Call of the Wild Museum

The Call of the Wild opened in the 1950s, when the growth of the interstate highways and the family automobile created a whole culture of roadside attractions, museums, and oddities meant to lure travelers off the road. Northern Michigan, on the popular route to the lakes and the Straits of Mackinac, was ideal territory for such a stop.

Where many of those mid-century attractions have closed or been torn down, this one has endured, passed along and cared for over the decades. Part of its appeal now is that it has changed so little: it is a genuine window into how families experienced travel and nature before screens, a preserved slice of American road-trip history.

The heart of the museum is its collection of wildlife dioramas, taxidermy animals arranged in carefully built natural scenes: a bear at a stream, a wolf pack in the snow, deer in an autumn wood, a bull moose in a marsh. The settings are painted and sculpted to suggest depth and place, an art form in itself, and narration helps bring the scenes to life.

The animals shown are the creatures of the North American forests and wilds, many of them native to Michigan and the Great Lakes country. For children, it is often a first close look at wildlife they might otherwise only glimpse in the woods, and for adults it carries the warm nostalgia of the road trips of their youth.

The museum sits in downtown Gaylord, a town that has adopted a Swiss Alpine theme, with timber-and-stucco storefronts, an Alpine festival, and even a small herd of resident elk kept in a nearby park. Its position high on the I-75 corridor, near the height of land in the northern Lower Peninsula, gives it cool summers and deep, snowy winters that draw skiers and snowmobilers.

Gaylord makes a convenient hub for the surrounding lake-and-forest country, close to inland lakes, golf resorts, and the Pigeon River Country State Forest, home to that free-ranging elk herd. The Alpine-themed downtown, with its shops and fudge, extends the northern-Michigan tourist tradition that the Call of the Wild has been part of for so long.

Gaylord anchors a stretch of northern Michigan defined by forests, inland lakes, and rivers, prime country for fishing, paddling, and watching wildlife. The nearby Pigeon River Country is often called the Big Wild, home to one of the largest wild elk herds east of the Mississippi, reintroduced to the region in the early twentieth century.

This is Anishinaabe homeland, long the country of the Odawa (Ottawa) and Ojibwe (Chippewa) peoples of northern Michigan, whose descendants remain in the region's living bands today, including the Little Traverse Bay Bands and the Grand Traverse Band. Their communities hunted, fished, and traveled these northern woods and waters for generations, and the wildlife the museum celebrates is part of a landscape they have long known intimately.

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