The Au Sable River: Trout, Logging, and the River That Almost Died

The Au Sable River runs about one hundred thirty-eight miles across the northern Lower Peninsula, rising near Grayling and emptying into Lake Huron at Oscoda. For much of the late nineteenth century it served as a log highway: timber cut from the northern Michigan forest was floated down the Au Sable to the mill towns at its mouth. The Oscoda mills ran twenty-four hours a day. By the eighteen nineties, the forests that had supplied them were effectively gone, and the mills closed.

What logging left behind was a damaged watershed. The driving of logs down the river scoured the streambed, destroyed the gravel spawning beds that brook and brown trout require, and changed the river's hydrology. When the timber economy collapsed, the northern Lower Peninsula looked like the surface of the moon: cutover, logged-out, eroded, and in places actively burning.

The Huron-Manistee National Forests were established on this degraded land, and the conservation work of the early twentieth century, tree planting, erosion control, watershed restoration, was the foundation for what the Au Sable has become. The river today is one of the premier trout streams in the eastern United States. The Au Sable holds a nationally recognized fly-fishing tradition anchored in the stretch from Grayling to Mio, and the Mason-Quimby stretch near Grayling is designated as a natural river with no motorized watercraft.

The Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, held each summer since nineteen forty-seven, runs about one hundred twenty miles from Grayling to Oscoda on a single overnight course. It is among the longest and most demanding flatwater canoe races in the world. The same river that the logging industry used as an industrial corridor is now the centerpiece of a conservation landscape that the industry's destruction inadvertently made necessary.