Planning a Re-route

 Three of us from the chapter went out this morning with two Forest Service employees to flag some trail re-routes through Leitch Bayou along the Manistee River. It was cold but beautiful.

This is the area where the North Country Trail goes right along the Manistee River, and not very high above the water like in most places.

The problem is that, as is normal, the river is eroding the outside curves.

In a number of places, the trail is right along the edge of the low sandy bluff. The guys are even having trouble getting the DR mower along there because it's so close to the edge. So today, we flagged some places where we are going to move the trail away from the edge. We'll probably get some complaints that it's not as close to the water. However, the FS has to do a bunch of studies for us to be able to move the trail, and it's better to not have to do this very often, so we moved anything that was close and on one of those outside curves of the river.

Here we are discussing a route and marking it with pin flags.

Coming back, between the trail and the river we saw what looked like a homemade shelter. Yup. Someone had tied some supports to a tree and covered it with tarps, and then left it all. Apparently that's a really popular camping site. Based on the stuff we found, we think anglers moreso that hikers. Anyway, after scouting around (most of this was just thrown in the bushes and weeds), we hauled out two tarps, two tents and their broken poles, 10 cooking pans of various sizes, one teakettle, three campfire grates, underwear and socks, broken lawn chairs, boxes of fishhooks, the remains of food packaging, numerous broken pieces of ropes and straps, some other junk, and so many beverage containers I didn't even count. It filled the back of the Forest Service truck.

I still have no car, so Pete had picked me up for this, and then we planned to spend the rest of the day putting out Carsonite posts to replace some that were broken or to put in ones that were never in place. You might remember I was working on this in the summer of 2021. Anyway, we went to 8 different locations, most on really bad back roads where it was good that Pete has a big truck. But we got everything done that he had planned! I didn't take any pictures of that because it's just more posts in the woods with stickers on them. Not so interesting on a blog, but really nice to find on the trail in the right places.

Cathy is going to pick me up and we will spend the evening doing a puzzle. All play for me today!

Total miles hiked in 2024: 172.8 of which 55.8 is North Country Trail

North Country Trail, Manistee County, Sawdust Hole through Leitch Bayou and back, plus another little squirt. 3 miles

See Loren Gets Her 100 Miles