me, there is nothing scarier than an untrained, ill-socialized or drunk clown with a gun, and I’ve talked with deer hunters who admitted they fire whenever they hear something rustling in the underbrush without ever seeing their quarry—they called it a “sound shot”! Given all this, maybe you can understand why the sound of gunfire along a walking route tends to make me nervous. We arrived at our campground without incident, but I would not recommend taking these back woods trails during the hunting season.

All in all, this Volksmarch was a very nice blend of beach and woods walking with the historical and scenic lighthouse as its main focal point. If you just used the access road and don’t take the woods paths back, the difficulty is only level 1, but you would miss all the fun that way. If you walk out and back on the beach, walk up the stairs in the lighthouse, and take the woods walk extension on the way back, I’d give it more of a 2+ or a 3 difficulty rating and you would probably be doing more than 10 km.

Since we didn’t have to drive back to camp, we had a nice, restful afternoon. I, of course, napped while Monika processed pictures from the last few walks. She put together two beautiful photo-montages while I was snoozing, one of the lighthouses we had seen and one of sunrises, moonrises, and sunsets that we had photographed on the trip. As my brother once said, one key to taking good pictures is to take a LOT of them, and we have clearly taken enough pictures along the way to have some good ones. On a day with an interesting walk and a nice sunrise or sunset, we easily take more than 100 pictures—the camera chip’s limit was about 125 pictures and we often bumped into that limit and had to start deleting earlier pictures to take some more. I was so impressed by Monika’s montages that I printed out several copies of each one and we wrote letters to family and friends for the next few hours. When sunset time rolled around, we again trekked up the dune beside the campground to have a grandstand view and take some pictures. The sky was clear rather than streaked with clouds and no freighter sailed into the sunset, so this was what I would expect from a typical sunset rather than the “kick-butt” kind. But still it was very pretty and we took 30 or so pictures before the ruddy sun finally sank beneath the lake. We finished the evening with a campfire and reading some more of “Justice Hall” together, our current book since we finished “Dear Friend”, a biography about Abigail Adams last week. The only tricky part about reading together is that sometimes I read faster than Monika and sometimes she reads faster than I do. To make sure that we have both finished the page, we have established a signaling system where I start to turn the page from the top corner when I am done, but she holds down the bottom corner of the page until she has finished. Getting to the next page requires both a page release (Monika) and a page turn (Bob), but that goes very quickly and the page will not be turned until we are both finished. This all may sound a bit odd, but this system beats having to ask the other person if they are finished at the end of every page! And so to bed, as Pepys used to say.

Copyright 2004 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

September 2003
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October 2003
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