The Inland Waterway - Black River Branch

 When you trace the Cheboygan River south from The Straits, you are going upstream.  A few miles upstream of the town, you come to The Forks, where the Black River joins the Cheboygan River.  The Black River is much wider than the Cheboygan River, so it's understandable that you might mistake it for the mainstream.  My satellite view calls this stretch the "Upper Black River", but this is incorrect.  The real Upper Black flows into Black Lake from the southwest.  It's a pretty small stream, so you will need to zoom way in to see it.  The Upper Black drains a whole lot of land, all the way to the county line, and likely beyond that, but I can't trace it any farther.  

Black Lake was much smaller before the Alverno Dam was built.  I don't know the date, but it was originally used to generate electricity.  Back in the 1970s, the power company didn't want the dam anymore, so they tried to get permission to remove it and abandon the site.  Turned out that there was an old treaty that required the dam builder and its successors to maintain Black Lake at a certain level forever.  The state might have taken it over for a while, I don't remember, but a private outfit ended up owning it and, last I heard, they were still generating on a small scale. 

Now we go back downstream until we return to The Forks.  The Black River is not really Black but, its water is noticeably darker than the Cheboygan River water upstream of The Forks.  This is not due to pollution, it's caused by natural tannin that leaches out of tree bark and other vegetation through which the Upper Black flows.  As previously noted, the Cheboygan River channel is narrower than the Black River channel, but it has a swifter current.  The Black River ends at The Forks, from there on down, it's all the Cheboygan River.  If we continue up the Cheboygan River channel from The Forks, we soon come to Mullet Lake, from where we will continue our journey in the next installment.