Our family stewards a little cedar-shake, all-season cabin named Soo. It’s painted Falu red and tucked into Palmer Woods, a horseshoe of protected old growth forest just off scenic M22 on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula. Across the dirt road in the sunset’s shadows of Pyramid Point, some of the best mountain biking trails on the peninsula cut through sun-dappled stands of rare ferns, home to far more deer than people. Not a single jail-bar of cell reception on Wheeler Road, and I rue the day they put up that tower.

Deer mice living in the walls of the barn chewed the neck of my wetsuit, put away hastily and still sandy from last year. I shake an old nest of neoprene fluff out of my leather ski boot, an eviction notice that comes obviously too late. Quietly, and out of eyesight of my young kids, I trap the mice, and leave them in offering at the bottom of the giant nearby beech tree.

As anyone who has schussed and shoveled their way through a northern winter knows, these earned summers when we return are the ones best remembered. A peek through the cedars overlooking the Manitou Islands, under the peach glow of the setting sun, we can feel those long Northern Michigan summer days on that same horizon. Even still, there’s never enough daylight to pack in everything on our bottled-up warm-weather checklist. So grab a headlamp, you’re coming with us on our much-anticipated summer tour.

The Leelanau Peninsula is perhaps most known for its acidicly aqua freshwater ocean, the water like a North Country Caribbean. Mixed hardwood and pine forests cluster atop steep sand dunes that tower over Lake Michigan, home to some of the bigger rises and deeper valleys in the lower peninsula. Sturgeon call these deep, cold waters home, ancient dinosaur-like fish sculling over reefs of prized, fossilized coral called Petoskey stones. The color of the water, an idyllic consequence of sun and stirred sediment, looks like the appropriately flavored Glacier Freeze Gatorade.

NORTHERN MICHIGAN

A field guide to farm stands and wineries, Sleeping Bear Dunes, lake life, long hikes and country afternoons.

SHOP NOWSHOP NOW

We pump up the knobby tires on that old country road bike and depart. A library paperback is tucked in our ragged Boat & Tote, wrapped with care in a faded drugstore beach towel (the perfectly thin, cheap ones). I’m inspired to try to keep the car parked at the cabin and voyage the Northwoods on stubbornly human power, always tinkering with creatively minimizing my secondhand kit.

First we stop for a snorkel swim in the Manitou Passage, nearshore at Pyramid Point, to explore the shipwreck of the Rising Sun. (The old cargo steamer, once owned by the House of David cult, went down in 1917. All passengers and crew swam safely to shore among floating crates of provisions, potatoes and turnips said to scatter the beach for weeks.) Or if a breeze is up, maybe we knee paddle an old yard-sale-picked windsurf board on a dune-flanked downwinder. It’s hard to find a sufficiently safe weather window to paddle the passage all the way to the Manitou Islands, but people definitely do it (albeit in stout sea kayaks). We tune into the NOAA marine forecast and stand ready.

Last summer we hosted friends and neighbors to trail run the length of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore out of Empire. Shuffling the paved and gravel Heritage Trail from south to north, we all stopped for a swim each time the trail met a river or lake. We ran a little over a marathon’s distance, and made seven swim stops in total. Along the trail we snacked on foraged ditch berries, and sampled some supremely astringent, long abandoned, early season heritage apples. The run ended with a potluck picnic with friends on Bohemian Beach, soaking our zapped legs in some summer sunset surf.

We’re still wet from our snorkel but it’s lunchtime, so we pedal north and east to NJ’s Grocery in Lake Leelanau. This parks us in the light of the orange, glowing heat lamps in the rear corner of this liquor store and grocery, for surely Michigan’s best Indian samosas (a sidecar of fresh, punchy mint chutney on deck). Near the checkout belt, there is a tall cooler of take-home Indian staples, well worth their ink in the local newspaper. Stop at NJ’s for some saag paneer, Walt’s Crawlers bait and a can of Vernors.

Further up the coast to Fishtown (in Leland), we dock our bicycles at Carlson’s Fish Market & Smokehouse to survey the day’s catch with dinner in mind, a weather-worn shack perched above the harbor’s deep emerald water. A local cheesemonger neighbors the market, with National Park Service Manitou-runner boats tied up nearby. I query the deckhands about conditions in the passage, amidst the hum and bustle of this summertime scene.

There is a really bright energy up here. Each small town in the peninsula hosts its own weekly farmers market, a calendar well enough cadenced to pack the pantry almost daily from spring sprout until deep into fall colors. One of my favorite spots to grab some local-corn pozole is Farm Club. They own and operate nearby Loma Farm to provision the restaurant, thoughtfully tucked right on the Tart trail from Traverse City. We’ll dine al fresco, our family spreading out to reflect on the day’s adventures, and to plan the next.

The peninsula has such a rich history of attracting artists and outdoor adventurists, in all seasons. Our friends Lexi and Garryn keep a small sheep farm, just south in Benzonia, called Pastura, planning to harvest the wool seasonally to be carded and spun for the local fiber community. Nearby, and just past the Nippa Sauna Stove Headquarters, is the late Gwen Frostic’s legendary printmaking studio—a must stop on the National Register of Historic Places for experiencing her naturalist artwork. My plein-air-painting, rug-hooking great-grandmother used to tie flies and build lures at the Burke factory in Traverse City, and moonlit as a ski lodge cook at Schuss Mountain. On the pedal home we grab some fresh-picked front yard farmstand cherries, sold by the Solo cup, with dinner fixins in the packed tote.

Everything at the cabin is cast in a dusky fuzz. The soundtrack plays, a haunting song from the pair of loons on the other side of the ridge at School Lake, as we poke the backyard fire for dinner. The menu tonight is some woodsmokey whitefish sausage, local wild rice, and a handful of ditch berries drizzled with raw honey, chamomile confetti to top. A firefly flurry settles above the swaying grassline of the meadow behind the cabin (or are those deer eyes?). If we point it and hurry, we can catch the second show at the Cherry Bowl Drive-in Theatre, spreading out the old thrifted quilt and tuning the transistor to 90.5 FM. But maybe we’re too sun drunk to move. The loons say stay.

Growing up downstate, my dad would check the pixelated Mackinac Bridge Authority webcam stills, year-round as the season turned, on our dial-up internet like people check the morning weather forecast. He’d retell the tall tale of recent history when a Yugo hatchback was allegedly blown into the straits during an extra spicy fall squall. (Locally tune into 1610AM for current bridge conditions.) “That air is straight from Canada,” he’d say, taking a deep breath with eyes closed, facing north from our back deck. With sharp swings in temperature, arctic winds turn the surf on, a wild washing machine with spin cycle set to snap a freighter in two (cue Gordon Lightfoot).

We settle in for a season of cider mill spoils, venison chili, wild turkey, wetting a line on the winter run steelhead, awaiting first snow with hot chaga-chai in the thermos. Nestled in the valley here, the north wind tossing the tops of the trees on the ridge above the cabin mixes with the distant roaring static of Lake Michigan, the storm before the calm. It won’t be long before we’re skiing into town, roads and trails lost under an endless rolling blanket of white, snow so bright it seems to make its own light. With woodstove popping and hissing, we cozy in for the incoming blizzard, like the mice in my wetsuit.