Come with us to an amazing wilderness area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to experience the pristine beauty of the Huron Mountains. We have an off-the-grid cabin on the shores of Lumberman Bay, an inlet of Mountain Lake, located entirely within the 25,000-acre enclave of the exclusive Huron Mountain Club. Accessible only by float plane, the cabin lacks no amenities, with satellite TV, internet, and telephone. Power is provided by a solar array and an oil furnace keeps us warm year-around. A large dock accommodates three float planes, and during winter months the cabin may be visited using a ski plane. A smaller dock is available for launching a rowboat or canoe; no power boats are allowed on Mountain Lake. A beautiful sandy beach fronts the cabin, and numerous trails wind through the mountains. I hope you will enjoy your time here as much as we do!
Historical background
Michigan’s Huron Mountains seem a world apart from the rest of the Midwest. Highly isolated, they can only be accessed by rough forest roads. This isolation appealed to rich Midwesterners during the gilded age. Men such as Cyrus McCormick (founder of International Harvester) and Frederick Miller (founder of Miller Brewing Company) began buying up property in the Huron Mountains in the 1880s, establishing the mountains as a prime hunting area for the very rich. The Huron Mountain Club was formed in 1889 with Upper Peninsula lumber magnate John Munro Longyear acting as the first president. The original purpose of the club was as a hunting and fishing playground for the rich. Its charter restricted full membership to 50 families who could build cabins on the property, and associate membership to 80 families who could only visit. Membership, which is still restricted to just 50 families, is so exclusive that when Henry Ford tried to join in 1917, he was put on the waiting list. He would have to wait until a spot was freed up through the death of an existing member, and then be voted in by the other members. As with much of his business dealings, Ford was not to be denied. In 1927, he quietly bought up nearby land that was needed by the state to extend highway M-35 through the Huron Mountains, a project that was opposed by the club’s members. Ford refused to allow the state to use his land for the highway, the highway was not built, and he was admitted as a member of the club in 1929.
The Huron Mountain Club continues to maintain strict exclusivity. The public is prohibited from visiting any part of its property, a prohibition enforced by armed security guards. When in the late 1950s adjacent land in the Huron Mountains was proposed for a new US National Park, the club members wielded their considerable political influence to torpedo the project. Even so, the zealous desire of the members to preserve the pristine natural beauty of their property has led them to emphasize ecological management as a main priority for the club. In 1938, the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold (author of A Sand County Almanac) was hired to do an ecological survey of club property and propose a management plan that emphasized scientific research. The Ives Lake Field Station was established as a biological research laboratory, using two buildings (the Stone House and the Red House) from John Longyear’s former dairy farm. In 1955, the Huron Mountain Club Wildlife Foundation was created to promote scientific research using club property. The Foundation continues to provide seed grants to help scientists create proposals for major research projects funded by external sources.
The Scenery implemented in MSFS
The cabin in this scenery is purely fictional. Member cabins are located on Lake Superior near where the Pine River empties into the lake (you can see these as you fly over). It is extremely doubtful that the club members would allow a cabin to be built on Mountain Lake, since preservation and ecological research is now the primary emphasis of the club. If you examine the map in Aldo Leopold’s management plan, you’ll see that Mountain Lake is entirely within the Reserved Area set aside for scientific research. But oh boy, what a beautiful place to fly a float plane! And how wonderful it is that we can do this in a simulator, without making any negative impact on the environment.
If you fly an amphibious plane, you can taxi right up onto the beach. Enter between the two docks, and exit on the opposite side of the float plane dock.
Notes
To install the airport, unzip and place the folder titled "mulberrywing-scenery-huron-mountain-club-cabin" in your community folder. To see the float plane dock you will need to download the Seaplane Asset Library from flightsim.to and place it in your community folder. Many thanks to 30West for providing this great library!
I have included the cabin as the point of interest called "Huron Mountain Club cabin". You can find it in the World Map either by typing the name into the search box ("Huron Mountain" should be good enough to find it), or you can zoom into the general area and click on the POI. You can then set the cabin as your departure or your arrival. If you set it as arrival, you can use it as the final destination in a flight plan. If you have POIs visible you will also be able to see it as you fly. Alternatively, you can search on the latitude and longitude.
If you’re from Colorado or Switzerland, you might not think of the Huron Mountains as “mountains.” But for flatland Michiganders, these rolling Precambrian hills with their granite outcroppings immediately adjacent to Lake Superior are a real treasure!
The world’s most northern settlement, Longyearbyen, located on Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, is named for John Longyear. who started a coal mining company there in 1906.
Michigan M-35 is an original trunk line of the Michigan state highway system, signed in 1919. It extends from Menominee, Wisconsin north to US 41 near Negaunee. It was planned to continue north, then turn west near Big Bay, pass through the Huron Mountains, through L’anse, and then terminate in Ontonagon. The 1932 Michigan Highway map shows the intended route through the Huron Mountains as “impassable.” The state admitted its defeat to Henry Ford, and ceded all completed portions of the highway between Marquette and L’Anse to local control. The portion between Baraga and Ontonagon became M-38. If the highway had been completed it would have dramatically changed the face of the Huron Mountains, but what a gorgeous road it would have been!
The cabin is a short flight from the fictional Big Bay Seaplane Base.
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