Northern Michigan  ·  The Line  ·  Hidden History

The Sign in the Leaves. The Story of Michigan's Forgotten Polar-Equator Trail.

Two hundred mile markers. A guidebook. A club of Michigan outdoorsmen who built something worth finding. Most of it is still out there.

Gaylord, MI  ·  45th Parallel

In This Guide

The Sign in the Leaves

Three years ago I was walking the woods along the road at the front of our property — a stretch I'd walked dozens of times — when I noticed something half-buried in the leaf litter near the tree line. An old metal sign. The kind that's been there long enough to look like it belongs to the ground more than to the road.

I picked it up. Brushed off the leaves. And found myself holding a mile marker for something called the Polar-Equator Trail.

I knew we lived near the 45th Parallel — I'd seen the highway signs near the exit ramp close to our house and had come across a mention of something called the Polar-Equator Trail — but I had no idea it used to run right across the front of our property. A trail I had walked over countless times, marked by a sign that had been lying in the leaves for who knows how long, waiting for someone to pick it up.

That sign sent me down a long road of research. What follows is everything I found.

The Michigan Polar-Equator Club

In December 1964, a group of Michigan outdoorsmen began meeting to discuss forming a club. Their original idea was straightforward: they wanted an association that would promote communication and camaraderie among Michigan sportsmen who had hunted or fished outside the continental United States. World travelers, trophy hunters, people who had been to places most Michiganders hadn't. They called themselves the Michigan Explorers.

Over the next few months, meeting through early 1965, they formalized the organization. They changed the name to the Michigan Polar-Equator Club — a nod to their shared interest in remote and extreme landscapes. Under the leadership of chairman Harold Walter and secretary-treasurer Rollin Baker, bylaws and operating policies were written. The first official meeting was held April 23, 1965, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

The club records, which are preserved in the Michigan State University Archives, describe the objectives broadly: public education in natural resource use, conservation and preservation activities, and the promotion of social gatherings among members. The club published a twice-yearly newsletter called the Logbook. They organized conservation efforts and minor political activities. And they took on a project that would become their most lasting contribution: the Michigan Polar-Equator Trail. For the full picture of what the 45th Parallel is and why it matters — the geography, the climate, where it runs across America and the world — that’s worth reading alongside this one.

Fred Bear and the Founders

Among the founding members of the Michigan Polar-Equator Club was Fred Bear — one of the most significant figures in the history of American bowhunting and a household name in Northern Michigan.

Fred Bear founded Bear Archery, originally in Detroit before relocating to Grayling, Michigan, where it remained for decades. He is credited with developing the first fiberglass bow, patenting the working recurve limb in 1953, and pioneering the takedown bow. He held multiple world records in bowhunting simultaneously — the Alaskan brown bear, stone sheep, barren-ground caribou, mountain caribou, and Canada moose records were all his at one point. Ted Nugent wrote a song about him. He is considered, without much debate, the father of modern bowhunting.

By 1965, when the Michigan Polar-Equator Club was forming, Bear was in his early sixties and at the height of his legend. The fact that a man of his stature was involved in the founding tells you something about the kind of people who made up the club — serious outdoorsmen with deep roots in Michigan's hunting and conservation culture, who had been places and done things and came home with strong opinions about protecting what was worth protecting.

Fred Bear died in 1988, twelve years before the club itself folded. His Bear Archery company remains active today, and his museum collection — originally housed in Grayling — was eventually incorporated into the Archery Hall of Fame at Bass Pro Shops. But his connection to the Polar-Equator Trail is one of the less-told chapters of his Michigan story.

Building the Trail

The trail project was ambitious. The objective the club settled on was to establish and maintain a trail across the state of Michigan as close to the 45th Parallel as possible — from Lake Michigan to Lake Huron, west to east, following the invisible line that runs halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

Michigan is about 135 miles wide at the latitude of the 45th Parallel, but the trail ended up being somewhat longer than that. The 45th doesn't care about roads, and in the northern Lower Peninsula there are rivers, wetlands, lakes, and stretches of state forest that make a straight east-west route impossible to follow on the ground. So the trail jogged north and south as needed to stay on navigable roads and paths, always returning to as close to the parallel as it could manage.

