Danes Trail

Summary

Danes Trail crosses Garden Island, north of Beaver Island. It is the only named trail on the outer islands with a narrative description in this archive, and it passes the ruins of the island’s school and Catholic church.

The route

Described once, in a 1965 walking account, and cleared again in 2018. No mapped geometry and no walked track are held. The account has the party hiking east along the shore trail until it “tie[s] into the Danes Trail”, then heading back across the island, and finally returning to a fork meeting the trail they had started on — a circuit, though its length is not given.

Points of interest

The 1965 account records, in order: an abundance of wild strawberries along the trail; a large clearing holding “some remnants of buildings”, identified by “old school desks and a collapsed belfry” as the Garden Island School, then abandoned since the early 1930s; scattered apple trees; and at the fork, “another old building, its ends and sides flat on the ground with grass even growing out of its foundation”, identified as the Catholic church of Garden Island.

History

The trail was cleared by volunteers of the Beaver Island Archipelago Trails Association in August 2018, described at the time as removing years of deadfall and encroaching growth. That work followed a 2018 motion of the Northern Lake Michigan Islands Collaborative directing the Michigan DNR to work with the association and tribal governments on special-use permits for maintaining existing trails on Beaver and Garden islands.

Access and ownership

Garden Island is largely state land, and trail maintenance there is carried out under annual special-use permits rather than by right. The island holds Anishinaabe burial grounds and other cultural sites, and the record includes a formal statement from Miniss Kitigan Drum, Inc. opposing the clearing of any additional trails on Garden and High islands until cultural resources are surveyed and assessed. Visitors should treat the island accordingly.

Garden Island is reached only by boat, and the crossing is exposed.

Evidence and limits

One dated narrative from 1965 and one dated clearing in 2018, sixty-three years apart, with nothing in between and no map. Whether the trail cleared in 2018 follows the line walked in 1965 is not established anywhere.

Documented associations

No source-confirmed non-road entity is linked yet. Exact-name research leads remain in scripts/audit_road_links.py; a name collision is not treated as a road association.

Research status

The local newspaper and website corpus contains exact-name mentions in 0 file(s). Those files are research leads; the relation layer is added only when the surrounding source text establishes that the record involves this road.

Added 16 August 2026. Recent changes