Thousands of miles of Michigan trails still need clearing after ice storm

• More than a month after a storm rolled through northern Michigan, over 80% of state-managed trails in the area are still marked closed
• The state is expecting to bring volunteers in to help in the next 2-3 weeks
• Trails managed by conservancies, counties and cities may already be using volunteers

CHESTER TOWNSHIP — A fire management specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Nate Stearns, drove me to an off-road vehicle (ORV) trail that doubles as a state forest two-track road. 

Laying in front of us, blocking the way forward, was a cluster of trees downed in the ice storm that hit 12 Michigan counties in late March, more than a month ago. 

Stearns and I watched as another DNR staffer used a small bulldozer to clear the area. At one point the vehicle pushed a sideways pine, at least 30 feet tall, by the root ball, through brush and between standing trees, onto the side of the road. It snapped and crackled and the scent of pine filled the air as the tree squeezed through. 

The pile that had been blocking the roadway was clear after about 10 minutes.

“That was pretty fast, actually,” I said.

“Yeah, this was just a hundred yard stretch, though,” Stearns responded. 

The DNR has more than 3,600 miles of state forest roads like this one in the impacted area. They’re used by residents for things like turkey hunting, morel picking or bird watching and can be used by Michigan Department of Resources staff to access timber or to respond to fires.

As of Thursday, around 20%, or 690 miles, were known to not be drivable. More than half of the road miles still hadn’t even been assessed. In terms of trails, the state has more than 3,000 miles in the impacted area. As of Thursday, more than 80% were marked closed. You can view status updates for DNR trails, roads, parks and facilities here.

Now that power has been restored to most homes and businesses — and major roadways are passable — government officials and organizations that care for land are focusing more on clearing trails and forestry roads. That’s what landed me in the Gaylord area. I wanted to see the state of the trails and what is going into making them usable. 

The state is asking volunteers to wait

What I found is that some people are just taking it upon themselves to clear debris from trails, in an unofficial capacity. Officials, however, warn against this for safety and liability reasons. The DNR is asking people who want to help clean up state-managed trails to use this online sign-up sheet and wait to be contacted.

“Our cleanup plan only allows us to engage volunteers when hazards are clear,” said Chris Stark, a member of the DNR’s Ice Storm Response Team.

Once the DNR has assessed a trail, it will bring in staffers to operate heavy machinery to do the bulk of the cleanup. ORV and snowmobile groups that already have contracts with the DNR may be tapped to help. But volunteers who use the sign-up sheet won’t be asked to assist until the final phase, which will likely begin in two to three weeks, when mostly all that will be left is moving branches. 

If you want to help out with clearing trails right now, you have other options. Counties, cities and organizations with a lot of land, like conservancies, have trails, too. 

HeadWaters Land Conservancy, which has nature preserves in 11 counties, has five established trail systems. I chatted with their executive director, Julie Rubsam, on the phone in Detroit in advance of my trip. I told her how some of my colleagues who had gone Up North said the images we’d been seeing didn’t really do the storm damage justice. Rubsam agreed.

“You're driving around and you're looking at these forested areas and you can just see the whites from the broken trunks shining in the sun,” she said. “It’s across the board, the tops of the trees are just gone.”

‘This is a trail’

After driving Up North, seeing what Rubsam was talking about — and countless brush piles — I met up with her at the conservancy’s most popular trail, the Sturgeon River Preserve in Gaylord. 

At the trailhead, she pointed to a pile of downed trees.

“You can’t see it now, but this is a trail,” Rubsam said.

From where we were standing, I truly couldn’t see it. It just looked like a pile of small and medium-sized trees. The trail section, which cuts through an embankment, was so badly damaged that Rubsam said she’s not sure if they’ll be able to rebuild it; hikers might have to use a nearby boardwalk instead.

As we walked along that boardwalk, Rubsam gestured to a cedar, hanging across the river at a 45 degree angle.

“The trees fall into the river, and it takes the bank with it and it creates even more erosion issues than what we’re already seeing out here,” she said.

The organization just completed an assessment of all of its trails last week. Rubsam said the destruction is devastating. 

“It will look different for the foreseeable future, for decades. Even in my lifetime, I won't see the full recovery of our preserves.” 

Related:

• As northern Michigan cleans out from storm, some find new use for dead wood 
• Slammed by northern Michigan ice storm, foresters wonder what’s next 
• 30,000 gallons of maple syrup likely lost in historic Michigan ice storm

But she said she’s still optimistic. 

“When you work in this industry, you understand the resiliency of nature and that … they will come back and they will survive.”

HeadWaters Land Conservancy has been enlisting volunteers to help clean up its trails. They’ll have a volunteer workday at the Sturgeon River Preserve on Wednesday. The hope is that all their trails will be cleared enough by mid-June that they will be passable, but Rubsam said it might take until the end of the summer for everything to be thoroughly cleaned up.

Time to ‘get our soul back’

Based a little bit further north, Little Traverse Conservancy protects more than 70,000 acres of land, which adds up to roughly the size of 53,000 football fields. Like HeadWaters, Little Traverse is also working to get its trails ready to be used again.

“Virtually all of our trails were impacted,” said Anne Fleming, Little Traverse Conservancy’s communications director.

Almost every day, for the last three weeks, the conservancy has been pulling together people to help clear trails. Mike McNamara is a volunteer from Conway who said the toll the storm took on forests has been palpable for northern Michigan residents like himself.

“For a lot of people it hurts their heart,” he said. “A lot of us just go get in the woods to get our soul back.”

Little Traverse Conservancy posts a list of cleared trails on its website. The organization hopes all of their trails will be usable within the next month or two.

“We know that the tourists and the resorters are going to come up by the end of May and they're going to want to have safe trails,” Emmet County Emergency Management Director Matt Blythe told me over the phone.

As for locals, Blythe said, they need to be able to get out into nature for their mental health, so they can “take a deep breath and get away from the chaos they’ve just witnessed for the past month.”