Good Hart, Michigan Things to Do in August
August 6, 2026
August 6, 2026
For most of the past two decades, a Good Hart August has been read from the seat of a car. M-119 delivered visitors through the Tunnel of Trees, drivers pulled up at the little red store, and the hamlet performed its part of a scenic drive that starts in Harbor Springs and ends at Legs Inn. This August, that read does not work. The road is broken at both ends of the village, and the drive-through version of Good Hart has been cut out of the summer program.
What is left is the resident version. It has always been here, quieter than the postcards, organized around a porch on Friday and a trail on Sunday. Reading the summer through that lens is more useful than mourning the through-drive, and it clarifies what actually holds this place together.
The two closures sit on opposite sides of Good Hart, which is what makes the hamlet feel like an island rather than a bypass this year. According to MDOT's July 13, 2026 update, both segments are expected to stay closed until summer 2027.
The practical effect is a Good Hart with two doors that no longer swing. Residents pass through on the detour or approach from the interior road grid. The store's own bulletin during the earlier Ball Hill washout was blunt about disaster tourism, and the same request holds this summer: leave the crews alone, and let the village be what it is on a weekday.
Good Hart Market Days is in its 17th season this summer, and it remains the closest thing the hamlet has to a weekly heartbeat. It runs Fridays on the store's grounds and stays deliberately small. Vendors sell for free, the store's own marketing carries their names into the week ahead, and the private "Friday Market Message" email list is how regulars find out who confirmed for that week.
The names that turn up on the porch are worth knowing by heart, because they explain what the market actually is. Lowell Beethem of Beethem Farms brings Michigan maple syrup and local produce. Little Traverse Tileworks, run by Cora Smith, shows handmade ceramic art. Through the Fire Fine Crafts, from Maria Arman, brings pottery and artisan soaps. These are not gift-shop resellers with a table out front. They are the people making the object.
There is a specific reason Market Days rewards residents more than visitors in a summer like this one. Without the drive-by traffic, the porch is quieter, the vendors have time to explain a piece, and the store's Friday hours run to 5 p.m. instead of the 2 p.m. weekday close that governs the rest of the week. A resident who lives ten minutes off M-119 can leave the house at 3:30, be back with dinner, syrup, and a piece of tile in under an hour, and never sit in a single car queue.
The other half of a Good Hart weekend has always been the preserves, and this is the summer to remember why the hamlet is surrounded by so much protected ground. Little Traverse Conservancy has spent decades assembling the network, and two of its properties sit within a short drive of the store.
Goodhart Farms Nature Preserve is the deep one. It runs to roughly 595 acres of meadows, hayfields, and maple, beech, and ash forest, with old orchards and pine plantations threaded through, and the rolling terrain opens onto views of Lake Michigan. There are three parking areas, 7½ miles of marked trail, and 5½ miles that get groomed in winter. Only the Robinson Road lot is plowed. The land was assembled by John Hannah, the former Michigan State University president, then bought by Ed and Maureen Mayne in 1994 and donated to the Conservancy in late 2002, which was the largest gift the organization had ever received at the time.
Thorne Swift Nature Preserve is the shoreline one. Thirty acres, 300 feet of Lake Michigan frontage, a nature center, dune and pond observation platforms, an amphitheater, and three boardwalk trails that together add up to about a mile and a half. Parking is off Lower Shore Drive with a small fee for non-township residents.
The two preserves are the correct pairing for a Sunday, and not just because one is inland and one is on the beach. Goodhart Farms is a place to walk for an hour without deciding anything. Thorne Swift is a place to sit for an hour after you have decided. In a summer without the through-drive, resident traffic on the trails has been lighter than the property's 2019 or 2022 August pattern, and the parking at the Robinson Road entrance rarely fills before mid-morning.
The trick to a Good Hart weekend has always been the sequence. Store, then trail, then store again. The road being closed does not change the sequence. It just removes the people who were only doing the middle third.
A resident who reads the store's weekly hours the way other people read a weather app knows the summer schedule ends in September. Monday through Thursday the counter closes at 2 p.m., Friday and Saturday run to 5 p.m., and Sunday stays dark. That rhythm is the tell. It is a shop built to serve locals first and second, and to catch weekenders in the shoulders of the day.
The other tell is what the kitchen is starting to make more of. The chicken and beef pot pies that carry the store's name year-round shift from a side item in July to the anchor of the case by late August, and they ship nationally in insulated containers to the diaspora of former summer residents who cannot make the drive up. If you have not paid attention to the Made-in-Michigan gift basket program, this is the month it stops being a novelty and starts being how out-of-town family members order a Christmas Eve dinner in advance.
None of this is on a menu board at the road. It sits inside the store, on a printed sheet by the register, and in an email newsletter that the store has been running quietly for years. That is the layer of Good Hart the closures have not touched.
The through-drive version of the hamlet was always the smaller story. A store built in 1934 by Cliff Powers, run since 1971 by Carolyn Sutherland and now with her husband Jim, was never engineered to be a rest stop. It was engineered to be a general grocery, a bakery, a deli, a post office, and a gathering place for a village whose full-time population would fit in a school gymnasium. The M-119 audience simply layered onto that.
Take the drive-by audience away for a summer, and the layering underneath is easier to see. Market Days is a farmer-and-maker network the store has curated for 17 years. The preserves that ring the village are the result of family decisions made 20 and 30 years ago to hand land to a conservancy rather than a developer. The store's weekday close at 2 p.m. is a schedule written for the people who live within five miles.
A property in Good Hart has always drawn its value from all of that, and not from the passing traffic. This summer is a useful confirmation.
If you own a home in Good Hart, or are thinking through what a Northern Michigan property is actually worth in a year when the drive is broken, Genna Hill is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
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