President’s Message:
Winter is surely coming now, but at least the bridge on Sturgeon Valley Road over the Pigeon has finally been replaced. So you can once again approach the Pigeon River Country from the west as usual. Last summer Rick Kropf and I did a float trip from the bridge over the Pigeon on Old Vanderbilt Road to the bridge over the Pigeon on Sturgeon Valley Road that went through the Song of the Morning pond with its grass growing up in the middle. I spoke about that at the August 2008 meeting of the Natural Resources Commission, and it has now been put on our PRCA website. You can see it here.
This summer I did a repeat trip with my wife, Frances. Just as before the Pigeon is a lovely river winding through the forest until it spreads out into an extremely shallow, at least 80 acre, pond with tips of grass growing in the middle at the Song of the Morning Ranch dam. We are, of course, now involved in litigation along with TU and the State of Michigan to have the dam removed. We are currently in the discovery phase with various motions being scheduled for presentation to the court in Gaylord. Our attorney, Pete Gustafson, is exploring the possibility of a negotiated settlement to reach our goal. However we are prepared to go to trial if there is no other alternative. We will continue to keep you informed about this issue with information and documents on our website. So please check occasionally.
Like many small organizations we depend on volunteers, and I would like to identify a couple of them for you. For the last several years Greg Keith has done yeoman service setting up our website sales of maps and book sales with the help of Google and keeping our website up to date. Lance Weyeneth has been responsible for checking the mailbox regularly, mailing items you have ordered either online or by mail, and keeping records of the orders and membership. They are both avid fishermen who spend many hours in the Pigeon River Country. Their help has been very much appreciated.
Advisory Council Meeting:
The fall meet meeting of the PRCSF Advisory Council was held on Friday, October 17 beginning at 6:30 PM at the Forest headquarters and information center. Among those in attendance was Mindy Koch representing the DNR Director. Among the subjects of note were the following:
Bridge and Campground Re-opening:
After a tough year economically to hurdles that have not helped locally have finally been cleared, the Pickerel Lake State Forest Campground was officially reopened on November 1st after being closed for renovations for over a year. A separate project and perhaps more visible the replacement of the Pigeon River (Cement Bridge) on Sturgeon Valley Road has been completed and recently opened to traffic. The completion of these projects comes just in time for hunting season and winter enthusiasts. While these closures no doubt had some financial impact on local communities, there is no way to tell just how much was a direct impact and how much was a result of the state of the economy.
A Legal Milestone?
It was announced that a group of attorneys has nominated the Pigeon River Country Legal Action over oil & gas exploration for a “Milestone Award” They have asked the Advisory Council for input as to an appropriate location to place the plaque. While some council members thought the headquarters building was appropriate others felt another location would be best. The milestone group would prefer the Otsego County Courthouse, this location is supported by the DNR as the site is more visible to those in the legal field.
Chandler Dam Removal:
The Council heard a report on the progress of the planned removal of buildings and the dam on the Black River just East of Tin Shanty Bridge on the former Kronlund Property. As one would expect with multiple levels of government involvement the process is extremely slow, they currently have a September 30, 2010 target date for completion.
Additions to the PRCSF Management Unit:
At the July Advisory Council meeting the Council questioned why the Hackett Lake tract had not been officially included within the boundary of the PRCSF. A report at the October meeting by Mindy Koch indicated that essentially the political climate is stopping the DNR from including this tract as a part of the PRCSF at this time. This despite the fact that the Advisory Council had supported the Natural Resources Trust Fund Grant application based on the fact that the parcel was to be included in the PRCSF. Further the grant application submitted to the Trust Fund Board also indicated this was to be the case. Hopefully the DNR will be persuaded to live up to their word and include the tract in the PRCSF which will afford it the protections of the Concept of Management.
Biodiversity Stewardship:
The Advisory Council has been informed at recent meeting of a “Biodiversity Stewardship” plan. This plan will set aside specially designated areas for specific management practices to protect sensitive resources. Since the Pigeon River Country was designated a “Special Management Unit” in 1973 to provide protection for all lands within the unit boundary, as they were recognized as not only containing “Special and Sensitive Resources” (both plant and animal), but also were deemed special in that nowhere else in Northern Michigan are these unique features and resources found in a single area. If followed properly with “Conservation” foremost in mind the “Concept of Management” will provide the protection proposed under the Biodiversity Stewardship plan, as was the intent over 30-years ago. Given the current economic climate it does not seem a wise choice to pursue a “Biodiversity Stewardship” plan (at least within the boundaries of the PRCSF). I hope our members and friends will urge the DNR to reconsider the proposal and leave the PRCSF management under the current system using the “Concept of Management” as a guide.
Webb Road Bridge:
The Advisory Council was informed that the Cheboygan County Road Commission in planning to replace the Webb Road Bridge (Red Bridge) over the Pigeon River in 2010. Plans are preliminary at this time and the Road Commission is keeping the Advisory Council informed.
