Alpena County Regional

Between 1869 and 1900, Michigan was the largest lumber-producing state in the country. Roughly 700 logging camps operated across the northern peninsulas. More money was made off Michigan white pine in those four decades than the Klondike gold rush produced. By 1910, the white pine forests that had covered nearly 90 percent of the state were nearly gone. A few isolated parcels in private hands escaped the saws — and by the 1920s those were being eyed by the few remaining lumber companies for one last cut. In 1927 Karen Michelson Hartwick, the daughter of one of Grayling's founding lumber barons, bought 8,000 acres from the Salling-Hanson Company. The parcel included 85 acres of virgin white pine. Her husband, Major Edward Hartwick, had died in France during World War I. Karen donated the land to the State of Michigan as Hartwick Pines State Park, with the stipulation that the forest never be logged and that a memorial building honor her husband and the lumberjacks who had built the region. She built the Civilian Conservation Corps cabin that still stands as the park's logging museum. A century later, the Pines are 49 acres — storm damage and natural mortality have reduced the 85-acre original. The trees in the grove are between 350 and 375 years old. The largest white pines stand 150 to 160 feet tall with trunks over four feet in diameter. They are some of the largest trees in the eastern United States. The 1.25-mile paved Old Growth Forest Trail loops through the grove and is fully accessible — wheelchair, stroller, dog-friendly. The Hartwick Pines Logging Museum sits a quarter-mile from the visitor center. This is what Michigan looked like before the saws. A traveler in 1850 walking from Mackinaw south to Detroit would have moved through hundreds of miles of this forest, almost continuously. Today there are 49 acres. The state park is 9,335 acres total — the fifth-largest state park in Michigan — and includes lakes, a campground, and the East Branch of the AuSable River, one of the most famous trout streams in the Midwest. 250,000 visitors a year.

Coming into Mackinac (KMCD), the red-and-white tower on the little island just south of the field is the Round Island Light. It went up in 1895 to mark the shoals in the straits where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet, built by Frank Rounds, the same Detroit carpenter who had just finished work on the Grand Hotel. The painted-brick tower stands 57 feet on an otherwise empty island; with its red base and pale top it gets compared to an old schoolhouse, and it's a near-twin of the Two Harbors light in Minnesota. It was manned until 1924, then run by a single caretaker until 1947, when the Coast Guard abandoned it for an automated light closer to Mackinac Island. Left to the weather and vandals, it nearly came down before the Forest Service took it over in 1958; it's since been restored, light and all. If it looks familiar, it's in the movie "Somewhere in Time."

You fly into KMCD on the island itself, not 83D on the mainland. Coming in, the Mackinac Bridge and the Round Island Light are easy to pick out, and the island sits in the straits with no cars on it; M-185, the road around the shoreline, is the only state highway in the country where motor vehicles are banned. The village banned them in 1898 because the engines kept spooking the carriage horses, and the ban was meant to be temporary. Once you're down, there's nothing to rent because there's nothing to drive; you get around on foot, by bike, or by horse-drawn carriage, same as the roughly 600 year-round residents and 500 horses. Fort Mackinac sits on the bluff above the harbor; the British took it in 1812, in the first land action of the War of 1812. The island became the second national park in the country in 1875, three years after Yellowstone, then was handed to Michigan as its first state park in 1895. The Grand Hotel opened in 1887, and its front porch (660 feet, billed as the world's longest) is long enough to pick out from the air. Downtown, the fudge is non-optional; locals call the summer crowd "fudgies." The flying changes with the season. In summer the ramp stays busy; in winter, once the ice shuts the ferries down, the airplane stops being recreation and becomes the island's supply line.

The five-mile suspension bridge connecting Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas. From above, the bridge appears as a delicate thread between two landmasses with the deep blue Straits of Mackinac flowing beneath. The bridge towers rise 552 feet above the water. On clear days, you can see the curvature of Lakes Michigan and Huron simultaneously. Combine with a landing at Mackinac Island (KMCD) for one of the best day trips in Great Lakes aviation.