Boulderdash, photo by hausfrau23.

A few month’s ago on Absolute Michigan we featured the quirky & amazing Earl Young and his Charlevoix cottages. One of the articles we linked to from the Freep in 1973 said:

Stone houses seem to sprout as naturally as dandelions from the soil of this pleasant Lake Michigan resort community.

And they do because of an already legendary 84-year-old man named Earl A. Young, who built them all.

For more than half a century Young has combed lonesome fields and dusty quarries searching for the odds and ends of nature. He blends stones and timber with an architect’s skill and a geologist’s respect for his raw material, and so far he has fitted more than 40 local landscapes with his art.

“l have a very strong feeling for stone,” Young explained recently as he sat in his wood-paneled office on the lower level of one of his most flamboyant creations, the Weathervane Inn, a local restaurant.

“Stones have their own personalities. People say I’m crazy when I say so, but they really do. Why I found a stone that weighed 160 tons. It was formed 350 million years ago at the bottom of a warm sea and was carried here 10,000 years ago by glaciers.”

Click through for lots more and links to great resources for seeing some of these architectural oddities including the Earl Young Collection at the Charlevoix Library and Park Avenue Prowl, which has a walking guide.

Check this out big as a boulder and in hausfrau23’s Up North Vacation – September 2010 slideshow.