The Boy Scout camp on the Doe Lake Road was the site of the first annual Grand Island
North Distance Rides on July 21st and 22nd which drew ________ participants from lower
Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Distance riding includes both endurance and competitive trail riding and is organized
much like sled dog racing insofar as riders follow cross-country routes and have periodic vet
checks; Grand Island North offers both 50 and 25 mile distances using the Bay de Noc – Grand
Island trail, a designated equestrian trail which runs from the Rapid River end of the truck trail to
Ackerman Lake on M-94.
Ride manager Karen Bahrman has managed a similar event using the Pine Marten Run
trail system for the last 15 years, and says she took on Grand Island North so as to increase
equestrian use of the northern half of the Bay de Noc – Grand Island trail.
Bahrman explained that the entire trail is underutilized because it is linear as opposed to
looped and therefore more difficult for pleasure riders to use, with the northern half of the trail
being especially difficult to use because there are no places to camp above the middle
campground and no places to park except Ackerman Lake, which is twenty trail miles from the
middle campground and situated on a busy highway where many people are unwilling to bring
horses. More problematic, according to Bahrman, is that there are no places to water horses in
those twenty miles although riders could easily be directed to Peterson Pond, Trout Lake, Forest
Lake and Lake Seventeen.
Bahrman also said that she and her fellow equestrians are extremely grateful to the Boy
Scouts of America for providing them with a place to pursue their passion, stating that “its been
so refreshing to work with people who are just relentlessly positive and helpful – the can-do
attitude is very much in evidence at Camp Hiawatha”.
Bahrman added that the current land management climate is not exactly friendly to horses
and her concern is that the underuse of this priceless resource will eventually be used to justify
the exclusion of equestrians in favor of some user groups, stating that “its heartbreaking to
realize that horses, who in our not-so-distant past were the backbone of transportation,
agriculture, logging, military operations, etc., and who carried/pulled the entire world into the
20th century without doing any damage to the planet, are now being blamed for a variety of
perceived environmental problems and slowly erased from the recreation picture through both
active and passive resistance to equestrian use.