Wexford County

Northern Michigan grows 75% of America's tart cherries. Old Mission Peninsula — a slim 18-mile finger of land splitting Grand Traverse Bay — is covered in cherry orchards and increasingly Riesling vineyards. From the air in mid-May, the white cherry blossoms turn the entire peninsula white as if it had snowed. The 45th Parallel runs straight through Old Mission — the same latitude as Bordeaux and the Italian Piedmont, which is why the wine works here. The Mission Point Lighthouse (1870) sits at the peninsula's tip.

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.

A 35-mile stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline with 450-foot sand dunes — among the largest freshwater dunes in the world. Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive winds through the dunes; from the air, you see the dunes drop dramatically to Lake Michigan, with the Manitou Islands offshore. Native Anishinaabe legend tells of a mother bear and two cubs who swam across Lake Michigan to escape a forest fire — the cubs drowned and became the islands; the exhausted mother climbed the dune to wait, becoming the "Sleeping Bear" mound. Voted America's Most Beautiful Place. Fall color in October is unforgettable.

The SS Badger is the last coal-fired passenger steamship in regular service in the United States. Launched 1952 by the Christy Corporation in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, she was built to haul railroad freight cars across Lake Michigan — the Pere Marquette Railway and successors operated her for that purpose until 1990. She was converted in 1991 to a passenger and auto ferry by the Lake Michigan Carferry Service, and has crossed daily May through October ever since, Ludington to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on a 4-hour run. 410 feet long, 60 feet beam, displacement 4,244 tons. Crossing capacity 600 passengers, 180 vehicles. The Badger burns roughly 50 tons of coal per round trip in her four Skinner Unaflow steam engines, generating 7,000 horsepower. She was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.