Over the years following the club's founding, members erected approximately 200 trail markers along the route — metal signs, mile markers, posted at regular intervals to guide travelers along the trail from one end to the other. The signs were installed and maintained exclusively through the financial and volunteer efforts of club members. No government funding, no institutional backing. Just a group of Michigan outdoorsmen who decided something was worth doing and did it.

In 1973, the club published a 20-page guidebook to the trail — edited and printed entirely through volunteer efforts — that described the route mile by mile and highlighted interesting sites along the way. If you were driving the trail in 1973, this was what you navigated by.

The Route Across Michigan

The trail begins — or ends, depending on which direction you travel it — near the village of Elk Rapids on the west side, at the Hugh J. Gray Memorial Cairn on Cairn Highway north of Kewadin. From there it follows the south shore of Torch Lake, moves east through Bellaire, and enters a complicated stretch through the Jordan River Valley. The valley section involves a series of side roads that are difficult to follow even with the guidebook, which describes the route through here as a convoluted tangle of county roads threading through one of the most beautiful stretches of terrain in the northern Lower Peninsula.

From the Jordan Valley, the trail winds into the town of Alba before picking up County Road 42 east to M-32, just west of Gaylord. Originally the trail followed Old Alba Road through this section — a stretch that the original guidebook describes as having a "western feel." That section is now closed through the Northland Ranch property. It was one of several closures and reroutes that accumulated over the decades as land changed hands and roads changed status.

Near Gaylord, the trail picks up again at Johnson Road off the I-75 business loop, becoming Bobcat Lake Road. This is predominantly a two-track through the southern edge of the Pigeon River Country — elk country, back-country driving, the kind of road that doesn't get much traffic and rewards the person taking it slowly. The trail continues east through Tin Shanty Bridge Road, into the Pigeon River Country proper, south toward Meridian Road, and eventually east toward M-33.

From M-33 the route continues east through increasingly agricultural country — a contrast to the deep forest sections to the west — before picking up Brush Lake Road and eventually Brush Creek Trail, which travels more than eight miles through back country before rejoining the paved road network. The trail hits M-32 near Hillman, continues east through a series of county roads, and eventually reaches US-23 on the Lake Huron shore near Alpena. From US-23, a right turn and about three miles brings you to the 45th Parallel itself — the eastern terminus, marked and documented, the end of the crossing.

The Cairn at Torch Lake

The western anchor of the Polar-Equator Trail is the Hugh J. Gray Memorial Cairn — a 12-foot pyramid of native stone erected in 1938 on a dirt road in the middle of farm country north of Kewadin, near the west shore of Torch Lake.

The cairn was built as a monument to the 45th Parallel itself, and its construction reflects the seriousness with which the people behind it approached the project. Each of Michigan's 83 counties is represented by a stone in the cairn, with the county name carved into it — 83 pieces of Michigan gathered from across the state and assembled here at the halfway point of the world. There is also one piece of granite from Brunswick, Georgia, included by the original builders for reasons that have not been fully documented. It is the kind of detail that makes a monument interesting rather than merely impressive.

Hugh J. Gray was a Northern Michigan tourism advocate who spent decades working to bring recognition to the 45th Parallel as something worth knowing about and visiting. He was largely responsible for the network of roadside signs that put the line on the map for travelers coming through the northern Lower Peninsula. The cairn that bears his name was built in his honor — notably while he was still alive, which the original signage acknowledges as something unusual. Very rare is the man who has seen a monument built to his accomplishments in his own lifetime.

The cairn sits at 5899 Cairn Highway north of Kewadin — the road is named for it. It is not on every GPS and it is worth tracking down.

The Bluebird Houses

One of the details about the Polar-Equator Trail that stays with you once you learn it: many of the mile marker signs have bluebird houses mounted on top of them.

This was an intentional project supported by the Michigan Polar-Equator Club. The Eastern Bluebird was in serious decline through the mid-20th century, largely due to competition for nest sites from non-native starlings and house sparrows. Bluebird conservation efforts — installing nest boxes in open habitat along rural roads and fields — were one of the more successful wildlife recovery stories of the era. The club decided to mount bluebird houses on their trail markers, combining trail maintenance with wildlife habitat work in a single volunteer effort.

