Pellston, MI
Pellston Regional sits in the Tip of the Mitt, the northern Lower Peninsula, with a single 6,500-foot runway 14/32 in flat terrain at 720 feet elevation. The airport is the principal gateway to Mackinac Island, fifteen nautical miles north — passengers transfer to Mackinac Island Airport (KMCD) on the island itself, or to ferries at Mackinaw City. Pellston was for decades known as the "ice box of the nation" — the National Weather Service station here repeatedly recorded the coldest temperatures in the lower 48, including a 1933 reading of −53°F. The town's annual Petoskey-stone hunting on Lake Michigan beaches (a fossilized colonial coral, the Michigan state stone) draws collectors every spring after the ice goes out. Bay View, the Methodist summer chautauqua community founded 1875 just south on Little Traverse Bay, is a National Historic Landmark — 446 Victorian Gothic cottages, no two alike, that have hosted figures like William Jennings Bryan, Booker T. Washington, and Helen Keller.
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.
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.
Earl Young was an insurance salesman and self-taught builder who designed and built about 30 stone houses in Charlevoix, Michigan, between 1918 and 1970. He had no architectural training. He picked up stones — glacial boulders from local fields, granite cobble from the Lake Michigan shore, large limestone slabs from Petoskey-area quarries — and built them into houses with low-slung, undulating roofs that look like they grew out of the ground. Locals called them "Hobbit houses" before Tolkien was popular and "mushroom houses" once Tolkien was. The name stuck. The houses cluster in three neighborhoods. Boulder Park (Park Avenue at Lake Michigan, north of downtown) holds the densest concentration — about a dozen houses, each unique, set on a wooded ridge above the lake. Several have boulders weighing 20+ tons set into corners or chimneys. The Thatch House has a roof that rolls in waves like the Cotswolds. The Mushroom House (the canonical one) has a roof that swoops nearly to the ground in places. The Half House is built around an existing 200-year-old oak. Stafford's Weathervane Inn restaurant on Pine River Lane is one of Young's commercial buildings, open to the public; the houses are all private residences but visible from the streets in their neighborhoods. Young worked without blueprints, often without notes. He told clients what he was going to do, walked them through the site, and built it. Several houses changed shape mid-construction when he found a particularly good boulder he wanted to use. He hired local masons and trusted them to interpret his vision. The houses look hand-fitted because they were. Charlevoix itself is the town between Lakes Michigan and Charlevoix at the head of the Pine River channel — a Gilded Age summer resort that has stayed a summer resort. The downtown harbor opens onto Lake Michigan via a drawbridge that lifts hourly for sailboat traffic in season. Beaver Island, accessed by ferry from Charlevoix, is the largest island in Lake Michigan and was briefly home to a Mormon offshoot king ("King" James Strang, 1850-1856).