If you live in Honor, you already know the week we're talking about. Tubers still show up at the M-22 bridge on Saturday afternoon, but by Tuesday the parking is easy again. The Cherry Bowl is still running double features. The hatchery grounds are quiet. And on the third weekend of August, the village briefly puts itself back together for the National Coho Salmon Festival before the first spawning fish show up in the Platte.
That stretch, roughly the ten days between the last big tubing weekend and Labor Day, is the most Honor thing about Honor. Here is how to use it.
Launch at the Weir, Not the Bridge
The tubing crowd tends to sort itself by launch point, and locals almost always start below Loon Lake. There is a reason for that. Riverside Canoes offers two tubing trips on the Lower Platte River: a one-hour float called the Loon and Walk, and a two-to-three hour trip from the Weir to the township park at Lake Michigan. The Weir option skips the section that most first-timers regret.
That regret is Loon Lake. Anyone who has floated the M-22-bridge route on a windy afternoon knows the story. The current disappears in the lake, and if the wind is up you paddle with your hands the length of a small inland lake before the river picks up again. The workaround is well known to residents and rarely printed in the brochures: start the tube ride at the Fish Weir Launch, which is located beyond Loon Lake, to avoid getting stuck by a headwind and slow-moving lake current.
The other local move is timing. Riverside puts it plainly on their own site: to avoid congestion on the Lower Platte River during peak season, plan your trip before 11 a.m. or after 3 p.m. In late August, the 3 p.m. launch is the sweet spot. You lose the busloads of morning tubers, the water is warmest, and you finish at the mouth in the long slanted light that makes the walk down to Lake Michigan worth the shuttle logistics.
If you would rather skip the outfitter shuffle entirely, the Honor Trading Post and Tipsy Canoe Rental and Brew both work the same river with their own shuttles, and both are easier to book on short notice this side of Labor Day than they are in July.
The Cherry Bowl Is Still the Cherry Bowl
The best news of the 2026 season, if you missed it, is that the Cherry Bowl is still the Cherry Bowl. When the drive-in went on the market last year for $625,000, it made statewide news for a reason. According to MLive, the Cherry Bowl is one of just eight drive-ins still operating in Michigan and the only one in the northern part of the state, out of an estimated 300 surviving drive-ins throughout the U.S.
New owner Mindi Jarman bought it with the explicit intention of leaving it alone. She and her husband plan to move to northern Michigan permanently to run the theater, keep their boat in Frankfort, and have spent summers there for years; the Cherry Bowl was where Jarman attended her first drive-in movie, and it was her desire to preserve things from the past that motivated her to buy the business. The 1950s concession stand, the original speakers, the mini-golf course out front, the PG-13 ceiling on the marquee: all intact.
What is new is the willingness to do the occasional bit. PickleFest: The Sequel ran on July 24 and 25, 2026 at the Cherry Bowl, following the inaugural PickleFest in 2025. If that already happened before you got around to reading this, the point stands. This is a drive-in that will, for two nights a year, crown a Pickle King. The rest of the season it plays Toy Story 5 and Spider-Man with real butter on the popcorn. In August, get there an hour before dusk. The lot fills up faster than it did in June.
Coho Festival Weekend: August 21 and 22
The Coho Salmon Festival is the reason August in Honor is different from August anywhere else in Benzie County. It is not a food truck festival with a fish theme. It is a village anniversary that happens to run on a fish.
Why the Village Cares
The short history matters, because it explains why the festival still draws people who have not lived here in decades. Coho salmon were introduced to Michigan in 1966 with the first planting in the Platte River. Honor became known as the birthplace of the freshwater salmon program because of the close proximity of the Platte River State Fish Hatchery. By the fall of 1967, fishermen were flocking to Benzie County, and Honor became the Coho Capitol. Three local men developed the idea of a festival to promote coho salmon fishing in Benzie County, and the first festival was held in October 1967.
That is not a marketing story pasted on later. That is the origin of a hatchery program that reshaped Great Lakes sport fishing, and the festival is the town's way of reminding itself who started it.
What Actually Happens
The Coho Salmon Festival is scheduled for August 21 and 22 in Honor. Live music both nights, a parade, a queen coronation carried forward from the 1968 tradition, and the kind of small-town programming that plays as charming when you already live there and as slightly bewildering when you do not. Park at the edges. Walk in. If you have not been in a few years, the crowd is a mix of returning summer families and the same neighbors you saw at the post office on Thursday.
The Hatchery, Before the Crowd
Here is the counterintuitive move for the last week of August. Go to the hatchery before the salmon actually show up.
The Platte River State Fish Hatchery is the working reason Honor exists on the Great Lakes fishing map. The facility was established in 1928 and converted to the state's main salmon hatchery in 1972, and Platte River is the main egg-take location for coho in the Upper Great Lakes. The show most visitors come for is the fall run: adult salmon returning to spawn from mid-September to late-October, which the public is welcome to watch. That is the crowd window.
The end of August is the opposite. The grounds are quiet. Grounds are open every day from dawn to dusk and hatchery buildings from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Open at no charge to the public. You follow the blue fish painted on the sidewalk, read the interpretive signage without a line behind you, and walk down to the weir before it becomes a viewing platform. It is a twenty-minute stop that resets how you think about the river you tubed last weekend. The hatchery address is 15210 US-31, ten miles east of Beulah, and the phone for group tours is 231-325-4611.
If you want to see the salmon actually run, come back the last week of September. By then the parking lot is different, the weir gate is doing real work, and you will be jockeying for railing space with anglers driving up from downstate.
A Local's Order of Operations
If you were mapping the week, this is roughly the sequence that works:
- Sunday or Monday afternoon: Weir launch on the Lower Platte, 3 p.m. or later. Skip Loon Lake entirely.
- Tuesday or Wednesday evening: Cherry Bowl double feature. Bring a lawn chair, dusk is the tip-off.
- Thursday morning: Hatchery visit while it is empty. Bring good walking shoes for the paved loop out to the weir.
- Friday and Saturday, August 21 and 22: Coho Salmon Festival downtown. Walk in from the residential blocks.
- Sunday: Back to the mouth of the Platte at Lake Township Park. Coffee, no tube, watch someone else deal with the wind on Loon Lake.
That is not a bucket list. It is the shape of a week that only works because it is Honor, and only works in this specific stretch of the calendar. A month earlier the river is too full. A month later the hatchery is too crowded. The Cherry Bowl closes for the season not long after Labor Day. What sits in the middle, between the tubers thinning out and the salmon showing up, is the version of the village that residents remember when someone asks what it is actually like to live here.
That answer is worth guarding.
If you own a home in Honor and you are starting to think about what the next chapter looks like, whether that is another few decades on the Platte or something new, the team at Team Shimek knows this stretch of Benzie County the way locals do. Schedule a free consultation and we will talk on your terms, on your timeline.