It is a quietly elegant idea. Every mile marker along the trail became both a navigation aid and a nest site. The signs did double duty — marking the way for travelers while providing habitat for a bird that was struggling to hold its ground in Michigan's changing landscape. Like everything else about the trail, the bluebird houses were installed and maintained entirely through the volunteer efforts of club members.

When you find one of the old trail markers now — lying in the leaves, leaning against a fence post, still standing but weathered past any paint — look for the mounting hardware on top. Some of them still have the houses. Some just have the bracket where one used to be.

State Recognition and the Guidebook

In February 1971, the Michigan House and Senate passed a resolution recognizing the Michigan Polar-Equator Trail as a significant tourist attraction in Michigan. It was a formal acknowledgment that what the club had built had real value — not just as a trail, but as a way of understanding and connecting people to the geography of the northern Lower Peninsula.

Two years later, in 1973, the club published the trail guidebook — a 20-page document that described the route mile by mile, highlighted points of interest along the way, and gave travelers enough information to actually follow the trail from one end to the other. Like everything else the club produced, the guidebook was edited and printed entirely through volunteer and financial efforts of the members. No outside funding. No institutional support. Just people who cared about the thing they had built and wanted other people to be able to find it.

The guidebook is now effectively impossible to find. The club's records are preserved at MSU's Archives and Historical Collections — 2.5 cubic feet of material covering the club's full 35-year existence, from 1965 to 2000 — but the guidebook itself has not been widely reproduced or digitized. If you have a copy, you have something rare.

What Happened to It

The Michigan Polar-Equator Club became defunct around the year 2000 — 35 years after it was founded. No single event ended it. Clubs like this tend to fade rather than fold. The founding generation ages out. The energy that sustained a volunteer-driven organization through its active years disperses. Membership declines. The newsletter stops. The meetings stop. And eventually the organization that built 200 mile markers and lobbied the state legislature and published a guidebook and mounted bluebird houses on every sign along the route simply ceases to exist.

With no one maintaining the trail, the markers began to deteriorate. Roads were renamed. Some sections were closed as land changed hands — most notably the Old Alba Road stretch through the Northland Ranch, which was a functioning section of the trail until it wasn't. Other stretches became difficult or impossible to follow as the guidebook instructions no longer matched the roads that existed. Particularly west of Gaylord, the route is now hard to piece together without significant research.

The markers themselves scattered. Some fell. Some were removed. Some, like the one I found on our property, ended up in the leaves — face down, slowly being reclaimed by the forest floor, waiting for someone who happened to be paying attention to walk past and pick them up.

The club's last known mailing addresses were at the Michigan State University Department of Zoology and a private address in Frankenmuth. Neither contact is active. The records live in the MSU Archives. The trail lives on the ground in pieces.

What's Still Out There

More than you might expect. The eastern half of the trail — from Gaylord to Alpena — is still largely followable. The markers are sparser and more weathered than they were in the club's active years, but the route holds together. People have driven it recently and reported finding signs along the way. The terrain east of Gaylord is more stable — more state land, fewer private road closures, less development pressure — and it retains much of the character the guidebook described. If you want to drive the corridor yourself, Following the 45th Parallel Through Michigan has the practical route, the stops worth making, and everything you need to plan the trip.

West of Gaylord is more challenging. The Jordan River Valley section requires patience and a current road map alongside whatever historical documentation you can find. The Old Alba Road closure is a genuine gap in the western route that has no clean workaround. But from Elk Rapids and the cairn east through Torch Lake and Bellaire, the route is still there and the landscape it passes through is as compelling as it ever was.

The cairn at Kewadin is still standing. It has been there since 1938 and it will likely outlast most of what has been built since. The county names carved into the stones are still legible. If you go there on a weekday in the off season you will probably have it entirely to yourself, which is the right way to see it.

The mile markers still turn up. In ditches, under leaf litter, leaning against fence posts, still standing in isolated stretches where no one has disturbed them. If you drive the route and pay attention, you will find them. Some still have the bluebird house hardware. Some still have the bluebird houses.

The trail was built by people who thought the 45th Parallel was worth marking, worth following, worth publishing a guidebook about and mounting bluebird houses on and lobbying the state legislature to recognize. They were right. The line is still there. So is most of what they built. It just takes someone willing to go looking for it.

Common Questions

The sign is on display at our shop in downtown Gaylord. Come see it if you're up this way. It belongs here.