The Cherry Capital — a stop on M-22 North.
As we come down toward Traverse City, the orchards on the hills are the reason this town calls itself the Cherry Capital of the World — and it isn't just marketing.
The Grand Traverse region grows a very large share of the tart cherries in the United States. Tart cherries are the pie-and-juice fruit, not the sweet ones you eat out of hand, and they're harvested by machine in a couple of frantic weeks in July: a mechanical shaker grips the trunk, vibrates, and the fruit rains into a padded catching frame and goes straight into cold water.
The National Cherry Festival takes over Traverse City for a week every July — a genuinely enormous event for a town this size, with something like half a million visitors. If you're here for it, book far ahead; if you're not, be glad of the parking.
The industry is under real pressure — frost years, foreign imports, and the sheer economics of orchards on land that a developer would happily buy. Some growers have shifted to wine grapes; some have sold.
So buy the cherries. Dried, in juice, in a pie, in a jar. It's the best thing you can do for a landscape you've spent all day admiring, and the tart ones with a bit of sugar are genuinely superb.