- Day 1: Intro, travel, and hiking to the Little Carp cabin (that's this one!)
- Day 2: Little Carp to the Lake Superior cabin (coming soon!)
- Day 3: Rest day at Lake Superior (coming a bit later!)
- Day 4: Lake Superior to Section 17 cabin (coming after that!)
- Day 5: Section 17 to Lily Pond cabin and a side trip to Summit Peak (you get the idea...)
- Day 6: Exit from Lily Pond and final thoughts (...keep watching!)
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| The Little Carp River trail runs right next to the river |
In late May 2025, the Lovely Sarah and I took a 6 day backpacking trip to the Porcupine Mountains, home to one of the biggest areas of primary forest in the United States, and one of my favorite places anywhere.
Here's what I posted in the Porkies Facebook group shortly after we got home:
PORKIES TRAIL CONDITION REPORT!
I just returned from a week of backpacking, so here's your already out-of-date beta. Read the footnotes.
Bugs - minimal*
Mud - minimal**
Weather - beautiful**** But increasing quickly towards the end of the week with wet and warmer weather. June will be miserable. But man was last week amazing - almost no bugs to bother. Bring your bug nets!
** The normal bad spots are still bad (Correction Line, east end of Lake Superior, middle of Big Carp) but the rest is pretty good. This could change with wet weather.
*** Your mileage may vary because, you know, time passes on.
As you can tell, the trip was great: Great weather, great (lack of) bugs and mud, and also a lot of fun. It was much more enjoyable for me than last year's trip, certainly in part because I got to share this trip with Sarah. This was our first backpacking trip together since our week-long 2023 trip to Isle Royale (a place that we're avoiding this year as we see how the wolves-eating-human-food situation shakes out).
The trip was essentially a march up and down the Little Carp River trail, staying in rustic rental cabins and enjoying one of the most beautiful corners of a supremely scenic park. None of this trip was planned to be new -- no new trails, no new cabins -- but more of a revisit of old favorites. We went in May, still springtime in the Porkies, hoping for the usual cool nights and few tourists. We got all of that and more.
We spent two days in Marquette before beginning the hike. Marquette has quickly become a favorite spot to stop -- it's a bit easier to get to than Houghton (you can really feel those 2 extra hours), has interesting shops, breweries, and restaurants, and there's even a bit of family history for me (last time we visited, I found my grandparents' high school yearbook).
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| Sarah at the Dead River falls, site of our first date |
We spent our time at places like Blackrocks brewery, the Presque Isle park, and even a farmer's market. We also recreated our first date by hiking the Dead River waterfalls. After doing that steep and tricky hike for the first time in 16 years, I was amazed we ever had a second date. I am a lucky guy.
We also stayed in the Superior Stay hotel, unusual for Marquette in that it's located near the interesting businesses on 3rd Street and Northern Michigan University's campus, rather than on US-41 or the fast-food-and-big-box-stores business strip. It's a perfectly nice hotel despite some quirks, chief among them an overabundance of signs. There are signs everywhere in the room, for every possible thing. There was even a sign inside our refrigerator:
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| Fridge sign |
We enjoyed our time in town, but after a couple of days, it was time to march off into the woods.
Sunday May 25, 2025: After breakfast at the hotel and coffee from our new favorite Marquette coffee shop, The Crib, we packed up and headed west towards the Porkies.
We took a detour up to Tapiola, south of Houghton, for lunch at Bosio Biscuit Company. This biscuit-themed restaurant, nearly in the middle of nowhere, is run by a college friend and has fantastic food. It's worth the trip. I'd first stopped there last year and wanted to introduce Sarah, who is a huge fan of all things biscuit. She was duly impressed.
Back on the road, we made it to the Porkies Ski Chalet to check in -- the Visitor Center was closed for renovations (after being closed all of 2023 for a parking lot expansion) -- and quickly retrieved our cabin keys. I learned from a ranger that "the mud's not bad, but the bugs are really coming out", but in my experience the rangers always say that the bugs are bad. Back in the car, we drove halfway around the park to the Little Carp River road, our starting point for the hike.