Advisory Council Meeting Dates:
Meeting dates have been set for 2010 as follows: January 15th, April 9th, July 16th, and October 15th. All meetings will start at 6:30 pm and will be held at the Pigeon River Headquarters and Information Center.
The Parks and the Pigeon (Editorial)
For those who watched the PBS series on the America’s National Parks this past fall, no doubt many issues that affect the Pigeon River Country may have come to mind. Not that the series was not worth watching for the magnificent photography by Ken Burns (famed for his series on “The Civil War” and other notable presentations for PBS) and his team, but this film, with its recounting of the personalities responsible for the creation of these Parks and even more the exploration of the sometimes conflicting philosophies that drove them, has great importance for us as we ponder the decisions that were made concerning the PRCF in the past and are confronted with challenges that will face us in the future.
Not that the Pigeon River Country in any way measures up to the spectacular landscapes found in America’s National Parks. Nor was the creation of the PRCF as a specially managed state forest area meant to duplicate the policies that were to be set for Michigan’s State Parks. Nevertheless. at least for the Pigeon River Country, many of the same issues that faced the creators of the national Parks also confront those who must set policies for the management of the PRCF. We see these issues as revolving around three major concerns: land, people, and wildlife.
The first of these three, which was the major bone of contention in the creation of the national Parks to begin with, involved issues of land ownership and management. Most, if not all, of the National Parks, were created on land that the government already owned. Only a few, like Acadia National Park in Maine, involved extensive tracts of privately held land. The big difference however, is that while these plans which were destined to become the national Parks were some of the last more or less untouched and pristine wilderness areas in the United States, the Pigeon River Country was, for the most part, a derelict, deforested, and a largely burnt-over ruin of the dense virgin forest it had once been. People like P. S. Lovejoy were not faced with a kind of battle between “conservationism,” understood as it was by the people in the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management as conservation of the natural resources to best benefit man, as contrasted to “preservationism,” as exemplified in the philosophy of John Muir, who fought for the preservation of these areas in their primitive and pristine condition for their own sake.
Not so for an area like the Pigeon. “Restoration” might be a better word or description for the work that faced Lovejoy and his colleagues. Nevertheless the same dilemma faces us when it comes to the Pigeon River Country because once restored as it has been to something resembling its original wild-like condition, the decision has to be made as to what extent various commercial uses such as the extraction of gas and oil and the harvesting of timber has to be balanced with or even to some extent modified to preserve what has been accomplished by way of restoration over the past eighty some years. No doubt there has been and will continue to be difficult decisions and tradeoffs to be made. While our parks, both national and state, generally allow no logging operations, the PRCF is still basically a state forest and is largely expected to pay its own way, not through visitor revenues like a state park, but through timber sales. But even so, great care has to be taken that it doesn’t end up, like some of our state and national forests, looking more like gigantic “tree farms” as so many of them, with their artificially planted stands of a single species, arranged in block-like rectangles (how many straight lines do you find in nature?) do. Integrated diversification of species is the key to keeping the “Big Wild” wild.
The next big issue that had to be faced, particularly at the start, was the influx of visitors. This was a particularly difficult problem with the National Parks because most of them were set aside for their outstanding scenery—which of course everyone would like to see. As the PBS series keep repeating, the determination had to be made, almost from the beginning, that they wouldn’t be turned into tourist traps, or commercial enterprises like what had happened with Niagara Falls. That began to happen to Yosemite Valley while the State of California was allowed to manage it, until the Federal government finally had to step in to take control of what was already its own land. But even today, the sheer number of visitors there remains a problem, so much that shuttle buses are now used to replace what had been, up until recently, an invasion of automobiles. Of course, a major part of the problem there is that the spectacular but rather narrow valley allowed space for only a single road.
In the PRCF, of course, we don’t have that problem. Our problem is that here we have a system of roads that can get you to just about anyplace you want to go without much exertion, this to the point that as even as wild as it may seem, there is no place in the PRCF that could be classified as real “wilderness” in the accepted sense of that term (an area where you’d have to camp overnight before you could walk out across it to the nearest road).
With this easy accessibility have come many other problems, one of biggest in recent years being the ability of people to haul in camp trailers and even larger trailers full of horses to an extent that would be impossible in most of our national parks. Same goes for snowmobiles and ATVs and other off-road vehicles. The national and even most state park experience has shown that the only way to control this problem and to keep the area hospitable to those who seek the experience of nature in the wild is to restrict use of such camping trailers, off-road vehicles, and horses or pack animals to specific routes and trails, or in some areas, to ban their use altogether. Hence the measures that had to be taken with the new revision of the Plan of Management for the PRCF enacted in 2008. All along it had been recognized that the danger to the PRCF was people “loving it to death” and that certain activities had simply gotten out of hand.
