I headed to Sharonville State Game Area yesterday with the idea of expanding upon my long-distance hike route across the state-owned, 2,000+ acre property.  For those who haven’t been there before, Sharonville is located just to the north/northwest of Manchester.  Its boundaries extend across both Washtenaw and Jackson Counties.  You can see my previous hike routes on the map below:

As with most state game areas, the trails are not publicized by the land managers.  Game areas are, to a large extent, funded through hunting and fishing licenses.  So, hiking is an accepted use, but not an encouraged use.

I have visited many game areas over the years and they usually follow the same pattern.  There is a small dirt parking area that shows up as a square on the DNR maps.  Most of these parking areas will have a dirt pathway or two-track that leads to an interesting geographic or wildlife feature.  This can be a lake, a hilltop, a clearing or marsh.

Many of these routes simply stop when the particular feature is arrived at.  Sometimes, these routes will reach all the way to a second dirt parking area.  But the maps don’t show the paths, so it is almost impossible to know unless you get out there and hike the paths.

With work, however, these pathways can be combined into really great hike routes.

My route yesterday began in the northcentral section of Sharonville.  Fishville Road bends to the left and makes a corner before heading straight north.  This is the parking lot from which I chose to start.  I hiked generally west.

The path from the lot is very easy to follow.  The trail is an old two-track that passes through forest.  Sharonville SGA is 20% forest with oak, maple, ash, elm, hickory and pine woodlots. 

As I hiked, I kept an eye open for morels, but I am not good at finding them.  I did notice this interesting conglomeration of fungus.

The terrain is pretty much level with some rolling terrain.  Heavily-vegetated marsh filled some lowland areas to the south of the trail.  After about eight-tenths of a mile, the trail passed a clearing and moved up a small hill.

At this point, the easily-followed trail stopped.  So, I walked around and spotted a well-defined dirt trail on the north side of the hill.  The trail moved down the hill and to a very neat stream/drain.

The soil at Sharonville is extremely sandy.  According to Tom Huggler’s book Hunt Michigan, the game area has some of the poorest soils in the region.  This keeps some vegetation types out of the area.  This also means that the stream bottom is almost completely sand.  It is quite pretty.

The difficulty was that there was no bridge where the trail crossed the stream.  The stream was quite deep.  I’d estimate it at about three feet.  And the banks are quite steep.  Previous visitors had placed a large log across the stream for hiking access.  This makeshift bridge was quite solid when I tested it, so I decided to cross.

The log crossing meant that I had to make about five steps across without the aid of any tree trunks or branches for leverage.  I was on my own.  My strategy was to cross fast and believe that I would make it to the other side and it worked.  I quickly made it to the other side and decided not to try going back that way.

The crossing was pretty much the only way to continue the hike.  The state land ownership south of the creek ends at the crossing.  On the other side, I used the stream as a makeshift trail route across grassland.  The grass was easy to walk on and it was clear that a few others had followed this route.

I had pretty much given up on this trail as a continuation of my cross-game-area route, but I did want to see if I could reach an unnamed lake just to the west.  I reached another stream, this one running north to south.  It was not near as large as the main stream and I was able to cross by stepping onto several large grass outcrops that reached out of the water.

Soon, I had reached the lake and I had a little surprise.  Right there was a swan.  It was beautiful.  It didn’t seem startled, but it gave me this look that seemed to say, “What are you doing here?”  I didn’t particularly want to challenge the swan and it didn’t look like there was an easy route around the lake, so I decided to turn back at this point.  I was roughly a mile away from the parking area.

Rather than cross the log bridge again, I decided to follow the stream all of the way back.  This was great because it allowed my to see the stream twist a bit.  I became a bit worried because another north-south drain blocked my route back to the lot.

Soon, however, I found an old farm bridge across the drain.  It is the absolute best way to get back to the lot, but it is so overgrown that it would be difficult to see unless you were looking for it.  I have noted its approximate location on the map link below.

Once across the bridge, it was just a short distance back to Fishville Road and a very short road walk back south to my car.  This was a short walk, but the water crossing and out-of-the-way lake made it extremely enjoyable.

Here is my route on Microsoft Virtual Earth:

http://tinyurl.com/3lpqmf

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