Cherry Capital

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.

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.

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).

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.