Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

Raelynn Terrian has a dark purple, 1998 Jeep Cherokee with a lift kit. A sticker on the window says “Not my boyfriend’s Jeep.”

This Friday, the self-described "Jeep fanatic" will hop in and drive across the bridge from her Mackinaw City home to meet in St. Ignace with more than 1,000 people in 600 other Jeeps from all over the country. Then they'll all cross the Mackinac Bridge together.

It’s the second annual Jeep the Mac parade across the bridge, and 22-year-old Terrian, who grew up in Mackinaw City, cannot wait.

“It’s literally like a dream come true,” she said. “You’re surrounded by people that love the same thing as you do and have the same passion. And you’re going over a monument..”

There are at least 17 special crossings planned on the five-mile Mackinac Bridge this year. Besides the annual Labor Day Walk, there are runs, a bike events and parades of antique tractors, big rigs, Mini Coopers and all-terrain vehicles. There's even a vintage snowmobile crossing in December .

“It’s an evolving trend,” said Bob Sweeney, secretary of the Mackinac Bridge Authority, which maintains the bridge, collects tolls and sets rules for safe crossing.

Big rigs were first. This September, semi trucks will make their 22nd annual crossing.

Tractors were next, with the 10th annual crossing on Sept. 8.

The idea of parading vintage tractors came up one night as Bob Baumgras and family members sat around the campfire on a visit to the Upper Peninsula. He threw it out there, but didn't get an enthusiastic response.

“My one daughter, who runs a lot of the paperwork now, kind of laughed,” he said. “She said, ‘Who would haul a tractor 200 miles just to go across the Mackinac Bridge?’”

A lot of them, actually. More than 1,300 vintage tractors – at least 40 years old – crossed the bridge in last year’s parade. The event stages on the Mackinac City side of the bridge; those who participate must belong to tractor clubs.

“This year we have a club in Texas signed up,” Baumgras said. “We’ve had a club in New York signed up, even California and Alaska.”

The tractor event has become so popular that the bridge authority may consider capping participation at 1,500 vehicles, Sweeney said.

Baumgras is often so busy with organizing that he doesn’t make it across the bridge on a tractor himself, but this year will be different. He’ll lead the parade on a Farmall H with his 16-year-old granddaughter, Haven Canze.

Some tractor owners deck their machines out with flags and signs, others just let these icons of farming speak for themselves. There are the familiar green-and-yellow John Deere colors as well as vintage Fords, Allis-Chalmers and Farmall vehicles. Some look like they’re babied and kept only for show. Others look like they were plowing a field the day before.

Almost without exception, Baumgras said, drivers and their ride-along passengers are having fun.

“They about break their arms waving to people,” he said.

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Managing traffic flow

Sweeney said most events are planned for the off-season when they’ll cause the least possible disruption to traffic flow.

“Primarily from mid-June until the end of September, we’re pretty much booked with all these events that we want to accommodate,” he said.

The Mini Cooper event takes place in August, when bridge traffic is high. A total of 581,197 vehicles crossed the bridge in August 2016. That works mostly because they’re street-legal vehicles that don’t need much special accommodation, Sweeney said.

The tractor event – where vintage vehicles are required to have the capability of going at least 10 mph – works in September because traffic is lower. A total of 464,394 bridge crossings were recorded last September. Last April, a total of 226,833 cars crossed the bridge, which makes this weekend’s Jeep event eaiser to handle.

Technically, street-legal vehicles such as trucks, Mini Coopers and Jeeps don’t need special permission to cross the bridge as a group, Sweeney said. But alerting authorities can help smooth the crossing with perks such as escorts at the front and back of the parade, a dedicated traffic lane and pre-paid fees so participants can skip the toll booths.

Nearly 600 Jeeps were registered online as of Saturday, said Emily Ogden of the Drummond Island Tourism Association. About half of those are expected to continue east to the island, which has 100 miles of off-road trails and a Saturday Jeep event including food, music, a Jeep scavenger hunt, vendors with Jeep-related products and seminars on topics such as four-wheeling with pets, communicating with CB radio and equipping your jeep.

Terrian, who also races vintage snowmobiles, said the Drummond Island trails are fun for everyone, even if their vehicles aren’t equipped with lifts like hers.

“There’s a ton of trails from easy to super hard,” she said. “It’s always pretty wet over there, and a lot of the trails are just really mucky swamp areas.”

Minis make for a big show

Ron and Nancy Wilson of Lansing each have their own red Mini Cooper, named Bradley and Alice for the actor and the rock star. They'll take the cars and two grandsons with them for the Aug. 5 Mini on the Mack event. In 2015, Mini drivers gathered to try to break a Guiness world-record for the largest bridge-crossing of Mini cars. The current record-holder: 1,450 Mini cars that crossed a bridge in London together. A 2015 attempt on the Mackinac Bridge fell short of beating the record with just 1,319 vehicles.

The Wilsons were there for that event, too, Ron said, and there was still plenty of fun to be had. They’ve also participated in other Mini events. People swap Mini stories in the staging area in Mackinaw City, admiring cars decorated with everything from vinyl cut-outs of the bridge to a bright yellow minion motif.

“To drive over the Mackinac Bridge for us, we do it all the time,” Wilson said. “For these people, many of them have never driven over a bridge like that. The beautiful view coming up, the vista, is just amazing for them.”

Bring on the snowmobiles

Snowmobile are not street-legal, so Charlie Vallier had to take his request for a parade to the Mackinac Bridge Authority board.

The board approved a plan that included replacing front runners on the vintage machines with wheel kits so they could run on pavement. Vallier is director of Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum in Naubinway, about 45 minutes west of St. Ignace. It has a collection of vintage snowmobiles and snowmobile history.

“We live, eat, breathe snowmobiles,” said Valier, director of Top of the Lake Snowmobile Museum in Naubinway, about 45 minutes west of St. Ignace. It has a collection of vintage snowmobiles and snowmobile history.

The museum has displayed some of its vintage machines for the past several years at the tractor crossing in September. He and a friend put wheel kits on their snowmobiles to escort one of the tractors into St. Ignace, and that sparked an idea.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we cross the Mackinac Bridge like the tractors are doing?’” Vallier said.

Thirty-nine vintage vehicles made the crossing for the first time on Dec. 17.

“It went great and everybody had a blast,” Vallier said. He handed out a few awards: best costume, youngest rider, oldest rider. He’s already planning for this year’s crossing, scheduled for Dec. 16, hoping to boost the number of snowmobilers participating.

“The word is out,” he said. “We have a Facebook page, and the snowmobile world is telling one another.”

He said the lure of the bridge is obvious to just about anybody.

“I bet if you were a dog walker and you got to walk dogs across the bridge you’d be happier than happy.”

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey.