Onaway State Park
While working aboard a ship on the Detroit River as a Deckhand, I became friends with a chief engineer named Jimmy. He was ex-Navy and had a story to go with just about anything you could think of. Jimmy was quite the character, and he was from Onaway, Michigan. We decided to camp at Onaway State Park on our first trip to that part of the state because it was near a lot of different things we wanted to see. As we drove from location to location, I couldn’t help but think about Jimmy cruising those same streets many years ago.
Onaway State Park was first established in 1920 and was dedicated in 1921 on the site of the former Allis Township Park. The park consisted of 158 acres, most of which were in close proximity to Black Lake, and in the early days, the park had a playground, pit toilets, picnic tables, and a small network of trails through the woods. While building a pavilion that would feature concessions and some modern amenities, a Chippewa burial site was discovered. Alongside the bones and other human remains, workers found knives, containers, and arrowheads. The artifacts were taken to the capitol, and work continued.
Onaway State Park was never overdeveloped, and today, its only modern amenities are the upper campground bathroom & shower building. The sites do have electricity, but even the more sought-after lake-front sites are a small hike from a toilet that flushes. When we visited Onaway State Park for the first time, it was mid-fall, and the campground was pretty empty. We chose a site right on the lake and arrived in the dead of night. When we awoke in the morning to take our first look at our surroundings, we were blown away. The park itself was absolutely stunning, but the lake just took our breath away. It was smooth as ice, and a thin layer of fog rolled around the rocky banks. After examining the water for a while, we started to see fossils. One of the main reasons we were in that part of Michigan was to hunt rocks, so we threw our rubber boots on and waded into the chilly October water.
We found an endless supply of favosites, which I think are remnants from the Onaway Stone Quarry on the south side of the lake in the early 1900s, but I’m not sure whether that is why there are so many. Either way, we found so many that we eventually had to pick and choose which ones we would take home. We like to joke that we took too many because on our way home from that trip, our back tire fell off the car. In the end, it was not because of the weight of the rocks, but we can pretend, right?
On our second trip to Onaway State Park we would be a little more picky about what we took out of the water, but we still ended up with more than we planned to. It was the end of summer on our second trip, so the campground was a bit more crowded, but the upper level of the campground, a little further from the water, was not busy by any stretch of the word. On both visits, the park was our jumping-off point for exploring the Lake Huron shoreline from the Mackinac Bridge all the way down to Alpena, with a lot of stops inland as well. I know that I will visit Onaway State Park again sometime soon, but I don’t know if anything will ever beat that first morning waking up and looking out over Black Lake.
