U.S. Park Service, Michigan County at Odds : Car-less Isle’s Dirt Roads Lead Only to Bureaucratic Standoff

NORTH MANITOU, Mich. â€”  This island is both paradise and paradox, a lonely, lovely, primitive piece of Eden that is a $14 boat ride from civilization.

It has a rich human history but few inhabitants. It has roads that everybody pays for but nobody uses. It has a robust deer population that is considered a threat to the environment.

North Manitou Island, which juts from Lake Michigan 12 miles from the northwest Lower Peninsula, is 15,000 acres of contradictions.

“It’s the most easily accessible isolated place in lower Michigan,� says Cathy Bietau, a National Park Service ranger.

It is a lavish display of cool blue waters and park-like forest, untrampled meadows and dune-lined beach. It is home to three humans and 300 deer.

The primitive nature of the island belies its history as a thriving 19th-Century lumber town. Crude roads built then remain, and crumbling, turn-of-the-century buildings scattered through the forest give the island a ghostly, Hansel-and-Gretel quality.

Since 1935, taxpayers have been paying to maintain the roads that nobody uses, nobody can get to, and which lead nowhere on an island where there are no cars. That situation has left North Manitou in the middle of a standoff between the federal government and a little county on the nearby mainland.

“We haven’t done anything because we wanted to give Congress or the state a time to find a solution to this problem,� said Dave Herrera of the National Park Service in Frankfort, Mich. “But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.�

The federal government bought North Manitou from the nonprofit Angell Foundation in 1984, and made it part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, a towering tourist mecca on the mainland coast.

The 42-mile system of dirt roads on the island was exempt from that sale, and is still counted as part of the road system of Leelanau County. A county employee who lives on the island uses a pickup truck and a grader to keep foliage from swallowing the roads.

“Our contention is we cannot allow the county forever to continue to use mechanized equipment on the roads,� Herrera says.

The federal government, which banned cars on the island, wants Congress to declare North Manitou a wilderness area and the county to get lost. Herrera says that Congress has been reluctant to authorize a settlement that would pay the county to leave the roads alone.

Leelanau County Road Commission Chairman Glen Noonan sees the conflict as a David-and-Goliath affair:

“I view it as the national park intruding on county government,� he says. “We’ve been there ever since the island was first settled. The national park has only been there a couple of years, and they’re trying to tell the road commission what to do.

“It’s our county road; there’s no question about that.�

Noonan is pessimistic about a settlement: “It’s not just the money, it’s the principle,� he said.

Alan Isola, a Michigan Department of Transportation engineer, says the $35,000 the state earmarked annually for the roads is far more than the county needs or spends to maintain them, but the money does represent about 8% of the county’s local road fund. The money is used elsewhere, he says. As long as the county certifies the roads as roads, he says, the state is obligated to pay for their maintenance.

“The law doesn’t speak to traffic on the roads,� he adds.

The Sierra Club, meanwhile, is growing impatient with the bureaucratic standoff and has asked the U.S. Department of the Interior and Gov. James Blanchard to intervene. Neither has acted.

“We don’t believe the county has a valid claim,� says Ann Woiwode, a Michigan-based staffer with the environmental group. “The county has continued to rattle their sabers and say they’re going to cut down trees, just to show that they have a claim out there.�

Noonan denies that, but says plans are afoot to repair a county dock on the island. Herrera says the federal government, which plans to build its own dock, may sue to stop the road commission.

Meanwhile, campers and hikers have slowly begun to discover the island, which has 20 miles of beach and a varied and picturesque terrain. The park service last year granted a ferry concession to shuttle campers to the island twice a week, at $14 a person.

Unlike the federally owned South Manitou Island, three miles to the south, there are no washroom facilities, stores or telephones on North Manitou. There also are far fewer visitors--only 3,000 from June through August.

“This could be the Caribbean,� camper Alex Wagner of Ann Arbor, Mich., recently told the first person she encountered after a half-day hike.

The island thrived as a lumbering community in the mid-1800s, but people gradually moved away as the timber market lagged.

Private Preserve in ‘30s

By the 1930s, most of the island belonged to William Angell, an auto magnate who turned it into a private hunting preserve. The government bought it for $12.2 million two years ago.

There are few plans for the island, Herrera says. The park service would like to see the roads grown over and replaced by hiking trails.

A limited deer-hunting season will continue to keep the herd from getting too big, he says. The 300 deer, descendants of five animals brought to the island in 1926, have substantially reduced low-lying vegetation in the woods, creating a landscape that evokes memories of the forest in “The Wizard of Oz.�

“North Manitou is somewhat unique because it is a pristine environment that is open to public use,� Herrera says. “I don’t think you’ll find too many islands in Lake Michigan like that.�

For Cathy Bietau, 26, of the National Park Service, life on the island means chilly nights and desolate days, with no one to talk to--but she likes it that way:

“I think that’s why I’m out here. I want to live with the bare necessities,� she says.

She and another ranger alternate 10-day shifts on the island during the spring, summer and fall months. Part of her job is to serve and keep track of the campers.

Most of her day is spent hiking seven to 12 miles on patrol.

“Any isolated place gets lonely once in a while,� she says. “It takes a certain type of person to live like this.�

Bietau is not entirely alone. Ken and Rita Rusco also live on the island. Rusco is the one Leelanau County pays to maintain the dirt roads.

Bietau and Rusco, employees of battling bureaucracies, live in a fragile co-existence.

“It has been tense sometimes,� she says. “It’s too bad there has to be so much turmoil.�

The Ruscos meet the ferry that arrives twice weekly with campers and supplies. They would not talk about their lives on the island or the controversy over the roads.