Mike Terrell of the Traverse City Record Eagle has a great column about the new guided bike tours at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in NW Lower Michigan:

“A few years ago the park service, following an old plan, tried to make Sleeping Bear a wilderness area, and that plan was not popular with local residents or park visitors,” he said. “They backed off that concept and are now preserving the old homesteads, clearing the fields and making it a historic district.

“With the new direction Sleeping Bear was one of the parks selected by the National Park Foundation and Ford Motor Company to promote alternative transportation methods within the park. That’s where I come in. We will be offering six guided bike tours every week through the middle of August. It’s free. Just show up for the ride at the designated time.”

This past week was the start of the tours, and both were well attended with 12 to 16 riders on each tour.

The first tour I rode on was through the 3,500-acre Port Oneida Rural Historic District, which, according to Locke, is the largest of its kind in the entire nation. You ride the backroads exploring the old farm homesteads and where Port Oneida once stood with its massive dock for refueling the steamers that plied Lake Michigan around the turn-of-the-last-century.

The second tour, which starts just south of Empire, includes backroads, farms, forests, ghost towns and even a little two-tracking. It’s also the longer tour, a little over 10 miles round-trip and took about two hours.

More here…

http://www.record-eagle.com/columnsblogs/local_story_199100113.html

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