Finally, as has long been the case of our National Parks, is the challenge of effectively managing wild life. Here the experience in the PRCF in some ways parallels that of Yellowstone, America’s first, and still best known, national park. First attracting visitors to its geysers and other geothermal features, Yellowstone soon was recognized as the last wild refuge of the bison or American buffalo. Hunting was banned, wolves were eliminated, and elk and bison multiplied. The bears were given food by the tourists and in the garbage dumps, and wildlife flourished in great abundance, so much that the ecosystem began to be strained. Then finally, in more recent years, wolves were brought in from Canada to try to restore nature’s balance, much to the dismay of ranchers near the park who were already perturbed by forays into the grazing lands nearby by the park’s greatly protected but still very hungry grizzly bears.
Here we have a lot of parallels with the PRCF. A large part of the rationale for establishing the PRCF as a special management area has been the reintroduction into the area, back in the 1920s, of elk (ironically shipped, it is believed, probably from Yellowstone Park or possibly some from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State). But neither grizzly bears (which were never native to this area, while black bears certainly are) nor wolves (which had been native) were brought in. In fact, the last wolf killed in this area was probably just about the time when the elk were released. Parts of the PRCF have been managed, aspen cuttings, and even open fields maintained to try to keep the elk content and entice them from wandering off into farm lands where their presence can cause great damage to crops. A strictly regulated hunt keeps their numbers in check, but keeping them out of the farmlands still remains a major challenge. Hunters dislike them because of the amount of forage they consume that would otherwise be available to deer. And even this raises a contentious issue: should we welcome the wolves (several of which are believed to have wandered down over the winter ice from the UP to an area NE of the PRCF) back? They would help keep the coyote population under control and perhaps also the feral pigs if they continue to show up. Meantime a few wolves could certainly make mushroom hunting more of an adventure!
Maybe we need to hear from our members regarding a lot of this.
(R W Kropf – editor. PS: For an example of the kind of problems that arise in land management and use, as well as the people management aspect of this whole dilemma, see the following article, originally written for, but not included in the summer issue, regarding problems concerning the High Country Pathway. )
Pathway Problems
In addition to the disruption to both the High Country Pathway as well as the much used Shingle Mill Pathway where they shared a crossing of the Pigeon River on the bridge now being replaced on Sturgeon Valley Road, several other problem areas on the High Country Pathway deserve notice by prospective users—particularly those using bicycles. The most recent of these came to notice early in August when some bicyclists from out-of-state ran into a logging operation along a segment of the western portion of the pathway some distance south of the newly replaced footbridge near the Pine Grove Campground. Due to the disruption it seems they temporarily lost their way (despite having a GPS and the Association’s official HCP/PRCF map in hand) and began to wonder if they had taken the by-now proverbial “bridge to nowhere.” Turns out that the abundance of rain in early August had turned the whole logging site into a quagmire and that the logging machines had sunk into the forest floor up to their axles and had left ruts practically thigh deep, making walking this section of the pathway, much less using a bike, almost impossible. We’ve been promised that the mess will be soon cleared up.
Unfortunately, I also have my own tales of High Country Pathway challenges to relate. One involved a segment outside of the PRCF east of M-33 a bit NE of Clear Lake State Park. There the pathway had been transected by a segment of an area plowed up by a bulldozer and apparently planted with jack pines—as is commonly done in outside of the PRCF to encourage the nesting of Kirkland Warblers. At that point (this was several years ago and the furrows were still rather fresh and the pines hardly visible) I could still make out where the trail was supposed to be and made it through on foot without too much trouble. But knowing how dense such plantings can be once the trees really begin to mature (I once tried taking a shortcut through such a planting on X-C skis—much to my regret!) I presume that the pathway has been repaired since or has been rerouted to avoid this particular area. More recently, I discovered that another part of the pathway, just west of the stretch that runs northward from the abandoned (except by ATVs) extension of Swartz Rd. in Cheboygan County had been disrupted by logging machinery with apparently no attempt to repair the damage. At that point there was no option except to shoulder my bike and stumble through where I thought the pathway once was.
Among other hazards facing users of the High Country Pathway are a thicket of blackberry bushes that can really lacerate a hiker or bicyclist in a short stretch of the pathway north of Webb Road and (at least when I was last there) a boardwalk section east of Milligan Creek that was so overgrown with tag alders that if not eventually cut back, might by now reduce even a hiker to crawling through on hands and knees.
All this, I think, points out the need to make sure that various divisions of the DNR be more in touch with each other and operations be a bit better coordinated. But even more, with DNR budgets cut back to the bone, all this underlines the vital necessity of recruiting volunteer help to keep our pathways useable and especially the importance of our Association’s summer intern program largely funded by PRCA membership. (R. W. Kropf, editor)