Northwoods Field Station

Northwoods is Hiram’s off-campus field station located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Built by a group of Hiram students and faculty in the 1970s, this rustic cabin location in the Hiawatha National Forest is frequently used by Hiram faculty and students during the 3-week and summer sessions.

The station is twelve miles from Lake Superior at the western boundary of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The buildings include six sleeping cabins and a main lodge that can house up to sixteen students and three faculty families. The camp is on the shore of Little Lost Lake and is surrounded by federal lands of hardwood and conifer forests, meadows, bogs, a river, and more than a dozen other undeveloped lakes, all within a two-mile hike of the station. At Northwoods, the emphasis is on living in harmony with nature, a low consumption lifestyle, and appropriate technology—including wind power and solar water heating. Summer course offerings vary and have included field biology, field botany, geology, environmental studies, natural history, and photography. Other recent offerings include: astronomy, storytelling, writing, literature, and leadership.

Hiram’s Northwoods program encourages students to undertake individual projects and internships in diverse areas, such as water quality monitoring; fisheries survey and habitat improvement; research and management of reproduction in the bald eagle, common loon, and sandhill crane; as well as in local oral history and folklore.