Parks in Northern Michigan
5 parks to discover with Bad Historian in Northern Michigan.
Clinch Park and the Bay
You're at Clinch Park, right on the edge of West Grand Traverse Bay. That building behind you showing movies — the Bijou by the Bay — has one of the best origin stories in town, and it belongs to a man named Con Foster.
Hoffman Park and the Weathervane
You've reached the water at Hoffman Park, and now I want you to look across the channel at that building with the swooping roof — the one that curves up at the end like a bird's wing lifting.
Marquette Park & Main Street
You're on Main Street, at the foot of the hill, with the harbor on one side and a green park climbing toward that white fort up on the bluff. This is Mile Zero — the whole island loop starts and ends right about here.
Park Avenue Row
You're on Park Avenue now, and this whole stretch is Earl Young's neighborhood — in the most literal sense. He didn't just build one house here and leave.
Thorne Swift Nature Preserve
A few miles up, the canopy has really closed in over you now — that green tunnel the road is named for — and this is a good place to pull off, get out of the car, and put your feet on the ground. Thorne Swift Nature Preserve.
Northern Michigan Audio Experiences
Visit these parks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Earl Young's Mushroom Houses
A short, unlicensed insurance salesman spent fifty years building around thirty storybook stone houses in Charlevoix — burying nine-ton boulders in the ground for decades, tearing roofs off for being too neat, and naming his cottages like pets. Walk Earl Young's "hobbit houses" from the drawbridge to the lighthouse, and try to spot the one lie at every stop.
Mackinac Island — The Island That Banned Cars
Eight miles around the Great Turtle — an island where cars have been illegal since eighteen ninety-eight and roughly five hundred horses do all the work. A fort that surrendered without firing a shot, a doctor who spent eight years studying a hole in a living man's stomach, a hotel built in ninety-three days by candlelight, and an 'ancient legend' that was written in nineteen seventy. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you is true. A little of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
The Complete Guide to Traverse City
A town that turned an insane asylum into a wine bar, baked a cherry pie that needed a construction crane, and let a river out of a hundred-and-twenty-six-year jail. Cherries, lumber, and the asylum with a wine bar — a comedic walking tour of Traverse City where most of it is true and some of it definitely is not.
The Tunnel of Trees — Twenty Miles of Crooked Road
Twenty miles of the most famous two-lane road in America — M-one-nineteen, the Tunnel of Trees, the only Michigan state highway with no center line. A car-free town of millionaires who still ride a horse-drawn bus, a driftwood castle roofed in cast-iron stove legs, a village named after a post-office typo, and the Odawa homeland of the crooked tree, still here today. Most of what the Bad Historian tells you is true. A little of it he made up — you find out which at the end.
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