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| Starting selfie -- we thought we would need bug nets |
With one final check of our bags and bug nets perched on our heads, we headed out down the trail -- actually a gated gravel road -- to begin the backpacking phase of our trip.
After crossing a bridge, we picked up the Little Carp River trail. This is, in my opinion, one of the park's most beautiful trails. It's also relatively easy by Porkies standards, but the part we were starting on -- near Overlooked and Greenstone falls -- is some of its tougher terrain. This part of the trail is extremely bumpy, rooty, and rocky, constantly going up, down, and over obstacles and small hills. Many dayhikers are unpleasantly surprised at the difficulty of this part of the trail.
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| The rocky, rooty, hilly Little Carp River trail |
30 or 40 minutes into the trip, as I was gazing lovingly at the ancient hemlock forests that shaded us on every side, Sarah said: "So when do we get into the old growth?" I pointed out that we were in the middle of the oldest of old growth. "But the trees look so... small!" I saw her point: Compared to a big old maple or oak, these trees didn't have huge trunks. But that's mainly because hemlocks are an extremely slow growing species. I gestured at a tree and said "that one is probably 500 years old". Sarah was skeptical. At just that moment, we came across a recent blowdown that had fallen across the trail, its trunk cut cleanly by a trail crew. We stopped to count the tree's narrow rings. Our best estimate for this tree (which had a trunk diameter of at most 1.5 feet) was again 500 years. Sarah was impressed.
A few minutes later, we implemented a rule that we had invented on our last backpacking trip together: Stop every hour for a rest break. This keeps us snacking, happy, and less tired. An hour into our hike put us in the middle of the woods, so we stopped and sat on a log and enjoyed our usual backpacking lunch: a "runner's sandwich" made of rice cakes and peanut butter.
Our next two breaks were at more natural stopping points: the two unbridged river crossings of the day. Porkies river crossings are usually pretty easy. We weren't lucky enough to be able to rock-hop across the river this time, but the water was at most calf deep. I waded through with my trail runners, Sarah stopped to switch to sandals. Each time we found the opposite side of the river to be sunny but cool. We sat on rocks, dried off, and enjoyed some gorp.
Throughout the day, we had barely even met a bug on the trail. We'd started out with bug nets on, and quickly started pulling them up onto our hats, keeping them there just in case we needed them. By the end of the day, my bug net was in my pocket, and Sarah's was largely forgotten on top of her hat.
Less than 30 minutes after the last crossing, we came to the mouth of the Little Carp river with its spectacular wooden bridge. We checked, but there were no fish spawning in the river. Despite multiple spring trips around the same time, we've only ever seen fish running up the river one time.
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| Sarah at the Little Carp bridge |
We crossed the bridge, turned down a spur, and came to the Little Carp River 4-bunk cabin, our home for the night.
We'd last been here in 2021. We quickly noticed a few changes, not the least of which was a deer skull decorated with feathers sitting next to the fire pit. That wasn't ominous at all. The outhouse wasn't leaning any more either. For some reason the cabin, which I had remembered as strangely large and empty feeling, felt smaller and cozier now.
Sarah and I are probably some of the more Covid-cautious people you'd ever meet, and small, enclosed, poorly ventilated cabins are a great place for airborne diseases to hang out long after the last people left. So as usual, we opened all of the cabin's windows to let it air out and entertained ourselves outside.
At this point I checked my GPS app on my phone. I'd been tracking our distance from the trailhead, which came out to 5.9 miles. I wasn't surprised, because this is the distance on a CalTopo map I had helped create, as a step towards creating a grid of trail distances for Porkies trails. Why not just use the already existing park maps, you might ask? Because those maps -- and the trail signs on the ground -- indicate that the same route we followed today is 7 miles long. If anything, the error is even worse, because the park's distance doesn't include the spurs to the parking lot and to the cabin, both of which were included in my GPS track. It's a lesson I've learned again and again: Never trust the distances marked on maps nor trail signs.
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| Accurate distance grid for the Porkies. Feel free to share, save, or print. |
There was lots of firewood left in the cabin by some previous renters (perhaps from as long ago as last fall), but it's hard to have too much. We went out into the woods to find some more. This is always easier in May, after a winter's worth of blowdowns, than in September, after a summer's worth of campfires.
