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 a place we chose through independent editorial review, never a paid placement.

The Call of the Wild Museum in Gaylord, in the northern Lower Peninsula, is a long-standing roadside wildlife museum where lifelike dioramas display taxidermy mounts of North American animals in recreated natural settings. A nostalgic Up North tradition for generations of Michigan travelers, it lets visitors get close to bears, wolves, moose, and other creatures posed in realistic scenes, with narration and educational information. Combined with a large gift shop, it offers a fun, family-friendly, and quintessentially northern-Michigan stop along the highway.

You can walk through darkened halls of illuminated dioramas featuring realistically mounted North American wildlife, from towering moose and bears to wolves, deer, and smaller animals, arranged in scenes depicting their habitats, often with recorded narration explaining the animals and their behaviors. It is an old-school natural-history experience that predates modern interactive museums, giving it a nostalgic charm. A sizable gift shop with toys and souvenirs rounds out the visit, making it especially enjoyable for families with children.

Yes, children are often captivated by seeing large wild animals up close in the lifelike dioramas, and the museum's manageable size and educational narration make it an easy, engaging stop for families. The nostalgic, classic-roadside-attraction feel appeals to parents and grandparents who may remember it from their own childhood trips Up North. Affordable and quick to tour, with a fun gift shop, it is a wholesome family outing while passing through the Gaylord area.

As an indoor attraction, the Call of the Wild Museum can be enjoyed year-round and makes a good rainy-day option or a break from driving in any season, though summer and the fall color season bring the most travelers through the Gaylord area. Checking current hours before you go is wise, since they can vary seasonally. A visit is fairly short, making it easy to combine with other stops on a northern Michigan road trip.

The museum is in Gaylord, a northern Lower Peninsula town along the I-75 corridor, near the region's many lakes, golf courses, and forests, and within reach of the AuSable River country around Grayling and the old-growth pines of Hartwick Pines State Park to the south. The route north leads toward the Straits of Mackinac. That makes the Call of the Wild Museum an easy and fun stop on a road trip through the heart of northern Michigan.