Drive the back roads southwest of Grand Marais, in the eastern U.P., and you will come across something that stops people cold. An open plain, flat and quiet, studded as far as you can see with the silvered, weathered stumps of enormous trees. There is almost nothing growing between them but lichen and scrub. It looks like a graveyard, and in a way it is. This is the Kingston Plains, a ghost forest, and the trees that once stood here have been gone for well over a century.
Not that long ago, this was one of the great white pine forests of Michigan, giant trees a hundred feet tall standing on the sandy ground. Then, in the late 1800s, the loggers came. A timber man named Thomas Sullivan ran crews that pulled around 50 million feet of white pine off these plains in roughly three years. In winter they sledded the massive logs over iced roads to the Grand Sable Dunes, hauled them to the top, and sent them down a wooden slide five hundred feet to barges waiting on Lake Superior, bound for the sawmills. What they left behind is what made all the difference.
Why the forest never came back
Loggers of that era practiced what is bluntly called cut and run. They took the valuable trunks and left everything else, the branches, the tops, the needles, scattered across the ground to dry. That debris became perfect fuel. Fires swept the cutover land again and again, and here they burned so hot that they did more than clear the surface. They cooked the seeds that would have started the next forest and burned the thin soil right down to the bare sand, while the wind carried off what topsoil remained. The land was, in effect, sterilized. More than a hundred and ten years later, most of the Kingston Plains still cannot grow much more than lichen. The straight lines of trees you can spot on the horizon were planted by people. Almost nothing else has managed to return on its own.
A monument to a vanished forest
The Kingston Plains are not an isolated tragedy. They are a snapshot of what happened across the whole region. In the closing decades of the 1800s, the U.P.’s seemingly endless white pine was cut and shipped south to build Chicago and the fast-growing cities of the treeless Midwest. Forests that people genuinely believed could never be used up were gone within a generation, and the fires that followed turned huge stretches of the north into wasteland. Most of it eventually recovered into different forests of aspen, oak, and jack pine. The Kingston Plains are one of the places that simply never did, which is exactly why they are worth seeing.
How to find it
The stump prairie sits along the Adams Trail, a dirt road running south from County Road H-58 between Grand Marais and Melstrand, on the edge of the Lake Superior State Forest and not far from Pictured Rocks. It is public land and free to wander. Photographers love it, and for good reason. The stumps are hauntingly beautiful in morning fog, at sunset, and especially under a clear night sky, since this corner of the U.P. is dark enough for brilliant stars and the occasional show of northern lights. Many of the stumps still carry the notches the loggers cut into them, a direct, physical link to the men who took the forest down.
It is a strange and quietly powerful place. Stand out there among all those weathered stumps, in the silence, and you are looking at both a ghost and a warning, the outline of a forest that was here long before any of us and a reminder of how quickly something that seems endless can disappear.
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Sources: Michigan State University Geography; NMU Upper Peninsula Studies; Michigan Public; North Country History.
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