A ride that tests your legs and rewards your soul.
In 1855, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow committed one of American literature's most spectacular acts of geographic and cultural confusion. He published The Song of Hiawatha, an epic poem in the meter of the Finnish Kalevala (drawing heavily on Ojibwe oral traditions that ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft had collected along the shores of Lake Superior). Longfellow set the whole thing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, peopled it with Ojibwe figures and Ojibwe landscape, and then — for reasons that remain a testament to the perils of desk-bound scholarship — named his hero after someone else entirely.
Hiawatha was a real historical figure, but he had nothing to do with the Ojibwe, Lake Superior, or Michigan. He was a Mohawk chief — a Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) statesman from present-day southern Ontario and upper New York who, alongside the prophet Deganawida, helped unite the Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Kanyen'kehà:ka) into one of the most sophisticated political confederacies in the precolonial world. As the primary carrier of Deganawida's message of peace, Hiawatha was an agent of diplomacy and reconciliation, subordinating himself to former enemies in the name of unity. He was, in other words, precisely the kind of figure you would not confuse with Nanabozho: the shape-shifting, endlessly scheming Ojibwe trickster-hero who actually lived in Schoolcraft's stories.
Longfellow apparently found the names interchangeable. He took Nanabozho's adventures, Nanabozho's landscape, Nanabozho's Ojibwe world — and published the whole thing under Hiawatha's name. Scholars have spent the better part of two centuries untangling the wreckage. As one assessment put it, the poem ultimately became
"A romanticized conflation of disparate Indian tribes, their traditions, and their legends" — one that presented Native American culture as doomed, a relic of the past inevitably making way for Euro-American expansion.
None of this diminished the poem's popularity. The Song of Hiawatha became one of the best-selling poetry collections of the nineteenth century, inspiring parlor readings, theatrical productions, and, in 1931, the naming of nearly 900,000 acres of Upper Peninsula forest. The federal government designated this land the Hiawatha National Forest — after Longfellow's fictional protagonist, not after either of the actual historical figures whose identities had been quietly merged to create him. The forest spreads today from Lake Superior to Lake Michigan, sheltering over a hundred miles of Great Lakes shoreline, a wilderness of hardwoods and cedar swamp and glacial lake that has changed little since Schoolcraft paddled through taking notes.
Into this magnificent, improbably-named landscape, the Munising Bay Trail Network (MBTN) — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to building and maintaining singletrack trails across the region. Hiawatha's Revenge starts and finishes in Munising, threading quiet forest roads, rugged two-track, and remote landscape through exactly the terrain Longfellow imagined without ever visiting. It is a ride that tests your legs, rewards your soul, and, for those who appreciate a good literary irony, puts you directly inside one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated mistakes. This is, Hiawatha's Revenge.
100 miles of forest roads, two-track, and singletrack. Eight segments, each with its own character. Here's what to expect.
Snowmobile trail peppered with small stones where sugar maple and yellow birch create an enclosed canopy. Tight, sandy, and all uphill; you'll be carrying pieces of this section in your shoes the rest of the day.
Deteriorating sand and gravel two-track cuts through mature northern hardwoods where sugar maple and beech dominate the canopy, with red maple, cherry, yellow birch, and basswood beneath, white pine and hemlock interspersed throughout. Some deep sand, washboard ruts, and relentless fist-sized nuggets.
Packed county gravel rolls south along the lake corridor, where paper birch colonizes productive upland sands and red maple and aspen fill the broader canopy; alder and cedar fringe the water margins. Rolling terrain, broad sight lines, and firm gravel make this the most forgiving stretch on the route if it weren't for the constant hills.
Compact gravel thread across flat outwash plain through a red pine and white pine corridor, cedar and tamarack closing in along stream margins where the Indian River headwaters drain the interior. Long, level, and meditative — the route's quietest stretch. Makes it worth doing the 100 to get here.
Loose gravel and sandy patches on an unmaintained forest road push through jack pine standing on dry outwash soils, with oak, aspen, and paper birch in the gaps and a low blueberry understory underfoot. Quiet and remote, the surface demands attention through every mile. Features the route's most technical descent.
Forest road gravel rolls through second-growth hardwoods between ND2225 and Doe Lake. Firm surface with occasional sandy wash; the terrain is gentle but relentless, a quiet stretch where the route's northern character begins to reassert itself.
Deep, loose gravel through red pine and jack pine on morainal upland sands, cedar and tamarack gathering near the lake margins, aspen filling the cut-over gaps. Most people's least favorite section.
Firm packed gravel on a USFS road descends north through moraine topography where sugar maple, yellow birch, and beech reclaim the upper slopes, aspen flanking the ridges, white pine holding the crests. Long, sweeping descents carry the route back toward the Lake Superior plain.
Use the route selector in the map below to switch between 100 Mile, 100K, and 50K before downloading.
A project supporting MBTN.
Decorative elements on this site are inspired by the woodland floral beadwork tradition of the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) people, the original stewards of the Hiawatha National Forest region and surrounding Great Lakes homeland. The Ojibwe remain a living, contemporary culture.