Available for pick-up or shipping from Horizon Books in Traverse City. Price includes tax.

Northern Michigan is a place, like all places, in change. Over the past half-century, its landscape has been bulldozed, subdivided, and built upon. Climate change warms the water of the Great Lakes at an alarming rate—Lake Superior is now the fastest-warming large body of fresh water on the planet—creating increasingly frequent and severe storm events, altering aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, and contributing to further invasions by non-native plants and animals.

And yet the essence of this region, known to many as simply “Up North,” has proved remarkably perennial. Millions of acres of state and national forests and other public lands remain intact. Small towns peppered across the rural countryside have changed little over the decades, pushing back the machinery of progress with the help of dedicated land conservancies, conservation organizations, and other advocacy groups.

Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain.

Praise for Up North in Michigan:

Named to the 2022 Michigan Notable Book list 

Finalist, Midwest Book Award, Non-Fiction–Nature (2022)

“Dennis is now the dean of the region’s literature, taking up the mantle from writers like Jim Harrison, he grounds readers in the rhythms that ring familiar to those who spend time outdoors in the North. Author of “The Windward Shore ” and “The Living Great Lakes,” among others, he illustrates the tension between longing to know a particular piece of ground intimately over a lifetime against the urge to explore new territory.” —Glen Young, Petoskey News-Review