M-119 north of Harbor Springs is not one road with one problem this fall. It is three separate stretches of pavement in three separate conditions, and the difference between them is not how bad the damage looks. It is whether the state can tell you when it ends. One stretch reopened three weeks ago. One has a firm return date of next summer. One has no date at all, because the ground underneath it is not entirely the state's to fix.
If you live between Good Hart and Cross Village, that distinction is not trivia. It decides which errands take an extra twenty minutes and which ones might for the foreseeable future.
The Stretch That Reopened on Schedule
The section between West Stutsmanville Road and Terpening Road, just north of Harbor Springs, closed in April after spring flooding started eating away at the slope beneath the roadway. The Michigan Department of Transportation treated it as a straightforward, if expensive, engineering job: a $300,000 project to install a new retaining wall and guardrail along two damaged segments. Work started June 23, and MDOT reopened the road to all traffic on September 3.
It is open now, but not finished. Crews are still completing restoration work with single-lane closures and traffic regulators in place, so budget a few extra minutes if you catch a flagger on a weekday afternoon. This is the version of "closed" that behaves the way most road repairs behave: a diagnosis, a contract, a construction window, a reopening.
The other two closures do not follow that pattern.
The One With a Real Date
South of Cross Village, near Division Road, a culvert failed overnight on April 13 after heavy rain and snowmelt, taking a section of roadway with it. This is the more severe of the two remaining closures in terms of physical damage: a bridge washed out, not just a slope that started to slide. Traffic has been detoured onto Island View Road and North State Road since that morning.
The difference is that MDOT has committed to a repair window. The agency has said this section will stay closed until summer 2027, which is a specific, unusual thing for a road agency to say about a bridge rebuild this early. It means the design and construction plan already exists in some form, even if the work has not started. If you live north of the closure and rely on the State Road route into Cross Village, that arrangement is not temporary in the way a detour usually implies. It is the commute for at least the next two construction seasons.
The One Nobody Can Schedule
The stretch known locally as Devil's Elbow, just south of Good Hart, is the one worth paying attention to, because it does not behave like the other two.
It closed later, after a washout on June 29, weeks after the Division Road and Stutsmanville damage was already being repaired. MDOT attempted a stabilization there. A storm in late July washed that attempt away. There is no second repair date on the calendar, and the agency has not offered one, because the damage extends down the slope beyond the road's right-of-way, meaning the fix isn't purely a construction question anymore. It may require agreements with adjacent property before MDOT can even design a repair.
That is a different category of "no timeline" than "the contractor hasn't been scheduled yet." It is "we tried once, it failed, and the boundary of what we're allowed to repair doesn't match the boundary of what's broken."
| Stretch | Status | Detour | Expected reopening |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harbor Springs to Good Hart (Stutsmanville to Terpening) | Reopened September 3, 2026 | None, though single-lane work zones remain | Open now |
| South of Good Hart (Devil's Elbow) | Closed since June 29, 2026 | West Stutsmanville, Townline, Church, and Robinson Roads into Good Hart | No timeline given |
| South of Cross Village (Division Road) | Closed since April 13, 2026 | Island View Road and North State Road | Summer 2027 |
MDOT is reportedly planning to bring in a consultant to study erosion, drainage, and slope stability along the entire Tunnel of Trees corridor, not just the failure points. State Sen. John Damoose, who represents Harbor Springs, discussed the scope of the storm damage with MDOT's North Region Engineer on the July 1 edition of the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, which is a fair signal that this has moved past a routine maintenance item and into something the region is tracking at the state level. If the whole bluff is unstable in more than these two spots, this fall's map may not be the last version of it.
What This Actually Changes Day to Day
The practical part is which destination sits on which side of which closure, because the two detours do not serve the same places.
If your errands run through Good Hart, the detour via West Stutsmanville, Townline, Church, and Robinson Roads still gets you there. The Good Hart General Store is open on its usual schedule and still functions as the community's post office alongside its bakery and deli counter, a role it has held since 1934. Woollam Family Nature Preserve and Turtle Moon Farm sit on that same detour loop.
Trillium Woods Coffee, just before Middle Village, is a different situation entirely. The shop reopened after being forced to close during the worst of the washouts, but traffic still is not permitted past it from the south. If you're coming from Harbor Springs, that stretch of M-119 is a dead end at the coffee shop's doorstep, not a through route. Reaching it now generally means approaching from the north.
Legs Inn in Cross Village is the clearest case of a business that has effectively lost its main road. It is open noon to 8 p.m., closed Tuesdays, through October 25, but M-119 is not the way in anymore. The detour runs through State Road or Levering Road from the south instead. For a restaurant that has spent decades as the reason people drive the Tunnel of Trees in the first place, that is a meaningful change in how people actually arrive.
South of all the closures, the stretch of M-119 north of Harbor Springs never stopped functioning normally. Thorne Swift Nature Preserve, Pond Hill Farm, OTIS Harbor Springs, and Birchwood Farms Golf and Country Club are all reachable exactly as they always were.
Timing an Outing Around the Work Zones
Fall color along this corridor typically peaks in the second and third weeks of October, which means the next few weekends will bring the heaviest traffic onto detour roads that were never built to carry it. West Stutsmanville, Townline, Church, and Robinson are narrow, two-lane township roads, and the reopened Stutsmanville stretch of M-119 itself still has single-lane work zones with flaggers directing traffic.
A weekday, especially a Wednesday or Thursday, moves through those choke points with noticeably less friction than a Saturday. It also happens to line up with Legs Inn's schedule, since Tuesdays are its one day closed. If color and a stop at the Good Hart General Store or Legs Inn are both on the agenda, that midweek window does double duty this year in a way it wouldn't in a normal season.
None of this is permanent in the way a bridge collapse sounds permanent. Two of the three closures have real end dates, even if one of them is a year and a half out. But Devil's Elbow is the reminder that a road built along a bluff above Lake Michigan is only as stable as the ground under it, and that ground has now failed twice in the same spot in one season.
If you've been watching how this stretch of shoreline is holding up and you're curious what a property along it is actually worth this year, Coldwell Banker Fairbairn Realty can walk you through a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk.
