Glen Arbor & the Day the Sky Fell — a stop on M-22 North.
Coming into Glen Arbor — a small resort village between two lakes, with good ice cream, and a lovely name that was chosen by a settler's wife, Harriet Fisher, for the shady grapevine arbors she found growing here.
Look at the trees as we pass, because on August second, two thousand fifteen, this village was hit by a storm that people here still date their lives by. A line of severe thunderstorms came across the lake and struck with sustained winds around sixty to eighty miles an hour, gusting locally to ninety or a hundred — and one post-storm survey estimate put a gust as high as a hundred and ten.
It flattened roughly two thousand acres of forest in minutes. Damage ran to something like eighty-two million dollars. Every road in and out was blocked, the power was gone until the following Friday, and crews cleared more than twenty-eight hundred trees off just six miles of trail.
And here's the remarkable part: nobody was killed. In a village full of summer visitors, in the middle of the afternoon, with a forest coming down — not one fatality.
The Park Service made an interesting decision afterward: in the wild areas they largely LEFT the downed timber where it fell, because that's what a forest does. You can still see the blowdown from the road, and the young growth coming up through it.