A great home base is near the town of Baldwin, a nice little oasis about 1.5 hours north of Grand Rapids with a few options for lodging and considerably more camping opportunities. However, I'm cheating--family cabin in Nirvana, MI 5 minutes east of the town. Our place is on the Pere Marquette river, which has some of the coldest water on earth (best post-excursion ice baths anywhere). But most importantly, this area is approximately right in the middle of a whopping 126 mile stretch of the NCT.
Whereas my earlier excursion to Huron National Forest led me to a series of loop trails, this time I was dealing with one very long, linear trail with multiple trailheads to start/finish at. Basically I would park, head north for an hour, return to my car, head south for an hour and return to my car again. It was nice to never be too far from my car & it's cooler full of water/supplies, and of course there's the safety matter. For solo trips you never want to get too terribly far from your ride to the hospital (God forbid).
My trips started/ended at 76th Street, Bowman Bridge, Timber Creek and Freesoil Rd. Each run/hike was about 3 hours in length...and I barely scratched the surface. There are additional trailheads to the south near White Cloud and many, many more to the north near Manistee--and that's just for the NCT. If I wanted to get off of that 126 miler and check out some of the other non-NCT trails in the area, there are the Manistee River Trail (10 miles), the "Big M" (37 miles), Crystal Valley/Hungerford Lake/McKenzie Trail (51 miles), Nordhouse Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan (14 miles) and Marzinski Horse Trail (20 miles). I could probably spend about a month and never do the same trail twice. (Unless I suddenly got into much better shape...) To think I spent all that time and sweat out there and only tapped about one fifth of these trail resources is, well, humbling and bewildering.
But back to the NCT. The terrain of this particular stretch is, honestly, pretty tame. Not too many hills, not too many roots, rocks or technical sections. You can't even imagine all the trees, from oaks and elms and maples to birch and towering jackpines and everything in between.
This is definitely fern country. There are swampy areas but also bridges for some of the lower spots so my shoes never got wet. The trail gets sandy in spots but mainly it's pure wooded single-track, well-maintained, and there are blue markings on trees to let you know you're still on the right path. These trails present a great opportunity to go long. The trailheads are spaced anywhere from 5 miles to 19 miles apart, and there are about 14 different trailheads where you can park & start from.
If you want trails that have almost no trace of human contact (except for the blue markings on the trees), here's your mecca. Having spent about 12 hours on various parts of this trail, I only saw 3 people the entire time. Another sign of how little human contact these trails have can be found in the incredible lack of garbage. Usually if you cover that much terrain you'll see at least some garbage, but I couldn't fill one hand with the trash I saw. It's a remarkable testament to the volunteers who created & maintain these trails, but I think it also speaks to just how little use they get.
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