The newly revised Great Lakes Better Backroads Guidebook is now available for downloading. The manual is in its third edition and has recently been sent to all County Road Commissions in Michigan. It's a great resource for watershed groups, road maintenance personnel, engineers, and anyone interested in minimizing the impacts rural roads have on water quality. Huron Pines is thankful to the Great Lakes Commission for funding the update and printing of this important guidebook. 

 

The guidebook is available in three parts as a pdf file, click on any of the sections below. (Please note these are very large files.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(To receive a hard copy of the Great Lakes Better Backroads Guidebook, please send your request, along with $5, to Huron Pines, 501 Norway Street, Grayling, MI 49738.)

 

Road-stream crossings can be a major contributor of large quantities of sediment to Northern Michigan rivers. The majority of secondary roads or “backroads” are unpaved or graveled roads. Some backroads are maintained year-round while others are seasonal forest roads. Many of these roads cross small tributaries and feeder streams where large amounts of road-gravel and sand are deposited into the streams during precipitation events. Tributary streams provide crucial habitat for various trout species, prey fish, and insect communities. Excessive amounts of sediment entering tributary streams can result in a wider and shallower river channel, destruction of fish and aquatic insect habitat, and can lead to elevated water temperatures.

 

Such detrimental changes can appear to happen slowly over time and are subtle enough to go unnoticed for some time. Over time the stream can become severely degraded and is extremely difficult (and expensive) to restore.

 

Minimizing the effects before they become severe is the first and most important step in addressing the sedimentation of our rivers and streams. Over the years, Huron Pines has partnered with numerous County Road Commissions to implement Best Management Practices to improve road-stream crossings in Northern Michigan.

 

BMPs are guidelines used to ensure that project design, construction, and maintenance are conducted in such a way as to have minimal impact on natural resources. Such practices can be structural, managerial, or vegetative in nature, depending on the scope of a particular project. Oftentimes, several types of these techniques are used together as a "System of BMPs."
In addition to protecting ecological resources, proper use of BMPs at road/stream crossings has been found to actually reduce long-term costs.