ORS: Ogemaw Hills Pathway

The new job has assigned an opinion column every three weeks. My first was a brief self-introduction. Tomorrow I'll pitch this as the first in a series.

Ogemaw Hills Pathway

On runs, sentences...

A good recreational trail keeps one on one’s toes; lulls, perhaps, a wanderer into a sense of detached familiarity but just as easily immerses a traveler in the present moment and place. The way is clear one instant, inviting, but later on cluttered with debris and uncertain, merging and diverging with old fire roads and off-road vehicle paths, offering shortcuts and side-routes and extensions. A signpost’s map has fallen off or was never installed. A natural sense of direction disorients under the canopy, after a series of switchbacks that prevent erosion and confuse the hapless.

Ogemaw Hills Pathway is a most suitable environment to experience the great outdoors—physical space for psychic journeys, explorations of nature and self. The pathway’s winding trails and interconnecting nodes branch out forming a network fit to fulfill most any explorer’s wont. The distance covered in an outing might be short or long, flat or hilly. Most signpost maps show the northern area, forcing the southbound cartographically dependent to conjure up what memory they can from the full map at the trailhead.

Figure a: 3 Runs

In my first three runs at the OHP I became lost once and ran a small loop within a larger loop by accident another time (see fig. a: 3 Runs). The reader should understand the presentation of these facts as an endorsement. To become lost I had hubristically set off in an apparently backwards direction, heading from signpost number 1 to 23, looking to follow the area’s outer perimeter straight to the most challenging terrain. It was my first foray into the natural area and I’d sent my wife and daughter to forage mushrooms on an easier short loop.

Hard charging down a hill I encountered a four-way intersection and hesitated only a fraction of a second before continuing downhill on a well-traveled path and a seemingly proper bearing. Had I been traveling in the direction suggested by the signpost numbers, the turn at the intersection between posts 15 and 16 would have been obvious, difficult to miss. But instead of emerging from a narrow trail onto a wider one, I had come down the wider trail and missed a turn onto the narrower path, and failed to see a blue trail indicator obscured by some foliage a short distance up it.

I ran on an off-road vehicle trail for three quarters of a mile to an intersection with a seasonal road before doubling back to the spot where I deduced my error. Someone had helpfully drawn a right-turn symbol in the dirt on the downhill in my absence.

Having reached the easternmost part of the trail system and the hardest terrain, then becoming afterward briefly lost, I arrived back at my point of origin in under an hour. It was a fantastic introduction to an outdoor recreation area that is exciting in the nearly endless variations it presents. I can imagine returning time and time again to run slightly different paths and to learn which are best for a given mood, ambition, or sudden impulse.

Let this conclude the first entry in On runs, sentences... More information about Ogemaw Hills Pathway can be found at visitwestbranch.com/ogemaw-hills-pathway. The next column will be on the Rifle River Recreation Area. Meanwhile I’ll be putting in base miles with door-to-doors in the surrounding farmland flats. Run like your past is catching up to you.