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Ok, now that it’s Labor Day weekend, it’s officially taken me all summer to get this post done. Better late than never.. here it is!

Over the memorial day weekend, a friend and I took a backpacking trip to the North Country and Manistee River trails near Mesick, Michigan. In this particular area, you can make a 21 loop out of these two trails. At first, this article may seem out of place in a tech-oriented blog, however as you’ll see there’s still a lot of geeky fun to be had with technology whilst in the woods.

We left on Thursday night after work and drove up to the southern trail head at the Red Bridge Access. There’s a parking lot with a boat launch and a handful of campsites there. There is also a pit toilet and water pump. (No, this is not the high-tech part.) We started on the North Country Trail at about 9:00 P.M. and hiked in for a half-hour and found a place to camp. The nice thing about both of these trails is that you can camp anywhere you want as long you are 200 ft off the trail or away from the water. Here is another map on the U.S. Forrest service’s website.

Friday we hiked the remainder of the NCT portion and crossed over the Manistee River. The NCT portion of the trail was not quite as impressive, after comparing it to the Manistee River. The views of the river were really spectacular. We camped about a mile past the bridge and had probably the best campsite on the whole trail. There’s a picture below, but it just doesn’t do it justice.

Saturday we hiked the rest of the MRT completing the loop. We were thinking about camping one more night a mile or two short of the trailhead. However, it seemed that there really weren’t any great spots to pitch our tent in that area. My friend had left his Hennessy Hammock at home and had we been thinking ahead, we could have borrowed a second one for me. That would have taken care of any tent issues. Since our trip I’ve purchased one for myself and I’m itching to try it out, but it’s starting to get cold and there won’t be much time left this year.

The hike down the river was great. There were lots of senic views from both the water’s edge and up on the ridge that follows the river. Below, I’ve posted just a few of the many great pictures I got (and not because I’m a great photographer, by any means.)

Scenic View 1	Scenic View 2
Friday Night’s Campsite	Scenic View 3

See the next page for the Techie stuff…

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Backpacking, GPS, Camping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.