Doty’s Camp Trail

Road

Coordinates

45.6096° N, 85.5921° WGoogle Maps: Doty’s Camp TrailDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

trailstransportationrecreationModern eratoponymy

Within

Beaver Island

Media

Beaver Island History Map, 1978 revision

Summary

Doty’s Camp Trail is the 2015 map name. Current OSM has several Doty’s Trail segments, so those lines are shown only as an approximate proxy rather than a claim that the names are identical.

A January 1972 Beaver Beacon report independently refers to Doty’s Camp. The 1978 History Map dates the camp to about 1907–1910, but no inspected source corroborates that span; it remains an attributed map claim.

What the trail sheets show

The route runs between two established endpoints on Peaine Township’s own 2021 narrative guide, though the guide’s own passages disagree on the length of the southern leg by nearly a third of a mile.

Coming from the south, the guide’s “Doty’s Camp Trail, south field, Miller’s Marsh” entry says: “South of the Miller’s Marsh parking lot and viewing area 0.2 mile is a two-track to the east… This is Doty’s Camp Trail, and Doty’s Camp is 2.0 miles east on this wide two-track.” A separate “Doty’s Trail” entry in the same guide’s Middle Trails section describes the identical starting point — “Doty’s Trail originates in a field south of Miller’s Marsh at West Side Drive” — and gives the same leg as 1.5 miles to Doty’s Camp. A third passage, describing the route down from the MASH sign, corroborates the shorter figure: from Doty’s Camp, “the rest (left fork) is open and an easy two-track road to the south field at Miller’s Marsh and West Side Drive (1.5 miles).” Two of the guide’s three passages agree on 1.5 miles; the 2.0-mile figure is recorded here rather than silently dropped.

North of the camp the guide is consistent: from Doty’s Camp it is 0.82 to 0.85 mile to “the Y,” where North Lake Trail joins on the township’s account, and the trail continues north to “eventually join/become” Camp #3 Trail, reaching Fox Lake Road/West Side Drive 5.74 miles from the trail’s own Miller’s Marsh origin.

Doty’s Camp itself is described as “clearly a deer camp/drinking area with an outhouse, a huge stone fire pit, plastic chairs and a Weber grill.” The approach from the south is wet enough that “someone has placed many lengthwise logs in it,” and the guide records “several major water holes preventing easy motorized access between Doty’s Camp and Greene’s Lake Road,” while access from West Side Drive is “generally good.”

Access and ownership

No Beaver Island Trail Association cue sheet is dedicated to this trail. The association’s July 2019 North Lake/Buffalo’s Camp sheet only notes, in passing, that walking northwest on Buffalo’s Camp Trail “you will reach the end of the trail where it meets Doty’s Camp Trail” — it does not describe Doty’s Camp Trail’s own route, distances, or land status. The 2024 Peaine Township Parks and Recreation Plan places much of southern Peaine Township — the area this trail crosses, between Miller’s Marsh and Camp #3 Trail — within the Beaver Islands State Wildlife Research Area (Michigan DNR); the archive holds no parcel-level record specific to this trail’s own corridor.

The township’s narrative guide describes the approach to Doty’s Camp as crossing standing water serious enough that someone had laid logs across the trail by hand, and separately notes “several major water holes preventing easy motorized access between Doty’s Camp and Greene’s Lake Road” — evidence of informal, unofficial trail maintenance rather than a managed public facility. No source held here documents a right-of-way instrument for this trail.

There are no designated public ORV trails on Beaver Island (see Trails and trail-making).

As walked in 2019. a walked account contributed in 2019 turns west off West Side Road about a quarter mile south of Miller’s Marsh, with parking available immediately after the turn onto the trail. A public toilet is recorded at Miller’s Marsh, just north of the trailhead.

Evidence and limits

This trail is published: the 2015 map names Doty’s Camp Trail, and the 2021 township narrative describes it in the three separate passages quoted above. It is mapped only approximately: current OpenStreetMap carries several “Doty’s Trail” segments, shown here as a proxy rather than a confirmed match to the printed route, which is why geometry_status is approximate rather than mapped. No walked GPS track held here is tagged to this trail, so it is not walked in the archive’s own sense, and no LiDAR or field search has been recorded against it either.

The same 2019 guide that gives this trail’s approach and parking left its description and distances blank, as it did for Camp 3 Trail — the two trails that share an orange blaze. Both gaps are recorded rather than filled.

Map status

The displayed line is current OSM data retrieved 2026-08-02 and explicitly qualified as approximate. Pending update: reconcile Doty’s Camp Trail with the 2021 Peaine descriptions and a current field or official map track.

Documented associations

No source-confirmed non-road entity is linked yet. Exact-name research leads remain in scripts/audit_road_links.py; a name collision is not treated as a road association.

Research status

The local newspaper and website corpus contains exact-name mentions in 0 file(s). Those files are research leads; the relation layer is added only when the surrounding source text establishes that the record involves this road.

Added 2 August 2026 · revised 7 August 2026. Recent changes