French Bay Trail

Summary

French Bay Trail is the walking route down to French Bay, on Beaver Island’s southwest shore. It is one of three trails in the archive that end on a Lake Michigan beach.

The bay has been reached on foot rather than by maintained road for a long time, and the trail is the reason French Bay appears in the record as a picnicking and camping place without ever having a road to it.

The route

No mapped geometry is held. OpenStreetMap carries French Bay, North French Bay Road and South French Bay Road, but no way of this name, and no walked GPS track covers it. The route below is published in a 2004 shoreline survey and walked in a 2019 guide; it has never been mapped or surveyed into this archive.

The 2019 guide has the approach turning west off West Side Road onto South French Bay Road and continuing to where it meets North French Bay Road at an unmarked road going left, about a mile in. The trailhead is about half a mile down that unmarked road, just past a private dwelling, and is itself unmarked. The trail opens in a partly overgrown field, turns left, and drops a steep embankment; from the foot of the drop it runs through woods to the beach. The guide gives the trail as about half a mile, with another half mile added if a walker parks back at South French Bay Road.

The 2004 survey describes the same descent from the other direction: the beach is “down a steep hill off an old unimproved road, blocked by beaver ponds.” Fifteen years and two independent observers agree the last stretch is steep. They differ on the beaver ponds, which the 2019 account does not mention.

Access and ownership

The trailhead is unmarked and sits just past a private dwelling, and the approach is an unmarked road. A walker following this route passes close to somebody’s home; treat the last stretch of the approach as private unless signed otherwise.

The bay itself was surveyed in 2004 as a public shoreline tract. That survey’s short-term plan was explicit that no access should be developed “without a careful assessment to provide access that preserves the iris and closes the trail to vehicles of any kind,” and it called for a parking area, a re-sited trail and signage. None of that is recorded here as having been built, so the 2019 arrangement — park on the road, walk in — is what the ground offers.

The bay holds an abundance of dwarf lake iris, a threatened species. Stay on the tread.

The foot path is partly a decision, not just neglect. In November 1988 a property owner asked the Road Commission to make the road drivable again. The report records that the road “has not been drivable for many years,” that endangered species had made the area their home, and that the Commission stopped work once told. It then records the island’s own preference: “Many people want the road to be abandoned and to keep the access to French Bay a foot path as it has been in the past years.” The Commission left the question to the island.

The species were not named in 1988. Whether they are the dwarf lake iris the 2004 survey found is not established here.

Evidence and limits

Three dated points across thirty-one years, none of them a survey: a 1988 road dispute, a 2004 shoreline assessment, and a 2019 walked account. No geometry, no GPS track, and no trail-association sheet. The route’s line is therefore described but not drawn, and the archive cannot say where it runs to better than the turn-by-turn above.

Whether the trail the 2019 walker took is the same line the 2004 survey wanted re-sited is not established.

Added 20 August 2026. Recent changes