Public Land, Public Trust
by Drew YoungeDyke
Yesterday was Nov. 15. That may seem like a meaningless statement to some, but where I’m from, it’s like saying that yesterday was Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Independence Day, and my birthday all rolled into one: it was Opening Day for firearm deer hunting.

In northern Michigan, that usually meant a couple days excused from school and a trip to a neighbor’s property, if you were able to secure permission, to sit in a plywood blind and freeze while waiting for a buck to appear silently from the woods. If you didn’t know someone, or didn’t have your own acreage to hunt, then you went to the nearest patch of state land wearing as much blaze orange as you could while retaining the ability to walk. Hunting is so important in this state that even the legislature has recessed for deer season.

However, the very concept of public land is under attack here in Michigan. The resource that has defined our state since it was a territory is now deemed expendable, even burdensome, to some state legislators. Bills recently introduced in the Michigan House and Senate include proposals to limit the amount of public land Michigan may own, to force the DNR to grant permits for easement roads over public land - even when landowners know there is no road access when they purchase the land – and, most appallingly, to raid the Natural Resources Trust Fund in order to publicly fund private mining and logging roads through state land.

These proposals indicate contempt for undeveloped land held in the public trust, and thereby contempt for those who use it. State land, public land, is the great equalizer that allows every Michigan citizen to hunt if he or she so chooses. State land means that you don’t have to be land rich, or inherit a farm, or even know a farmer (though they’re generally great people to know), in order to engage in the oldest outdoor activity in the history of our species. Hunting also contributes $153 million in state tax revenue, and most hunting license fee revenues go to conservation programs. In Michigan, public land means that you can live in a small town and still hunt, or live in a city like Grand Rapids, Traverse City, East Lansing, Detroit, Marquette, or even Ann Arbor (really) and still hunt.

While true that there is plenty of public land across the state – approximately 4.5 million acres, the most of any state east of the Mississippi – most of that land is concentrated in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. It gives great character to the northern part of the state, but if you live in southern Michigan, there are precious few places to hunt. The DNR has an innovative tool for locating public hunting areas, called Mi-Hunt, but you’ll find many of those areas are crowded with other blaze orange dots scattered throughout the tract.

The problem with bills that would cap the amount of state land, ordestroy its wild character by slashing it with roads, or deplete the trust established to purchase new state lands by spending it on private industry roads, is that state laws apply statewide. Someone from the Upper Peninsula or northern Michigan may look around and think that state land is infinitely abundant, but a state law preventing new land acquisitions would apply equally to southern Michigan, where what little available state land exists is already fractured by roads, easements, and development. At a time when the biggest obstacle to hunter recruitment is the availability of a place to hunt, there is no action more anti-hunting than limiting and destroying public land.

While the legislature is recessed, I hope they go out on state land and hunt. I hope they experience the outdoors as an active participant, first-hand, and realize what they rob from Michigan citizens when they introduce and pass bills like these. When they return from their break, I urge them to oppose any bill that would limit, carve, or destroy the abundance and character of public land in Michigan. Until then, I’ll be tracking whitetails on state land while we still have it. 

The Eternal Lightness of Backpacking
Ultralight is nothing new
by Drew YoungeDyke

To read most backpacking resources, you would think that the ultralight concept is as modern as the internet. New synthetic fabrics are introduced each year which allow backpackers to continually reduce pack weight with minimal losses in function. Innovators create new lightweight pack and shelter designs each day, but the concept is as old as our species. 

Ötzi, the “Iceman” mummy found in 1991 in Italy’s Ötztal Alps, may have been the first documented “ultralight” backpacker. He lived over 5,000 years ago. Items found with him included a hazel wood backpack frame, a bow stave, a quiver, arrows, a knife, a hatchet, a net, a prehistoric lighter, various tools, and birchbark containers theorized to be lightweight alternatives to pottery. Scientists think he may have been a hunter, a prospector, or a shepherd; whichever his profession, he carried a thoughtfully selected overnight kit. That he chose birchbark containers over heavier pottery indicates a conscious consideration of his pack weight, and a preference for the lightweight alternative. 

Here in Michigan, the Odawa travelled lightly in canoes up and down the coast of Michigan between their summer residence at Little Traverse Bay and their winter homes, which ranged from Chicago to the Muskegon River. According to Andrew J. Blackbird, an Odawa chief who wrote History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan in 1887, they carried light cedar poles in their canoes. When they camped on shore each night, they stretched marsh reed mats or sewn flags over the cedar poles to make small, portable, waterproof wigwams – tents, basically - which were lighter to carry than the larger permanent birchbark wigwams they lived in at home.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous treatises, magazines, and guidebooks were published about wilderness travel. The writer and outdoorsman George Washington Sears, pen name Nessmuk, wrote in his seminal 1884 treatise Woodcraft, “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest materiel for health, comfort, and enjoyment.” 

The 1910 Boy Scout’s Hike Book outlined a scout kit that weighs 23 pounds, and described the nineteenth century northwoods pack-sack kit which weighed no more than 30 pounds. Horace Kephart, in 1919’s Camping and Woodcraft, described numerous light tents and a simple tarp-tent to be used for “shifting” camps, when “cumbersome affairs are out of the question.” 

Kephart spent pages on the most lightweight and waterproof materials of the day to be used for tent construction, at that time waterproofed silk, which reminds me of modern blog posts about dyneema and ripstop nylon. He described pack/shelter and sleeping bag/pack combos, though he doesn’t give them a very ringing endorsement, and even a 7-pound European pack kit, though he didn’t recommend it for use in deep wilderness. For a 10-day solo hunting trip in fall weather, he outlined a 28-pound pack, 42 with provisions, but when you consider that he allotted eight pounds for his sleeping bag, you realize that it really was a lightweight pack for the available materials. 

My own ultralight obsession began in high school during football practices when we had to run up and back down a sand hill before every water break. Soon I replaced my 15-oz. cleats for 10-oz. versions that looked like soccer shoes, my one-inch-thick foam hip pads were replaced with lighter hard-foam ones half as thick, and I traded my bulky running back/linebacker pads for quarterback pads which weighed much less but definitely allowed me to feel the full brunt of defensive ends’ fury after I made an option pitch. Despite the reduced impact protection, I felt a definite advantage running up that sand hill four times a day. When I began backpacking, I applied the same principles and compiled a lightweight, if not ultralight, kit, due to the ridiculous prices charged for modern ultralight materials. By taking into account the principles described in these century-plus-old texts, though, a light pack can be assembled with the gear you probably already own. Most of the texts are available online through Google Books due to expired copyrights. 

While packs of 25-30 pounds wouldn’t be considered ultralight now, they were definitely ultralight in their day. The modern obsession with light pack weight may sometimes seem like a fad akin to barefoot running, but it’s really neither modern nor a fad. From 5,000 year-old Ötzi substituting birchbark for pottery, Michigan Odawa canoeists substituting woven reed mats for birchbark, or a modern backpacker substituting a sil-nylon tarp for a dome tent, the principle hasn’t changed since Nessmuk told us to “Go Light.”