Porkies 2026, Day 1: Intro, travel, and Section 17

This is the first of 6 posts about our backpacking trip to the Porcupine Mountains in May 2026. There's a link to the next one at the bottom of each post, or you can use the list below. This list will be updated as each is posted:

• Day 1: Introduction, travel, and hiking to Section 17 cabin (that's this one!)
• Days 2 & 3: Section 17 to Lily Pond, and a rest day (coming soon!)
• Day 4: Lily Pond to Mirror Lake, and an unexpected hotel (coming soon!)
• Day 5: Big Carp (coming soon!)
• Day 6: Rest day at Big Carp (coming soon!)
• Day 7: Big Carp, Marquette, and home (coming soon!)

Lily Pond

Another year, another backpacking trip to the Porkies. At this point they've become almost routine, but still wonderful. The Porcupine Mountains, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, is a wilderness state park and one of my favorite places in the world. Our backpacking trips there have always been unique due to the park's rustic cabins, which let us backpack from place to place and be sure of a roof over our heads, a wood stove, and an extremely uncomfortable bunk.

Sometimes though, we feel the need to change things up. At the end of last year's trip, Sarah and I decided that our next visit should be a "2-2-2" trip. That is, instead of backpacking from place to place and staying only one day at each, we wanted to stay at three different places for two days each. That would give us a rest day at three favorite locations. We have loved our (single) rest days on previous trips, and wanted to expand those.

Of course, things never quite work out the way you expect. When I made our reservations -- 6 months in advance, to the minute! -- we couldn't get two days in a row at any of our desired locations and dates.

Luckily, with a bit of shifting and adjusting, we found a way to make it work... sort-of. Here was our final plan:

• Day 1: A 1-mile hike to Section 17 cabin, an old favorite and addition to shift our schedule.
• Days 2 & 3: 4-ish miles to Lily Pond cabin plus a rest day, one of our goals for the "2-2-2".
• Day 4: 2 miles to Mirror Lake 4-bunk cabin, where we could only spend one night.
• Days 5 & 6: 7-ish miles to the Big Carp 4-bunk cabin plus a rest day. This was one of my favorites from my 2024 trip, and the last of the Big Carp cabins that Sarah hadn't stayed at. She was cautiously curious about this cabin and agreed that we could give it a try.

As you can see, we weren't planning on particularly long miles, and we still got two rest days (plus some very short hiking days). As time would show, even this plan would get significantly reworked, but that's for a future post.

We made very few updates to our well-established packing list. The only big change from last year was that Sarah finally upgraded her old, heavy Osprey pack to a brand new Superior Wilderness Designs Long Haul, cutting out a solid 2.5 pounds from her weight. She immediately replaced one of those pounds with her camping chair, a luxury that I had brought last year and she had left home -- and immensely regretted.

Confidential to Osprey advertising reps (and anyone who wants to enjoy a ridiculous story): Way back in 2021, I blogged about upgrading my own Osprey pack to SWD and saving 2+ pounds along the way. Last year, I got an email from an Osprey rep who somehow found that post, but apparently hadn't actually read it. That's because the rep asked me about adding a link to Osprey's website, in exchange for a link back to here. They must have paid no attention whatsoever to the contents of my comment about Osprey, and when I ignored their email, they kept bugging me about it. I finally had to point out that the SWD was a major upgrade, and that in fact I don't think Osprey's packs are worth the weight nor price any more. So Osprey rep, if you bug me again, I'll make my opinion from that last sentence even more explicit.

The Little Carp River

Thursday May 21, 2026: We did lots of practice hikes, spent time poring over our packing lists, filling up Kindles with books to read, all that usual stuff. I'm going to fast-forward past all of those and get straight to the fun.

On Thursday, we packed up and headed to the UP. We detoured to Gladstone to meet our 2-year-old niece (ok, and her parents too -- love you!) at the Castle Park. We had a lovely time playing on the slides and balance bars, shared a deli dinner, and then headed north to Marquette.

We checked in at the Superior Stay hotel, now a well-established favorite, and walked up 3rd Street to enjoy some more favorites. We shared a beer at Blackrocks, perused the storefronts (all closed, we were there too late), and then looked at each other and said "I'm still hungry!" Luckily, the local Main Street Pizza offers two slices of pizza at a very reasonable rate, an offer that we took them up on and thoroughly enjoyed.

Friday involved more favorites: coffee at the Crib, books at Snowbound, and a walk along the waterfront. We also found some new favorites: A take-out dinner from the newly founded Marquette Masala on Ore Dock brewing's new patio. Sarah discovered a new place called, literally, "Girly Pop" that sold incredibly expensive fancy pop (aka soda) drinks, and immediately fell in love. We also noticed a storefront with quarter-play pinball machines and had a fantastic time trying to play them (emphasis on trying).

In the evening, we assembled the last few parts of our packs: Peanut butter rice cake sandwiches for lunches (which are always best when made fresh) and gorp bags (consisting this year of almonds, peanut and peanut butter M&Ms, and sour gummy worms).

Starting out on our trip - head nets eventually proved unnecessary

Saturday May 23, 2026: Saturday was our first actual day of backpacking. We woke up in Marquette to the news that Whitetail cabin, one of the few Porkies cabins we've never stayed in, had burned to the ground overnight. This was the first Porkies cabin to ever burn down, despite the fact that each one has a wood stove, plus lots of candles left by campers. Luckily Whitetail wasn't on our trek, but the news cast a bit of a pall over us that morning.

