Cheboygan County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Cheboygan County

I-75 enters Cheboygan County from the south and exits across the Mackinac Bridge — the only Michigan county the Interstate touches on its direct Straits of Mackinac approach, making this the canonical RV staging county before crossing into the Upper Peninsula. The bridge itself is the world's fifth-longest suspension bridge by total length (26,372 ft, just under 5 miles end to end), with 552-ft main towers and a 199-ft midspan clearance above the Lake Michigan-Lake Huron junction; Mackinac Bridge Authority published wind-restriction protocols cap any tow-vehicle-plus-trailer combination above 65 mph, and full bridge closure to high-profile vehicles is triggered at sustained 35 mph crosswinds (typically 10-15 closure days per calendar year per the MBA log). Cheboygan County covers 715 sq mi between Lake Huron's Mullett Bay south to the Pigeon River State Forest, wrapping the Inland Waterway (a 40-mile chain of lakes and rivers — Burt, Mullett, Crooked, Pickerel, Black — navigable end-to-end by small boat between Cheboygan and Conway, the longest continuous inland boat route in Michigan).

Cheboygan (population 4,659, the county seat) sits at the Cheboygan River-Lake Huron confluence and runs the only US Coast Guard small-boat station between Alpena and Sault Ste. Marie. Cheboygan State Park on Mullett Bay accepts rigs to 50 ft with electric hookups, 76 sites on the Michigan State Parks reservation system; the loop is the most popular pre-bridge staging point among rig travelers headed to the UP, filling 4 months out for any July-August weekend. Black Lake on the county's southwestern edge holds Michigan's only legal lake-sturgeon-fishery — a 7-fish total annual quota distributed across a single February spear-fishing window, with Michigan DNR closing the season the moment the quota is hit (sometimes within 90 minutes of opening per DNR fisheries reports). Pigeon River Country State Forest 25 miles south holds the only free-roaming elk herd east of the Mississippi (550-head per DNR aerial survey 2023).