Trails and Resources Writer, Parks and Recreation Division Michigan Department of Natural Resources

Buckled into the backseat of his parents’ vehicle, alongside his older brother Tristan, Aaron Jones waited for the I-75 sights rushing past outside the windshield that would signify his family’s proximity to what they’d been waiting for all year: a 10-day stay at Wilderness State Park at the tip of the Lower Peninsula, near the Mackinac Bridge.

“We’d get past Gaylord, and I’d think, ‘We’ve got to be getting close,’ and then I remember we’d get seven, eight miles outside Mackinaw City and there was a hill,” Jones, 41, recalled of his childhood trips north from Pinconning, a drive that lasted a little over two hours. “When we crested over that hill, you could see the top of the bridge. Then it was, ‘We’re almost there!'”

Once the Jones brothers and their parents arrived at Wilderness, other unmistakable signs would let them know their annual autumn vacation was underway.

“There’s a smell in the air,” Jones said. “It’s the end of September, start of October, it’s cold and rainy. The smell is literally decomposing leaves – it’s that outdoor smell. And there’s the sound, the constant sound of the water, and the wind blowing through the trees. You can smell it, you can see it, you can hear it – it’s just unique.”

This immersion in nature, this time at his beloved Wilderness State Park, is like coming home to Jones. And no wonder, this annual excursion each fall has endured for more than four decades.

“I’ve been coming up there every year of my life since I was born,” he said. “Wilderness State Park has been a huge part of my family history. I guess you could say it is my family history.”

Today, Jones not only continues the tradition that his late parents started in the 1970s, but he’s also creating new memories each year with his own family, which includes his wife Katie Zapoluch, 42, and their 6-year-old son, Felix.

Over the years, many friends and family members have been part of this northern Michigan vacation, too.

“It really is such an incredibly large part of our lives going to this place,” Jones said. “You want to share it with the people you love.”

A TRADITION BEGINS

Mitchel and Susan Jones started rustic cabin-camping at Wilderness State Park in 1976, not long after graduating college. They liked the simplicity of staying in the concrete-floor cabin with bunk beds, using a woodstove, outhouse, and hand water pump. It was their time to get away from it all.

Extended family members – Susan Jones’ mother Ruth Spiewak and sister Patricia Spiewak, as well as Mitchel’s father Robert “Ed” Jones – were fixtures at their cabin, helping create treasured family memories.

“I remember my dad’s love of cooking outdoors – he’d make a pot roast dinner in the Dutch oven,” Aaron Jones said.

During the earliest years, Mitchel and Susan Jones stayed in the Station Point cabin. Eventually, with their two growing boys, they outgrew this space and spent many years booking either the Waugoshance or Big Stone Bay cabins.

The family always traveled north for their vacation in the fall.

“It has always been primarily in October, but sometimes it might overlap into November,” Jones said. “There aren’t a lot of bugs, we can spend all the time outside, we avoid the crowds, and we like that colder Michigan weather. You might get a gale storm, some snow. There were many years we would have really big windstorms and had to cut down trees on the road to get out. My dad always liked that — being useful — and we’d meet the rangers halfway as they made their way in toward our cabin, also clearing the road.”

It took just one visit to Wilderness in the spring of 2006, the year Aaron Jones graduated from Central Michigan University, to affirm the Jones family’s decision to stay there in the cooler months.

“I was really in need of taking a break and doing something crazy, and I decided to do a 250-mile hike with two friends, from White Cloud to Wilderness State Park on the North Country Trail,” Aaron Jones said.

“We took three weeks in May and when we got to the park, there were midges – I had never experienced them before,” he said of the swarms of tiny, two-winged flies resembling mosquitoes. “My parents had driven up to meet us and celebrate our accomplishments. We rented a cabin, but we never did go back in May because of the flies.”

A LEGACY OF LOVING NATURE

For their young sons, Mitchel and Susan Jones treated this special spot as “an outdoor classroom,” Aaron Jones said.

“We were learning something around every corner – geology, trees, bugs and animals we came across,” said Jones, who with his brother went on to become an Eagle Scout. Their father served as their scoutmaster.

It was Wilderness that sparked a lifelong appreciation of lighthouses and the Mackinac Bridge for Jones. And, when his studies of broadcast and cinematic arts at CMU led to an eventual position as the operations manager and advisor for the student-run campus TV station, he had the opportunity to shoot time-lapse imagery of the sunrise from the top of the Mighty Mac.

“My position would often have me working with students to give them hands-on experience working on professional projects. It was one of these projects that presented me with the opportunity to find my way to the top of the bridge,” he said.

The Jones family’s focus on nature through the years indeed left a lasting impression on Jones, who over time began recognizing the beauty that is the evolving park landscape.

“Something that I always found fascinating, looking back over 40 years of going to Wilderness, are the shoreline shifts and the water level changes,” said Jones, who added that he and his family have long enjoyed capturing such natural changes through photography. “In 2006, you could walk out 300 feet into what is now water; in 2018, the water was up higher than we’d ever seen it. And for the last four to five years, it’s been a beautiful rocky beach, which we hadn’t seen before.

“I find it really fascinating to see the spots I played in when I was 8 years old,” he said. “I remember riding my bike through some of the woods by Big Bay Cabin, and now the trees, they have nine-foot branches rather than two-foot branches. You see the evolution of the landscape every time and that’s pretty neat.”

Jones and his wife, who he began dating in the ninth grade, are passing on family camping traditions and their love of nature to their son.

“A lot of it for me right now is I see myself trying to recreate some of the experiences I had,” Aaron Jones said. “Whether that’s walking through the woods or hiking to a specific destination – we’re introducing him to parts of the park we love.”

The Lake Michigan shoreline is especially important to them.

“My wife is a rockhound and she loves to get out and walk the beach. With that comes some teaching moments for our son,” he said. “I remember when I was a kid, my dad one year took a big, strong magnet to the beach, showing me how all the black stuff – the iron filings on the sand – would stick to the magnet. He put the filings in a bottle filled with water so we could wave the magnet around and see the magnetic field. I did the same thing with our son and made bottles for him to take to his kindergarten class.

“It’s important to me that he gets an appreciation for nature,” he said. “We’ve got one shot of protecting this planet from ourselves and learning to respect the resources … I don’t know a lot of 6-year-olds who can identify a Hemlock tree, but he can.”