
A great blue heron fishes in the Boardman near Sabin Pond.
By MIKE NORTON
Well, once again there are big doings in Traverse City this week, as the Traverse City Summer Microbrew & Music Festival gets underway on the front lawn of The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, and cyclists from around the Midwest converge for the grand finale of the Third Coast Bicycle Festival - the extremely cool Cherry Roubaix Bike Race through the cobbled streets of the Central Neighborhood and the hills of western Leelanau County.
I was mentioning this latest batch of festivals to my wife the other day. “Is there any weekend when there isn’t something going on around here?” she asked. “How can anybody be bored in this town?”
Good question. Some people will still complain that there’s nothing worth doing or seeing or eating or drinking in northern Michigan because that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. We all know people like that. (The other travel bores I love are the ones who always say things like, “Traverse City’s all right, I suppose. But it used to be much better before they ruined it.” Which means, of course, “before people like you started coming here.”) On the other hand, there are people who think there’s just too much going on around here these days - that there are just too many darned festivals.
Personally, I like this idea of having lots of small celebrations and parties spread around through the whole year. I think they’re a lot easier to deal with, and they help introduce people to Traverse City in ways and times that might not have occurred to them before. But the coolest thing about this place is that even on the busiest days of the summer season, you can find wide-open spaces of peace, quiet and beauty here - even close to the heart of town - where you can relax and recharge.
I was thinking about that last week when I took off to shoot some photographs of the Boardman River. Most of the time, I think of the Boardman as our “urban river,” since it flows under highway bridges and between concrete walls in its last half-mile run through downtown to the Bay. And sometimes I think of the pristine Boardman you find up above the Brown Bridge Pond, a Blue Ribbon trout stream that looks wild enough to be in the Upper Peninsula or even Ontario. But I’d forgotten how beautiful and fierce the river is just outside the city limits, in the splendid Grand Traverse Natural Education Reserve, just south of Airport Road.
As I walked those shady trails and gazed down at the newly-liberated rapids below me, watching woodpeckers and orioles, swans and herons, I was amazed at the natural richness and diversity of this tight little valley. But the truly amazing thing is that this is not some pristine wilderness that’s been protected by isolation from the plundering hordes - it’s a river that was thoroughly deforested, dammed and exploited in its day, that even now runs between two of the city’s busiest highways. And yet, there it is: a testament to the resilience of the natural order.

Staghorn sumac and evening primrose on the steep Boardman banks.
Today you can hike the network of well-maintained trails on both sides of the valley, passing the crumbled ruins of an old dam and the quieted dynamos of others that are slated for future removal. You can kayak through some of the most exciting rapids in the Lower Peninsula, watch otters and muskrats at play in the water, or learn about native wildflower plantings at the fascinating new Boardman River Nature Center on Sabin Road. It’s a wonderful, restful place. And it’s what - a ten-minute drive from downtown?
The travel bores are wrong. Traverse City’s best days are ahead of her, not behind her — this place just keeps getting better.























