Copper Country State Forest is a state forest in the west-central Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It is operated by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Like other Upper Peninsula state forests, Copper Country is made up of clear cut parcels of forest land in thinly settled portions of counties such as Baraga County and Dickinson County. The state of Michigan acquired these land parcels after they had been stripped of their old growth trees in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; today, the state manages the land for reforestation. In many cases, the second-growth trees that have sprouted throughout Copper Country land are pulpwood trees such as aspen and birch.
In addition to pulpwood logging, the Copper Country land is valuable for active recreation, such as camping, fishing, and hunting. Many of the towns and cities of the Upper Peninsula have an active culture of whitetail deer hunting.
Famous quotes containing the words copper, country, state and/or forest:
“He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,”
—Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (1823–1896)
“So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,—the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breeding” respects only secondary objects.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The moose will, perhaps, one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns ... to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)