Porcupine mountains trip report

Well, as expected it was a great trip. We left southern Michigan at 8 o clock on wednesday night and made it to Muinising just in time to buy beer.
Another 15 miles or so down the road we stopped at a real nice and new looking state forest campground on lake au train and made to sleep at about 4am.
Awake at 8am we broke camp right away knowing we would regret the lack of sleep later in the day.
After burning a couple of hours trying to cut over to south boundry road from white pine we learned that most of the old forest roads have been gated up the last few years.
Better late than never we hit the overlooked falls trail head at about 2 o clock and spent a half an hour double checking gear and strapping up.
We headed towards mirror lake with plans to rethink our original route when we got there. Lily pond cabin is beautiful and would like to stay there some time. There was an awesome beaver dam built near the cabin.
At the mirror lake cabins we decided that taking the government peak trail over to the escarpment was a bit too ambitious, and would take 1 extra day.
So we decided to take north mirror lake trail to LOC and stay the night there. Just outside of the cabins we ran into a young couple that came from LOC and had a friendly chat. This trail is very cool IMO and has a wicked decline in this direction, the oposite direction would be a very tough stretch of trail.
We made it to the LOC penninsula site with every ounce of energy we had at about 6 oclock, a tough 10 mile hike on 4 hours of sleep if you ask me.The site was incredable with views rarely matched in Michigan.
On my top 5 campsites list for sure. A mild thunderstorm rolled in around sunset and made for a beautiful night to sleep in a tent.Friday morning was nice with an awesome trail ahead, The big carp river trail was great with unreal views and a gradual slope down the mountain.
We stopped at shining cloud falls to relax and have lunch for an hour, This place is awesome and the campsite here is one of the only sites I liked in the whole park, most of them were very unappealing to me.
We then hiked to Gitchi and found several people camping. We hiked all the way to the last sites by the mouth of the little carp and setup. I calculated about 12 miles for the day and it was a great hike.
The weather was 80+ and sunny and the black flies showed up out of nowhere by the millions. The only way to combat the flies was to put more clothes on and cover all skin, but it was way too hot.

There is a huge set of giant rocks that can be reached by wading out by the river mouth that had a great breeze and very few flies. I stayed on that rock in nothing but my shorts for about 5 hours, escaping the flies,burning weed, swimming, sunning, skipping stones and meditating

.After the sunset on the rock the flies subsided and we tried to catch some of those trout we could clearly see in the river to no avail, only a couple suckers.
We boke camp at 7am and hit the beautiful little carp trail enroute to the car. At the little carp cabin we met a couple of great people with 2 pit bulls.
This guy was great, had a lot of energy and this wild story about how he spent 2+ weeks up there the month before after one of his dogs went chasing a deer and never returned.
He covered near 90 miles of trail and eventually found his dog with the help of many others, the dog was in one of the pit toilets by a cabin.
After like 1 minute of meeting this guy he was like " I was just about to pack a bowl" and made for great companionship on our way out.Shortly after we finished our 7 miles for the dayand off to Ontonagon and a bar named stubby's I think, the place is a one of kind if your ever in the area.
We covered a grueling 29 miles in 3 days and it felt great.On the way home we stopped at every lkae superior beach we saw and jumped in to cleanse the soul and o how well it worked.
Hope you enjoyed the story,
until the next trip.


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I have been checking out property up there for years and hope to buy something in the near future, I am so damn jealous of you yoopers.