“Pick up a flat rock, skip it across Green River,” – John Fogerty

It wasn’t one of the “dog days” of summer, it was one of those “dog is under the porch because it’s too darned hot to be anywhere else” days.

I was sitting at a desolate junction. It was a place where the railroad tracks met the dust of a crossing dirt backway.

The track stretched out for at least a couple miles in either direction, straight as a yardstick. On the far side of the tracks from where I was, an even dustier off-road vehicle trail sat parallel to the railroad tracks.

For some reason that I can’t really explain effectively, I was drawn to the lonesome nature of the place.

Maybe it was the wide-open space with no one around except the grasshoppers that were flipping up off the dirt and scattered low brush and then back down just a few feet away.

I think the overall uncluttered plainness and simplicity of the scene was certainly a factor in my deciding to pause here to soak up the vibration of this place.

There were big blue skies up above today, with scattered dark clouds that held at least a threat of rain showers, likely nothing more.

It seemed like I was a lonesome stranger waiting for a train, in a scene out of “Bad Day at Black Rock” or when Cary Grant was out near the corn fields in “North by Northwest.”

However, I wasn’t waiting for a train today, nor a crop-dusting plane. I was headed down this dirt road ground truthing a place I’d only visited vicariously through topographic maps.

My route would take me on a largely horizontal pathway to a river crossing just a couple of miles farther up ahead.

The heat of the day was intense and there were very few creatures on the move. I did see a hermit thrush and a couple of robins flying through the low and scraggly branches of jack pine trees on either side of the road.

In many places, the trees were spaced together tightly with not a lot of places left for passing through. The wind was blowing in short bursts but did nothing at all to cool the afternoon.

Traveling through this jack pine barren, I was struck that several things were coinciding today that seem to be characteristic of these places.

The heat of the day reminded me that jack pines can tolerate drought and prefer dry and somewhat acidic surroundings. In less populated jack pine stands, the understory is sparse and there is plenty of room to walk.

Plants of the understory are shorter varieties and include the white and often crunchy reindeer moss, sweet and bracken ferns as well as blueberry bushes. I was hoping to taste some blueberries today, but I hadn’t seen any so far.

I recalled how when blueberry picking, it is often common for it to be hot weather and later in the day, the flutelike songs of hermit thrushes are an immense delight.

Jack pines not only love the heat, but they flourish naturally in areas that are burned by wildfires. The heat opens their tightly closed, gray-colored cones which then drop seeds to the ground to grow.

As I continued west, the vegetation around me began to change to poplars, maple and spruce trees, as well as various types of cherry trees – mainly chokecherry.

My interest in the river crossing was finding a potential new fishing spot, but more so to just experience a river I’ve known since childhood at a completely new location.

As I got closer, I wondered what the place would be like. Would there be rapids or still water or both, what type of bridge would there be?

I realized that these are the same exact things I thought about, with great anticipation, visiting a new stream or creek crossing as a young boy – traveling the two-track forest roads with my family.

On my left, I notice a couple of boulder-lined ponds at the side of the road that seem out of place. I decided I’d stop to figure them out on the way back.

The sides of the road are grown up in attractive bouquets of summer blooms including ox-eye daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans and purple thistle.

I round a bend and see the metal guardrails of a bridge glinting in the sun. The road and the bridge decking here are a good 30 feet above the river. The surrounding forests are green and lush.

The bridge itself has wood-plank decking, my favorite.

Upstream, the river runs slow and mostly straight, except for a slight bend and a twist just before the bridge. The water breaks at a down gradient and flows in a small rapid all the way across from one side to the other as it disappears out of my view.

As though I had just tossed a stick or something into the water on that side, I move quickly across the bridge to investigate what the water looks like on the downstream side.

The intensity of the rapids has increased and the water flows over some tree branches submerged in the river. The river shifts right at a fallen tree and then widens into a pool.

Farther downstream, there are more pools and straightaways where the water flows deliberately, but not fast.

I lifted my leg over the guardrail and carefully placed my boots on a scattering of rocks that led down the embankment to the water. Once down on the streambank, I see raspberries, ripe, red and delicious.

I sampled one handful and then another. I took several casts with my fishing pole, but oddly didn’t get even a single strike. This looked like viable trout water.

After a few minutes, I headed up the embankment and crossed the road to cast upstream from the bridge. I had better luck here with at least a couple of good smacks at my lure, but only from small fish.

The heat seemed to get even more intense, and I decided to start back.

As I drove, I noticed mud puddles in the road, remnants from rains of days past. I turned the wheel of my Jeep to avoid a frog doing a breaststroke across one of the chocolate-colored puddles.

I hadn’t noticed on the way in, but the road went up and down with puddles on most of the down sections. The character of the dirt backway here beyond the jack pines was like that of a sound wave with crests and troughs.

In a short distance, I pulled to a stop at the larger of the two rock-rimmed, greenish-blue ponds I had seen driving in.

The water nearest me was shallow and stagnant, almost brackish in appearance. Nonetheless, I casted my fishing line and watched a fish follow my lure back to the shallows. It was a bluegill.

I walked up over a narrow trail along one edge of the pond. Walking over crushed and scattered rock, I realized these ponds were once mining shafts.

The farther I walked, the deeper the water got and the higher the boulders and trail were perched above the water.

I knew I didn’t want to fall in. I could see large tree branches under the water. I cast my line and pulled it back toward me, avoiding the branches.

I watched more bluegill followers. On my next cast, a bigger fish struck the lure decidedly about 25 feet offshore.

It was a yellow perch.

As I reeled my line, the fish splashed at the top of the water and spit out the lure, which I was happy with. I stopped fishing to take a better look at the surroundings.

There was other evidence in and around this place – like the shape of the topography – that at one time, this must have been an active iron ore mining excavation.

Along the trail, on my walk back, I knelt to sample clumps of wild blueberries and then stood up for sugarplums dangling not much higher than mouth level.

I held a handful of each type of berry planning to have a sweetness taste contest.

First were the purple sugarplums. They were scrumptious and so sweet.

However, when I put the blueberries in my mouth and chomped down, there was an explosion of taste and sweetness in my mouth. Blueberries had won the challenge -hands down.

A subsequent handful of black huckleberries came in a distant third in the contest. The blueberries were also sweeter than the raspberries I had eaten earlier.

I stopped again at the train tracks on the way back to soak up more of the stark emptiness and to listen to the grasshoppers buzzing.

This wasn’t like discovering the spice route to China or anything like that, but this was an adventure expedition on a scale I am familiar with – great for a dog under the porch kind of day.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.