The missing Yalmar hill trail marker tree, taken about 1980, is seen. (Photo courtesy of the Marquette Regional History Center)

MARQUETTE — Unlikely as it seems, Yalmar Hill in eastern Marquette County and the Superstition Mountains in Arizona have something in common: Both are associated with lost treasures. The prospector who found the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona, died in 1892 without revealing the location of his fabulously rich gold mine. Many have searched, but no one has found it.

So far as we know, there are no precious metals at Yalmar hill. The treasure there is a Native American trail marker tree, which was deliberately bent and shaped to provide a signpost. The value of this living artifact is measured not in dollars or heaps of gold ore, but rather in terms of its cultural and historical significance. Like the Lost Dutchman Mine, it was found and then lost. We hope that someone reading this article will recognize the tree and help us solve the mystery of its location.

In 2021, when the Marquette Regional History Center began its project to locate, photograph and document surviving trail marker trees in the county, Marquette resident Wayne Thompson read our Mining Journal articles. He filed the images of those distinctive shapes away in his brain. In 2024, while going through a pile of old photographs, Wayne realized that one of them showed what appeared to be a trail marker tree.

I visited Wayne’s home, where he told me the story behind the photograph. In the early 1980s, he and one of his buddies were hunting deer “near Yalmar hill” when they spotted an unusual, crooked tree. They stopped for a few minutes while Wayne took a photograph of his friend standing under the tree. Wayne went back to the vicinity 45 years later to look for the old bent tree but was unable to find it.

We would like to add this tree to our inventory of Marquette County trail markers but cannot do that until we actually see it. We hope that it’s still there, but it may have died, been struck by lightning, cut down or bulldozed out of existence. All we know for sure is that a tree with high probability of being shaped by human hands long ago, was growing in eastern Marquette County in 1980.

Thompson recalls that the bent tree was near the landmark referred to as Yalmar hill, in section 2 or 3 of Skandia Township.

Until we can locate and examine this tree, it will remain in the “lost” category. Any reader who can shed light on this mystery is encouraged to call the Marquette Regional History Center at 906-226-3571.

There is nothing mysterious about the location of another tree we visited late last year. It stands near the west outskirts of Big Bay, alongside a dirt road near the gate of the old village dump. Chocolay Township residents Robb and Becky Coolman reported this tree. They became interested in trail markers after seeing a fine old specimen in the woods owned by their Green Garden Road neighbor, Kay Reader. The Reader tree was among the first to be documented by the History Center in 2021.

The Big Bay tree has had a hard life. Sometime in the past when an adjacent tree was cut down, a chainsaw plunged several inches into its trunk. Additional damage was done when a wooden pallet was nailed onto the horizontal section of the tree to make an elevated hunting platform. A line of rusty nails going up the trunk shows where wooden crosspieces made a crude ladder. But remarkably, it endures.

Until the discovery of this tree, every other trail marker we know of in the county has been a sugar maple. The Big Bay tree is a black oak. This is unusual, but not surprising. It is known that Native Americans favored long-lived hardwood species with limber saplings when selecting young trees to bend. Here in the upper Midwest, there are three such species: maple, oak and yellow birch.

The lost Yalmar hill tree and this latest find at Big Bay, are quite similar in appearance. Both have high first bends at about seven feet, and short horizontal sections. We believe that there are many more trail marker trees to be found in Marquette County. They may resemble these trees, or they may have been bent into other unusual shapes to convey different messages. Perhaps an observant mushroom hunter or hiker will spot something of the sort this spring before the trees leaf out, and call the Marquette Regional History Center.