We got some more coffee, did a quick spin through the farmer's market (featuring saxophone music, a lonely-looking state house rep sitting under his tent, and a guy with a typewriter promising to improvise poetry), and then headed out of town -- but not directly to the Porkies. We are now officially Bosio Biscuit Company groupies -- it's a biscuit-based restaurant south of Houghton, founded by an old college friend -- and we heard that they would be vending in Houghton that weekend. So, north to Houghton we went, under gray skies spitting occasional sprinkles of rain.

We found the Bosio Biscuit trailer parked along the Houghton waterfront, with a long line in front of it. The waterfront was taken over by "Locavore", some sort of local-stuff market that hadn't existed when I lived in Houghton. We got our biscuit-based meals, enjoyed them along the waterfront, took a quick walk through downtown Houghton, and then headed back out. The temperature varied wildly along our drive -- 80's inland, but 60's or even 50's near the shore.

By mid-afternoon, we pulled into the freshly repaved and expanded parking lot of the Porkies visitor center. The renovation of the parking lot was the cause of the center being closed for much of 2024. We walked in and marveled at the completely remodeled interior, which was the cause of its being closed for almost all of 2025. The visitor center, if you've never visited, is in a bizarre triangular building straight out of the 1970's, and until now, its interior was equally 70's. The new interior is light, airy, and modern. It has vastly better bathrooms, too. Nonetheless, it still has a bizarrely small gift shop (featuring, if anything, fewer good gifts). We also found it oddly empty, with lots of blank walls hopefully to be covered with art, and maybe a few more chairs or benches.

The ranger who checked us in had no news about Whitetail cabin. She did have news that all of the park's cabins are finally using codes for their locks. In previous years, a few of the more easily accessible yurts used numerical codes, while all of the interior cabins used good old fashioned keys. That's all changed as of 2026, and now every cabin has a number lock on it. Instead of clunky keys, we got a few slips of paper with codes on them. Well, that, and also an instruction not to worry about Section 17's code, because the previous renters had broken the lock and it wasn't replaced yet.

We took the long and scenic drive around the park to get to the Little Carp River road, our trailhead for our adventure. The margins of South Boundary Road will filled with trilliums in full bloom. In the parking lot, we did our last few checks, hitched up our packs, and headed out. Our hike was starting!

The short hike in to Section 17 cabin is always a little harder than I expect. This sequence of trails has a lot of small ups-and-downs, roots, rocks, boardwalks, and muddy sections. The muddy bits were especially muddy right now due to the long winter and wet spring, and we spent a fair bit of time carefully navigating them. We had head nets on, but there were very few bugs, and none that seemed to bite.

We soon passed Greenstone Falls cabin, the other Porkies cabin that once suffered a fire (but didn't burn down). The trail passes within feet of their front door, and the three inhabitants greeted us as they hung out around a smoky fire.

That's a lot of logs

Just a few yards later, we turned onto the spur that crosses the Little Carp River and brought us to Section 17 cabin. There's a long bridge across the river here, and there was a huge log jam piled up against its upstream side. While the bridge was clear enough to navigate, there were signs of lots of sawing and clearing -- this must have been an impressive snarl earlier in the spring.

As promised, Section 17 cabin had no lock whatsoever on the door. Inside, the first thing I noticed were mouse traps -- a lot of them, all set and loaded with a generous dab of peanut butter. Not a good sign.

Rain started shortly after we arrived, so after quickly getting some water to filter from the river,  we settled in to Section 17. This is a small and cozy cabin, much smaller than most other 4-bunk cabins. It's also dark: Despite having windows on all four walls, its deeply forested setting makes the cabin dim even at midday, much less on a cloudy and rainy afternoon.

Sarah pulled up the cabin's log book, skimming recent logs for helpful news or amusing stories. She read the best bits out loud, and we shared some good laughs (and eye-rolls). Sure enough, the log from immediately before us told a bizarre story. A family -- father and three kids -- had started hiking in to the cabin at 11 pm, ignoring the sign that reminded them to check in at the visitor center (which wouldn't have been possible at that time anyhow). They arrived at the cabin around 1 am and sure enough discovered that they needed a code for the lock. The kids tried to crawl in through a window that had been left open, while the father took a rock and broke open the lock. According to the log, they were hiking out the next day to get the rest of the lock codes from the rangers, and had left the loaded mouse traps to deal with an "infestation". Joy.

As usual, we hid all of our food and smellables in the cabin's cabinets. This has proved to be a foolproof way to avoid mouse problems. Nonetheless, I left the mouse traps set up, although I nudged them off to the sides a bit more -- there was no need for us to get caught in a mousetrap set right in the center of the floor!

As evening fell, we boiled up some freeze-dried Backpacker's Pantry Fettuccine Alfredo with Chicken. It was a known winner, which we try to eat on days when we have less hiking (and therefore more capacity to care about the taste of our food). With evening came cooler temperatures, so we boiled some more water to make hot tea.

Even that wasn't quite enough to keep the chill off, so I started a small fire in the woodstove, using the meager supply of firewood left in the cabin. The small cabin warmed quickly, and we enjoyed a cozy evening of reading and chatting. Sarah turned on one of our new camping toys, a tiny solar lantern, which made the cabin look even more cozy in its warm light. Overall, the word of the night was: Cozy.

We were in bed early due to the rain, chill, and darkness. I spent some time reading on my Kindle and then rolled over.

A few hours later, I was awoken by the snap! of a mouse trap going off. I didn't hear anything more for the rest of the night.

Next time: To Lily Pond, then back, then to...

Miles hiked: 1

Total miles: 1

If you liked this post, check out this list of all of my backpacking blog posts.

Our route, such as it was, for the first day