Sylvania Wilderness and the Copper Country of Ottawa

The Ottawa National Forest covers about one million acres in the western Upper Peninsula, pressed against the Wisconsin border and running north to Lake Superior. It encompasses the Porcupine Mountains, some of the most rugged terrain in the Great Lakes region, and the Sylvania Wilderness, an eighteen-thousand-acre tract of old-growth forest and pristine lakes that was never logged because it was held as a private sportsmen's retreat through most of the twentieth century.

Sylvania was purchased by a group of wealthy Detroit businessmen in the nineteen ten teens and maintained as a fishing club until nineteen sixty-seven, when the federal government acquired it. The old growth that survived inside the club's boundaries includes hemlocks and maples several hundred years old, trees that would have been cleared by the logging companies that stripped the surrounding Ottawa National Forest in the late nineteenth century. The logging boom of the eighteen seventies through nineties removed virtually every large tree from the western UP, making the forest you see today a second-growth landscape, with Sylvania as the surviving original.

The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, adjacent to the Ottawa's northern edge, holds another island of old growth, including a stand of virgin northern hardwood forest around Lake of the Clouds that has never been cut. The two preserves together represent what the western Upper Peninsula looked like before the loggers arrived: a closed canopy of hemlock, sugar maple, yellow birch, and basswood, with a forest floor that stays dark even at midday.

The copper beneath this landscape was the foundation of the Keweenaw mining boom, and the Ottawa National Forest was created in nineteen oh eight partly from lands that the mining companies had stripped and abandoned. The federal government inherited a degraded landscape and spent the following century trying to restore it.