Grass bay

It didn't take much to convince me.

We have been looking for a new beaver dam for our lab about selective foraging. So when Buck, Marshall, and Gardner Mike asked if I wanted to join them on an afternoon trip to Grass Bay, I said absolutely!

Grass Bay is a favorite place for me. A few miles beyond Cheboygan on a busy road we park at a nondescript up-north bar, appropriately named "Thirsty's". But that is where the underwhelming dull reality ends and magic begins. Just across the road through the weeds a trail leads down a ravine through birch and conifer forest dimpled with sassafras and lady-slippers.

Beyond a small creek crowded with marsh marigolds the land begins to get soft, then wet. A marsh full of grasses and strange carnivorous pitcher plants gives way to a slough between low dunes. Long grassy sandbars, wild rose, sundews, and driftwood frame a loamy delta disappearing into the enormous arms of Lake Huron.

This is Grass Bay. A subtle beauty, like an ecological haiku.