Up North Heaven 4 Sale!

Low angle view of Black Lake across the black-eyed susans

July 2010 Edit:

Officially, this property is off the market. Realtors in the area don’t seem interested in taking on any more advertising, if you ask me! Part of me doesn’t want to sell it at all; the realistic part of me still needs to! If you are interested, please contact me.
No, it’s not cheap to buy your way into heaven!

Icy cold artesian spring bubbles up from the ground year round

If you follow me on Twitter, you may know that I have had a sweet piece of Up North Michigan property on the market for nearly three years. I was corresponding with USA Today  about being included in an article Stephanie Armour was writing about the fall off in vacation home sales. Big surprise that no one is buying vacation spots right now, isn’t it! (See her article: Sales of vacation homes fall during recession) I got knocked out of the running by a Costa Rica place, which I would trade for in a second! I bet they don’t wait until MOTHER’S DAY for all the snow to melt!

A fellow Twitterer and Zazzler who also lives in Michigan, Sandy from Samack, saw my Tweet about the feature possibility and remarked  that she’d like to see what my Up North property looks like. So, here are the photos I sent to the USA Today photo editor!

I take a lot of my photographs here. It’s on all-sports Black Lake, about 45 minutes south of The Bridge (as we say locally). I’ve photographed Bunchberry, Jack in the Pulpit, Lady’s Slipper, Trailing Arbutus, Anemones, Wild Strawberries, Indian Pipe, Black eyed Susans, Turtlehead, Queen Anne’s Lace, Daisies, Milkweed, Hawkweed, Bindweed and more here. Deer, coyotes, ducks, porcupines, foxes and beavers have been known to show up along with the birds and butterflies. I’ve got a garden going with some apple trees and lots of lavender, oregano, thyme and chives.

But the economy has not been on my side!

Below is my note to Stephanie which prompted our correspondence. I’ve put the story and photos on their own page. Go to Up North Heaven for Sale!

Hi Stephanie,

I have lakefront vacation property in northern Michigan that has been on the market since July, 2006. It’s a sweet piece of property, over 5 acres with 300 feet of good swimming frontage and no close neighbors, backing up to hundreds of acres of state forest land. It has an artesian spring that runs year round and is ready for the building of a permanent structure with a flat cleared space. It ranges from fragrant cedar swamp at the lake’s edge to birch and spruce and maple then oak, poplar and white pines on a bluff at the back of the property.

This is a good sized lake (10,000A) and has always been the kind where people kept the property in their family and you didn’t see many “for sale” signs in the past. My own family has been there since the 1940s. It’s an all-sports lake, but not one where a lot of money ever migrated. You might think of it as more of a blue collar type crowd, with a number of property owners having worked in automotive and many from Ohio. In fact, the UAW Conference Center is on this lake.

When I bought this place in 2003, I had searched for over two years for something nice and available. Most of what sells in the area now are foreclosures.

Is this the sort of story you’re looking for?

Here are some of my favorite property photos and a bit of info on the property. If, by chance, you have an interest in owning a piece of lakefront heaven, leave a comment so I can put you in touch with the Realtor!

Seen from the lake a few years ago when I actually took a camera out in the water

About half a dozen years ago, I fell absolutely in love with this property! I had snuck onto it years ago with my cousins as we wandered the thousands of acres of the Black Lake State Forest that adjoin the property. Nearby there’s a teeny stream they say my Dad and cousins caught trout in. I know many families of beavers hang out on that stream! The day I fell in love, my cousin and I swam down the lake about half a mile from another cousin’s house and just looked at the land from the water.

It was a warm August afternoon, and quiet. We sat in the water, about where the kids are playing in the photo above, and just absorbed how pretty the setting was. We had no idea how big the property was that day. The cleared space is only about 1/3 to 1/2 the width of the property which extends back and up a steep bluff in the back. Of course, the glaciers were at work to sculpt the area around this lake and the loggers went through in the 19th century and fires burned after the loggers in the early 20th century. But it’s been peaceful there ever since. Black Lake is a good sized lake, about 10,000 acres, and not crazy with people and boaters the way Burt Lake or Mullet Lake can be. That’s partly because a dam blocks it from the Inland Waterway. My family has been coming up to this lake for almost seventy years and we love it.

My cousin and I finally ventured the breeze on our wet skin and walked up onto the property to explore. There was no one around; it was as perfectly quiet as it gets in nature. The front section was a meadow of colorful grasses at the time, flanked by cool cedar woods on each side. The temperature always drops about ten degrees in the shade and moistness of a cedar woods. There was a path that crept along the edge of the lake then, too, but which has eroded into memory. Our biggest delight when walking the property may just have been the view, complete with the birds singing, the sun shining and the breeze whispering through the grasses and creaking the branches of the cedar trees.

Or it may have been the biggest surprise – one of my dream features for a property – an artisian spring. Cold, cold water bubbles up from the spring every day of the year; it doesn’t freeze in winter. You cannot see or feel the bottom as swirling water and sand obscure it. It’s too cold to leave your hand in for even a minute! The water flows aboute thirty feet down into the lake, washing out under a fallen cedar. My brother helped me one day line the spring with beautiful stones and we made two miniature waterfalls along its flow. I sometimes keep cans of Diet Coke and root beer in the spring and they’re chilled to the perfect drinking temperature. However, they do get slimed up if left too long!

My cousin and I left that August day with dreams of what I could do with this property and I purchased it soon after . . . but, perhaps, it is time for someone else to realize their dreams here.

And time for me to move on. Peru has been calling me.

Another view from the water. The next neighbor is a ways down. Empty lots between us!

The driveway in autumn with the birches and maples coloring the scene.

Across the flower garden to a view of where the ducks hang out- the dock.

One of those summer days you pray for!

Another summer day.

Autumn is all about color in the middle section of the property

My herb garden thrives in the sandy soil.

The front yard. Well, before the beavers feasted on the birch tree!

Autumn view toward the lake from near the top of the property

A private road provides access for the neighbors.

The artesian spring bubbles up all year long - it's COLD water!

On top of the bluff at the back, it's a different world.

Too much driveway to shovel, but great view!

In the winter, you can see how steeply the back rises up!