Our next move was to hike down to the beach to collect water and wash out some clothing. Perhaps the only downside of the Little Carp River cabin is that it's high up on a bluff, and the trail down to lake level is steep and narrow.We collected water for our gravity filter, and Sarah swished some clothes (already sweaty!) in the river mouth. We spent time sitting on a giant driftwood tree, letting things dry and enjoying the beautiful scenery.
After a while, we were ready to get back to the aired-out cabin. We found a different, seemingly less steep trail that cut a diagonal up the steep bluff. All went well until we reached the middle of the trail, where a large muddy patch awaited. I tried cutting above it -- on the steep hillside -- but the dry leaves were just hiding more mud. I immediately slipped and fell on my side, just barely holding on to the bag of water I was carrying. I regained my balance and immediately slipped again, this time below the trail. I made it through, and Sarah carefully followed behind, but we decided to use only the steeper but drier trail next time.
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| Cobble beach and leafing-out trees |
Back in the aired-out cabin, we set up the gravity filter and made up our beds. I brought my 0-degree down quilt, by now my favorite quilt for staying cozy during spring camping. I also brought a new Nemo Tensor ultralight pad, specifically the wide version. I'm a side sleeper, and after many years I'd gotten tired of my knees (or rear) slipping off of a narrow pad. My elbows would even fall off if I tried to sleep on my back on a regular width pad. I am not a large person, but I've had it with regular-width pads.
Next up was dinner. We had intentionally packed extra calories this trip, another way to try to keep ourselves warm and healthy. We started out with the most caloriffic meal in our packs, Peak Refuel Beef Pasta Marinara. This was a new one for us that claimed to have 500 calories per serving -- far more than any other freeze-dried meal we've ever found. After adding boiling water and waiting a surprisingly short time, we decided that the meal was perfectly acceptable. It tasted a lot like other freeze-dried pasta meals we've had. It didn't feel like it had that many calories in it, but it certainly tasted good.
For dessert, we brought freeze dried cookie bites, another way to add some calories. We had been gifted them by some friends for our 2023 Isle Royle trip, and they were the perfect gift we didn't know we needed. Looking into the bag, I applied my extensive mathematical training and made a random guess that we could each eat 7 cookie bites per meal. And so we did.
We packed away all of our food and other smellables into the cabin's cupboards, a long-established habit to avoid mouse problems.
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| View from the trail: Looking across the river to a massive clay hillside. |
As I looked out the cabin's front window, I could see the sun setting through the (not quite fully leafed-out) trees. I climbed down to the beach to check out the sunset, although the clear sky promised a dull sunset and a cold night. Nonetheless, I pulled up my phone to take a photo, at which point the camera app froze and crashed. Then the entire phone crashed, restarting... then restarting again... and again. Nothing I did could get the phone to stay on for more than a few seconds. Eventually, as the sun set behind Lake Superior (it was dull, as expected), I held down the power key and got the phone turned off.
I climbed up the steep (but non-muddy) trail and back into the cabin, where I told Sarah about my phone troubles. I'd brought (and bought) this phone specifically for its really good camera, and here it had died on the very first day of backpacking! She kindly offered to let me use her phone, and from this point on, all of the photos in this blog series are from Sarah's phone instead.
With the sun below the horizon and the skies clear, we knew it would be a cold night (in fact, 38 degrees in nearby Ontonagon, according to the weather service). We had plenty of dry firewood, so I set about starting a fire in the woodstove. Using directions from the Porcupine Mountains Companion, I got the fire roaring with my first match.
I pulled a chair up to the stove, feeding in occasional twigs and reading on my Kindle. By the time we were ready for bed, I had some hot coals established and added one more log for the night.
The night was clear with no moon, a perfect chance to see stars and even the Milky Way. But we were both so tired -- and so cozy in the cabin -- that we went to bed instead.
Tired from our first day of hiking, I fell asleep quickly. But I woke up every few hours, sometimes thinking to stir the coals in the stove. Each time I fell back asleep, I slept intensely with vivid dreams. The fire and my zero degree quilt kept me cozy.
Miles hiked: 5.9
Total miles: 5.9
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| Day 1 map |
