Silver Lake Basin Tag | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Northwest of the Silver Lake Basin

Finding my way back to the small campsite on the Dead River, where it enters the Silver Lake Basin, was more difficult than I had planned. A maze of logging roads, mostly impassable in my small car, wound their way from the Peshekee Grade (north of Champion, MI) past Wolf Lake Road and over to Wildcat Canyon. While this area is within Kennecott's planned 'Wilderness Road', a proposed route from Republic up to their mine on the Yellow Dog Plains, it currently has few good roads and is all but impossible to navigate. After an hour of logging roads, I finally reached the campsite and parked near the firepit, more than ready for my hike.

Firepit at campsite along the upper Dead River

Earlier in the year I had embarked on an overly ambitious route around the entire Silver Lake Basin. There are several really interesting locations along the northwest shoreline that I skipped during that hike out of sheer exhaustion. Today I was going to revist these spots. While I only had a few hours of daylight left, my planned hike included ...

• Tags:
• campsite,
• dead river,
• north country trail,
• old growth,
• silver lake basin,
• uppco,
• waterfalls

Weekend on Mulligan Part B - Silver Lake Basin

The air felt uncomfortably hot as I walked down the trail, away from my campsite, in the early afternoon. My first Mulligan Plains hike seemed pretty easy, a simple trek around the Silver Lake Basin. There would be little bushwhacking with the lake levels still below normal from the burst of 2003. I carried a single water bottle with me, thinking that the hike would be easy and I'd be back at camp well before dark.

Uninviting upper Dead River landscape

After crossing Mulligan Creek I continued south until I hit some recent logging activity. I headed right, westwards up the hill, wandering around the piles of brush and avoiding the ankle-twisting traps left by the loggers. They only made it a short distance up the hill but I was surprised to see even more logged-out areas at the top. A recently widened two-track from the south gave them access to the entire area at the top. Disappointed by the lack of untouched woods, I headed down the sandy road.

The hill I was on is one of the tallest points on the west side of ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• mulligan plains,
• shoreline,
• silver lake basin