SHORT VERSION: This guide is a reflection of a lifetime spent kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, skiing, and snowshoeing around northern Michigan and a desire to share our love for northern* Michigan’s quiet sports.

We decided to concentrate on biyaking–using a bicycle, instead of two motorized vehicles, for the shuttle between the put-in and takeout when kayaking–because of the numerous websites already covering the other silent sports. Besides, biyaking, a niche sport with very few dedicated websites, is one of our favorite things to do (and the only way we have kayaked 35 (and counting) Michigan rivers).

Through this website, an informal online guide, you will find:

-Recommended outings with information about location, approximate distance, highlights, difficulty, maps, and anything else that strikes our fancy. (Click here for more information on how to use this online guide.)

-An occasional essay focusing on a river, forest, or recreation area.

-Reprints of my magazine articles about kayaking or mountain biking.

-Lists of favorite rivers or trails, like my favorite six downhills for mountain biking.

In the end, we want Northern Michigan Biyaking to be a jumping off point for anyone interested in the unique combination of kayaking with bicycling available in northern Michigan, from casual tourists to seasoned natives, a sampler plate, so to speak, of this magnificent slice of Michigan.

~Erin Fanning and Keith Radwanski

LONG VERSION: When I first visited Michigan in the winter of 1996, I anticipated a landscape of endless auto factories and a wasteland of smokestacks with the only potential highlight being a visit to the birthplace of Motown.

Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration; still, I did have a few preconceptions. As an Idahoan, I’d assumed that Michigan couldn’t compare to the recreation of my mountain state, but, as I soon discovered, the Michigan my husband Keith, a native Michigander, unveiled had little in common with my industrial stereotype.

Instead, I found myself mountain biking on frozen singletrack and breaking trail with our snowshoes at woodsy parks. And the farther north we traveled, the better it got with miles and miles of uninterrupted forest shrouded in snow and groomed cross-country trails in almost every town. We skied on Mackinac Island, climbing up to the Fort and gliding past Arch Rock, and snowshoed the North Country Trail, rambling through a frozen world of muted grays and greens, the silence interrupted only by the wind.

A year later, Keith and I were contracted with Globe Pequot Press to write Mountain Biking Michigan (published in 2002), immersing ourselves in Michigan’s other seasons.

We literally rode every conceivable trail we could find from the Ohio-Indiana border to the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, pedaling along singletrack bordered with pink and white trillium, climbing steep hills canopied with green foliage, and crunching over autumn leaves in a kaleidoscope of colors.

To put it simply, I was charmed by Michigan’s four seasons. With 11,000 inland lakes, 6.5 million acres of state and national forestland, 3,251 miles of Great Lakes shoreline, 36,350 miles of streams, and 35,000 mapped lakes and ponds, Michigan is truly an outdoor-lovers paradise.

We eventually settled on Lake Emma, a remote lake in northeastern Lower Michigan, and spent hours and hours traveling around northern Michigan, both in the winter and summer, altering between kayaks and bikes; snowshoes and skis.

And now that we are retired, we want to share our love for northern* Michigan’s quiet sports. We decided to concentrate on biyaking–using a bicycle, instead of two motorized vehicles, for the shuttle between the put-in and takeout when kayaking–because of the numerous websites already covering other silent sports. Besides, biyaking, a niche sport with very few dedicated websites, is one of our favorite things to do (and the only way we have kayaked 35 (and counting) Michigan rivers)

Through this website, an informal online guide, you will find:

-Recommended outings with information about location, approximate distance, highlights, difficulty, maps, and anything else that strikes our fancy. (Click here for more information on how to use this online guide.)

-An occasional essay focusing on a river, forest, or recreation area.

-Reprints of my magazine articles about kayaking or mountain biking,.

– Lists of favorite rivers or trails, like my favorite six downhills for mountain biking.

In the end, we want Northern Michigan Biyaking to be a jumping off point for anyone interested in the unique combination of kayaking with bicycling available in northern Michigan, from casual tourists to seasoned natives, a sampler plate, so to speak, of this magnificent slice of Michigan.

~Erin Fanning and Keith Radwanski

*For now, the website will only cover river biyaking in Northern Lower Michigan; however, we might include the Upper Peninsula and Southern Michigan sometime in the future.