Burt Lake State Park

The Inland Waterway is Michigan's longest connected chain of lakes and rivers, running close to forty miles from Crooked Lake down through the Crooked River, across Burt Lake, along the Indian River, over big Mullett Lake, and out the Cheboygan River to Lake Huron. Long before it carried summer cruisers, it was a shortcut. Native travelers, and later French voyageurs and fur traders, used this string of water to avoid the long, dangerous paddle around the tip of the mitt, portaging the few short gaps between one lake and the next.

Burt Lake State Park sits right on that route, at the point where the fast, cold Sturgeon River joins the lake. From the park's boat launch you can put in and, in theory, follow the water all the way to the Great Lakes at either end. For most visitors the waterway simply means big, beautiful water in every direction, sheltered from the moods of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron but connected to both.

The lake itself is large and clean and cold enough to hold walleye, perch, smallmouth bass, and northern pike, and anglers work the mouth of the Sturgeon River where the moving water pulls fish in. On a calm evening the whole surface goes to glass and the sunset spreads clear across it, the kind of northern-lake stillness that keeps the same families coming back to the same campsites summer after summer.

Michigan created its State Parks Commission in 1919, and within a year or two it began assembling a system of public lakeshores and forests for a state that was falling in love with the automobile and the weekend drive. Burt Lake was one of the first sites secured, its land purchased beginning in 1920 and added to through the 1930s, making it one of the original handful of Michigan state parks and one of the oldest still in operation.

The timing was deliberate. As cars put the northern lakes within a day's drive of Detroit and the industrial cities downstate, the state moved to keep the best stretches of shoreline in public hands rather than letting them all be bought up for private cottages. That early decision is why, a century later, anyone with a Recreation Passport can still pull off the highway, walk down to two thousand feet of open sand, and swim in Burt Lake for the price of a park pass.

The campground has grown into a full modern facility with hundreds of sites, some tucked under the hardwoods for shade and some out where you can see the water, but the appeal has never really changed: a plain, generous sand beach on a great big lake, kept public on purpose.

The lake the park is named for carries a hard history that is worth knowing while you sit on its shore. On a peninsula on the north side of Burt Lake, known as Indian Point, stood the village of the Cheboiganing Band of Ottawa and Chippewa people, the Burt Lake Band, who had lived on the lake for generations. Their village was recognized in federal treaties, and the land was set aside as an Indian preserve meant to remain theirs.

On October 15, 1900, that promise was broken. Acting for a land speculator who claimed the ground for unpaid taxes, the county sheriff evicted the families and burned their village to the ground, dousing the homes in kerosene and setting fire to some nineteen buildings while their owners watched. The event is remembered today as the Burt Lake Burn-out, and the descendants of the band have spent generations seeking justice and federal recognition.

None of this happened at the state park, and the park does not tell the story on the water it looks out over. But the same lake ties them together, and knowing it changes the view a little. The beach is a fine place for a family day, and it is also worth a quiet moment to remember the families who were driven from this same shoreline just before the park was born.

The park is easy to reach, just off the interstate at Indian River in the northern Lower Peninsula, roughly halfway between the towns of Petoskey and Cheboygan and a short drive south of the Mackinac Bridge country. A Michigan Recreation Passport gets you in; you can add it to your plate or buy it at the gate. The village of Indian River sits close by for supplies, so you can travel light to the park itself.

Come for the day to swim and picnic on the long sand beach, or stay in the campground and make it a base for the whole waterway. Launch a boat, canoe, or paddleboard onto Burt Lake, fish the mouth of the Sturgeon River, or just plant a chair in the shallows and let the kids splash where the bottom stays sandy and shallow for ages. It is an unfussy, old-fashioned Michigan lake park, and after a century that is exactly the point.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.