Pictured Rocks: 42 miles of beautiful hiking on the North Country Trail!  Sounds wonderful, and it totally is... if you can score campsites for a workable itinerary.  This special place gets super busy and sees around a million visitors a year, making backcountry camping a tough prospect when you have to reserve your spots ahead of time.  For us locals in the Upper Peninsula, that means we're not able to visit (for overnight camping, at least) during the busy summer months.

That bugged me, so I hatched a plan in late-winter 2017 to hike the entire NCT through Pictured Rocks in one weekend.  Even in April with snow still on the ground, campsites were filling up and I didn't get my preferred options!  I was in for some big days, so I packed my bag light and readied myself for speedy travel on relatively empty trails.

I set out from my house in the Keweenaw at 5 AM on a Friday, made it to Munising in time to catch the first shuttle to Grand Marais, and immediately started hiking west.  Log Slide, dunes, Au Sable Lighthouse... done basically by midday.  The hiking was relatively easy going, aside from a few blow downs here and there that hadn't had a chance to be cleaned up yet.

Twelvemile Beach was deceiving.  The trail through this stretch was littered with lingering snow piles and blow downs, so I decided to hike the sand for clear sailing.  Wrong!  Backpacking on sand sucks.  I camped somewhere in this area, but I don't remember the exact details because I didn't have a GPS at this time of my adventure career and forgot to take those kinds of notes.  Oops.

The cliffy sections of trail were great.  Waterfalls over the cliff were bustlin' and I mostly had things to myself.  I can't imagine how crazy this place gets in the summer.  The only downside of hiking this early in the season (aside from dying beech trees threatening to kill me at any moment) was that the trail was often flooded with rivers of snowmelt.  When your trail is on the edge of a cliff and also full of water... that's a recipe for near disaster.

I will admit that I didn't really get the appeal of Miners Castle.  To me, it's an ugly lump of rock.  Maybe I'm missing something, but I just couldn't understand why people flock to it in droves.

Between Miners Castle and the finish line at Munising Falls lay some of the worst mud in trails I've ever experienced.  The spring melt and general overuse had trashed the trail when I rolled through, making the woodsy part of the trail quite the slog.  I would've been better bushwhacking!  

Eventually I made it back to Munising, battered but happy I had dodged nearly everyone on the trail.  I zoomed home and made it back by 5 PM on Sunday, 60 hours after I had left home.  Talk about an efficient adventure!