Briar Hill closed many years ago. Just visited for the first time in years.

**gnjeepn** · June 11th, 2016, 10:00 AM

Many years ago our club use to visit Briar Hill on our color tour. Briar Hill is in the Cadillac Mesick area and Is the highest elevation in lower Michigan. They closed this probably 8 or so years ago. The Wife and I are also Geocachers and this spot is an earth cache location on geocaching.com. While there were some hill climbs off the north side of this spot the service road coming in from the south east was a gradual climb of decent to or from the top. The spot were this service road comes out is bermed with dirt rocks and trees now. This is understandable in typical US Forrest service fashion for closing roads. The closest you can get to the top is a half mile. What My wife and I encountered on our hike along that old service road is pure waste and destruction from the US Forrest service. The berms are every 10 to 15 feet with intentionally downed trees the entire length of the road. The entire half mile we hiked was this way. It was clear to my wife and I that not only did they not want motor-vehicle traffic they don't want any kind of traffic at all including foot traffic. The average person would have turned around because even on foot navigating the obstacles was very challenging.

What really angers me is the amount of money this must have cost to do. They could have put that money to better use. While I have seen other examples of the Forrest service trying to keep people out this one is probably the worse I have ever encountered. The pictures I have don't do what we encountered justice.