6 Michigan Fall Color Drives That Aren’t Worth the Weekend Traffic
Fall color looks great in a photo.
It looks a lot less great from a bumper-to-bumper line, and some of Michigan’s best-known drives can ask more of your weekend than the leaves give back.
These are the Michigan fall color drives that aren’t worth the weekend traffic, if you ask us.
1. Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive
Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive locks every visitor into the same one-way loop, and there’s no shortcut around a slow car ahead.
Nobody can pass.
The 7.4-mile loop caps speed at 20 mph and runs past twelve numbered overlooks.
Drivers pull off, park, and wander back toward the shoulder for one more photo of Glen Lake.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the park that owns the drive, logged more than 1.5 million visits in a recent year, the National Park Service says.
Leelanau County sits far enough north that its color often peaks before southern Michigan’s does.
That head start pulls the weekend crowd in early too.
How Michigan’s Color Timing Works
Cooler nights reach Michigan’s northernmost counties weeks before they reach the state’s southern border, and that temperature gap is what pushes peak color into the Upper Peninsula first every year.
Michigan’s tourism office tracks that pattern on its color map. Peak color moves south all season, from the Upper Peninsula down to the Lower Peninsula’s southern counties last.
By the time the Upper Peninsula is past its best week, color is often still arriving three hours south.
That’s why so many of these drives sit within a few hours of each other, on both sides of the Mackinac Bridge.
2. Tunnel of Trees
Tunnel of Trees is Michigan’s best-known fall color drive, running along M-119 for about twenty miles north of Harbor Springs.
Michigan’s transportation department reopened the stretch between West Stutsmanville Road and Terpening Road in September, after months of repair work on the slope beneath the roadway.
Two other sections of the route stay closed to through traffic.
Near Division Road, between Good Hart and Cross Village, a washout from spring flooding won’t be repaired until summer 2027, the department says.
At Devil’s Elbow, a separate washout from late June flooding reroutes drivers onto West Stutsmanville Road, Townline Road, Church Road, and Robinson Road.
No repair timeline has been set for that stretch.
No detour restores the view along either closed stretch.
The department describes the open sections as about 18 feet wide, with no centerline and barely a shoulder.
That’s built for a slow drive, not a season’s worth of detour traffic.
The department says local residents and businesses inside both closed stretches still have access.
General through traffic doesn’t.
3. Mackinac Bridge
Every drive on this list past the Tunnel of Trees leads to the same five-mile crossing.
The Mackinac Bridge is the only way over the Straits of Mackinac by car.
That single span is the bottleneck every color-tour driver bound for Brockway Mountain or Tahquamenon Falls has to clear first.
More than 455,000 vehicles crossed the bridge in October of the most recent year on record, the Mackinac Bridge Authority reports.
The bridge unsettles enough drivers that the Mackinac Bridge Authority runs a paid driver assistance service around the clock.
If you’re one of the drivers who can’t stomach the height, a staff member will drive your car across for $10, any hour of the day.
Add a Saturday’s worth of color-tour traffic to that mix, and the crossing becomes the slowest part of your whole trip.
4. Brockway Mountain Drive
Brockway Mountain Drive climbs to 735 feet above Lake Superior over ten winding miles near Copper Harbor.
Copper Harbor’s tourism office calls it the highest paved road between the Rockies and the Alleghenies.
That’s a bold claim to defend on a two-lane road.
Visit Keweenaw, the county’s tourism bureau, describes the pavement itself as rough, with potholes, minimal shoulder space, and blind corners in spots.
By that same account, a wrong move on one of those blind corners leaves you nowhere to recover.
A caravan of weekend leaf-peepers stopping short at every pull-off is exactly the kind of traffic the bureau’s warning describes, not just an inconvenience.
Psst! How much do you know about Michigan’s roads and parks? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Michigan Roads & Parks
Answer these questions on Michigan’s roads, parks, and geography. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Which Michigan state park holds the title of the state’s first?
5. Old Mission Peninsula Wine Trail
Old Mission Peninsula Wine Trail runs the length of a single road, Peninsula Drive, past more than a dozen tasting rooms between Traverse City and the lighthouse at the tip.
Grand Traverse Bay splits around Old Mission Peninsula into its East and West arms.
The drive runs the ridge between them, past vineyard rows and cherry orchards that turn red and gold alongside the water on both sides.
Every car headed to one winery passes every other winery's driveway first, since there's no second road onto Old Mission Peninsula.
Call ahead if you're bringing a group of six or more.
That's what the trail's visitor FAQ recommends for its busiest seasons, summer and fall, not a warning it hands out for a slow Tuesday.
Traverse City sits at the base of Old Mission Peninsula.
The city also doubles as the finish line for the region's other big color drive, M-22.
A fall Saturday stacks both crowds onto one narrow stretch of road.
6. Tahquamenon Falls Loop
Tahquamenon Falls Loop follows M-123 to one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi River, Michigan's tourism office says, then back around to rejoin M-28 near Newberry.
One road in, and the same road back out.
In fall, Michigan's Department of Natural Resources says many visitors come to hunt and to see the autumn color.
Every one of those visitors parks in the same small cluster of lots at the Upper and Lower Falls, since the loop road offers nowhere else to leave a car.
The falls themselves stretch more than 200 feet across, wide enough that a packed parking lot doesn't improve the view from the boardwalk.
The falls run the color of root beer, not from pollution, but from tannins leaching out of the cedar and spruce swamps upstream.
Go on a Tuesday afternoon instead, and you'll get the same brown water and the same 200-foot drop, minus the wait for a parking spot at the Upper Falls lot.
What Caused the Tunnel of Trees Washouts
Two separate storms are behind the washouts still closing parts of Michigan's Tunnel of Trees drive this year.
A culvert failure in April washed out the section near Division Road.
A slope failure the same month left the roadbed near West Stutsmanville Road too unstable to drive on safely, Michigan's transportation department says.
Crews spent months rebuilding the slope near Stutsmanville with a new retaining wall and guardrail, a $300,000 project that reopened to traffic in September.
Late June brought a second round of flooding, and that's what washed out the road at Devil's Elbow, a few miles away.
Final restoration work near Stutsmanville will still bring occasional single-lane closures with traffic regulators on duty, the department says.
None of that repair work touches the two sections still closed, and the department hasn't given Devil's Elbow a timeline the way it has for Division Road.
9 Signs Someone Was Raised in Michigan No Matter Where They Live Now
Michigan's transportation department credits the state's signature Michigan Left with cutting crashes at those intersections by 30% to 60%, and it's a habit that doesn't transfer anywhere else.
These are the small habits that mark someone as Michigan-raised, no matter how many other states they've lived in since.
9 Signs Someone Was Raised in Michigan No Matter Where They Live Now
7 Perks Michigan Legislators Receive That Voters Rarely Hear About
A Michigan legislator collects a separate $10,800 expense check every year on top of a $71,685 base salary, set by the same commission that sets both numbers.
These are the perks that come with the job that many voters never hear about.
7 Perks Michigan Legislators Receive That Voters Rarely Hear About
