Petoskey State Park
I have memories from middle school about camping at Petoskey State Park with my soccer team—playing three or four games in a day, getting a bite to eat downtown afterward, and unwinding in the campground before crawling into my tent to do it all over again the next day. Whether we won or lost, our days got less crowded as the weekend went on, and we had more time to enjoy the park. I had not been to Petoskey State Park since probably 2008, but as soon as we pulled in, I started to recall my previous trips there.
Eating dinner with my team and their families in the middle of the park, my friend James falling out of a tree onto the street by the parking area, and trying to skip rocks on Little Traverse Bay before diving into the water to play 500 with my teammates. I have great memories in Petoskey, and on our most recent trip, we made more.
We spent Indigenous People’s Weekend here in the Fall of 2021, and the colors were absolutely stunning. Oranges, yellows, and reds graced the trees, with the constant hammering of falling acorns and rusty pine needles crunching beneath our feet. We saw pretty much every kind of weather on our trip, from hot sunny days allowing us to swim (yes, in October!) to rain and cold weather that saw us hunting for rocks on the shores of the bay.
here are a number of short hiking trails through the park, two of our favorites being the Campground Trail, which connects the Tannery Creek Campground to the Dunes Campground, and the other being the Old Baldy Trail, which takes you on a half-mile loop to the top of a dune with a view of the bay at the top. Most of the trails are interconnected, which is very nice.
We spent time in Petoskey, Charlevoix, and everywhere in between while camping at Petoskey State Park, as it is a great jumping-off point for a ton of things to see in the area.
The park itself sits on the former site of the Petoskey Bathing Beach and William Wirt Rice’s Tannery, which employed some 150+ people at its peak but closed in the 1950s. After the closure of Rice’s hide tanning operation, the State of Michigan purchased a chunk of his former land, which included the Petoskey Bathing Beach, opening Petoskey State Park in the late 1960s. Since then generations of Michiganders have enjoyed the park, including thousands of soccer teams like mine way back when. Petoskey State Park is a great medium between being self-sufficient, meaning you do not have to leave to find entertainment, and being in the middle of everything, as it is located near a ton of quaint Michigan towns that will entertain you for weeks. Whatever you are looking for, look no further than Petoskey State Park!
