"The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins."
"Big Two-Hearted River," 1925
Ernest Hemingway spent his boyhood summers at the family cottage on Walloon Lake. He learned to fish in Horton Creek, took camping trips to the Sturgeon and Black Rivers, married his first wife in the Horton Bay church, and boarded in a Petoskey rooming house as a struggling young writer. In the summer of 1919, still recovering from shrapnel wounds suffered in Italy, he took a train to Seney in the Upper Peninsula with two friends. They fished the Fox River for a week, catching over 200 brook trout. Five years later, writing in Paris, he turned that trip into "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the most celebrated fishing stories ever written.
This trail follows the rivers and places Hemingway fished and wrote about. Where we have USGS gauges, you get live conditions. Where we do not, you get the literary context, the access points, and the Navigate buttons to get you there. This is trout fishing as Hemingway knew it: cold water, wild fish, and the north country.
The Hemingway family built Windemere Cottage on the north shore of Walloon Lake in 1899, the year Ernest was born. He spent every summer here through his teenage years, fishing, swimming, and exploring the surrounding forests with the Ojibway families who lived nearby. The cottage is still standing (privately owned, not open to the public) and the lake remains one of the clearest in northern Michigan.
"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "Ten Indians," "Wedding Day." The lake and cottage are the setting for Nick Adams's childhood. The rowboat crossings, the mill at the creek mouth, the Indian camps on the far shore: all drawn from this place.
Horton Creek is where Ernest Hemingway learned to fly fish. The creek is a cold, spring-fed brook trout stream that flows through cedar swamp north of Horton Bay before emptying into Lake Charlevoix. It is small water, rarely more than 15 feet wide, with a marl and gravel bottom so clear you can read a newspaper through two feet of it. The fish see everything. This is some of the most technical small-stream fishing in northern Michigan.
The Little Traverse Conservancy maintains the Nick Adams Nature Preserve along the creek with public fishing access off Horton Creek Road (a seasonal dirt road, passable in summer). The wadeable section below town is mostly private. In the Preserve, the marl bottom is soft and difficult to wade, the brush is heavy, and the brook trout are educated. Hemingway's son Jack wrote that his father fished a McGinty wet fly, cast across and downstream. A size 12 McGinty or Royal Coachman fished the same way still works.
Horton Bay itself is a tiny community on Boyne City Road. The Horton Bay General Store (still operating, now with an inn) is where Hemingway gathered with friends and set scenes in "The End of Something" and "The Three-Day Blow." He married Hadley Richardson in the Horton Bay Community Church on September 3, 1921.
"The End of Something," "The Three-Day Blow," "Summer People." The general store, the creek, the roads between Horton Bay and Charlevoix: this is Nick Adams's home ground as a young man. The spring at the halfway point of the gravel road from town to the lake appears in "Summer People."
After the summer of 1919, Hemingway stayed on in northern Michigan while his family returned to Oak Park. He boarded at the Eva Potter Rooming House in Petoskey, gave a war talk at the Carnegie Library, and wrote. A bronze statue of the young Hemingway stands in Pennsylvania Park in downtown Petoskey, erected in 2017. The Little Traverse History Museum has Hemingway exhibits. Petoskey is the natural base camp for fishing the Hemingway trail: the Bear River runs through town, and the Pigeon River Country is an hour east.
Hemingway called this "the last good country" and made it the setting for his posthumously published story of the same name. The Pigeon River Country State Forest covers 106,000 acres of wild land with elk, bear, and some of the best brook trout streams in the Lower Peninsula. The Black River (eastern) was one of Hemingway's favorites: he took camping trips here from Horton Bay. The Pigeon River itself holds wild brook trout in its upper reaches and browns below.
"The Last Good Country": Nick and his sister Littless flee into the deep forest to escape game wardens who want to arrest Nick for poaching trout. "This is the way forests were in the olden days. This is about the last good country there is left." The woods near the Pigeon and Black Rivers are that forest.
Hemingway took camping trips to the Sturgeon River from Horton Bay. This is one of the coldest and fastest rivers in northern Michigan, holding all three trout species: brook trout in the upper sections near Wolverine, browns and rainbows below. The Sturgeon gets a fraction of the pressure the AuSable receives despite comparable fish quality. Hemingway would recognize it today.
In August 1919, Hemingway and two friends arrived at Seney by rail. He was twenty years old, still favoring his right leg from an Austrian mortar wound in Italy. They walked north from the train depot to the East Branch of the Fox River and camped for a week, catching over 200 brook trout. The trip became "Big Two-Hearted River," though he borrowed the name of another UP river "because it had more poetry."
The Michigan Outdoor Writers Association dedicated a heritage memorial marker at the East Branch Fox River State Forest Campground in 2013, seven miles north of Seney on M-77. The Seney Museum and Historic Railroad Depot (the same depot where Hemingway stepped off the train) is open by appointment. The Fox River still holds brook trout. The Steeb Pathway near the campground loops around King's Pond, where DNR-stocked brook trout rise to mayflies on calm evenings, just as they did a century ago.
"Big Two-Hearted River," Parts I and II. Nick Adams steps off the train at Seney, finds the town burned, hikes north to the river, makes camp, and fishes. The burned town, the grasshoppers covered in soot, the big trout in the deep pool that breaks his line: all drawn from the Fox River and the country around Seney. Hemingway said the story was "about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war." The war is never mentioned. The river does the healing.
The river Hemingway named his story after but never actually fished. The Two-Hearted flows north through the Lake Superior State Forest to Lake Superior, passing through some of the most remote country in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It holds native brook trout in its upper reaches and steelhead runs from Lake Superior. The river mouth at the Lake Superior shore is accessible via County Road 412 from Newberry. The upper river requires hiking or canoeing to reach.
Hemingway chose the name over "Fox River" because "Big Two-Hearted River is poetry." He was right. The river lives up to its borrowed reputation: cold, wild, and far from everything.
The full trail runs roughly 250 miles from Walloon Lake to the Two-Hearted River mouth. You can drive it in a long day, but it deserves at least a long weekend. Stops 1 through 5 (Walloon Lake to the Sturgeon River) cluster within an hour of Petoskey and can be done in a day. Stops 6 and 7 require crossing the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula: Seney is 90 minutes north of the bridge, and the Two-Hearted River mouth is another 45 minutes beyond Seney.
For anglers, the Pigeon River Country (Stop 4) and the Sturgeon River (Stop 5) offer the best fishing of the trail and have live conditions on this site. The Fox River (Stop 6) is a pilgrimage for Hemingway readers, and the brook trout are still there. Horton Creek (Stop 2) is tiny, technical, and humbling. The Two-Hearted (Stop 7) is remote and wild.
Hemingway fished wet flies: the McGinty, a Royal Coachman, and live grasshoppers. You can fish his patterns or bring modern gear. The trout do not care about literary history. They care about the fly.