WobblyReport

Rifle River State Recreation Area On runs, sentences... Rifle River State Recreation Area is massive. A full circuit of the area’s trail system would require the stamina of an ultra-runner or a sturdy, single-track-ready bicycle. A quick glance at the trail map and distance intervals between numbered locations reveals as much. Perhaps more revealingly, the worker who greeted me at the park’s main entrance on my first visit May 12 seemed unaccustomed to runners looking for the best parking area near a trailhead. “Are you looking for hills?” That sounded great, I said. The normal day-use lot was closed for maintenance, they said, but the lot near the Devoe Lake boat launch would suffice. Navigational challenges and anxieties at RRSRA are unlike trail systems that overlap or abut vast tracts of state land, or those complicated by plethoras of interior side-trails and intersections. Instead, long segments of trail open into sprawling camping and gathering spaces and parking lots. On a f...

The new job duties include an opinion column every three weeks. This was successfully pitched as first in a series. Ogemaw Hills Pathway On runs, sentences... A good recreational trail keeps one on one’s toes; lulls, perhaps, a wanderer into a sense of detached familiarity but just as easily immerses a traveler in the present moment and place. The way is clear one instant, inviting, but later on cluttered with debris and uncertain, merging and diverging with old fire roads and off-road vehicle paths, offering shortcuts and side-routes and extensions. A signpost’s map has fallen off or was never installed. A natural sense of direction disorients under the canopy, after a series of switchbacks that prevent erosion and confuse the hapless. Ogemaw Hills Pathway is a most suitable environment to experience the great outdoors—physical space for psychic journeys, explorations of nature and self. The pathway’s winding trails and interconnecting nodes branch out forming a network fit to fulfill...