Twenty-Two Miles of Somebody’s Stubbornness: The Hart-Montague Trail

Twenty-two miles of asphalt does not sound like an accomplishment until you learn it was the first of its kind in the state, and that it exists because one man from Shelby got outvoted and bought the thing himself.

That’s the short version. The long version has orchards in it.

The William Field Memorial Hart-Montague Trail State Park runs from Montague north to Hart — roughly twenty-two paved miles through Oceana County, which calls itself the Asparagus Capital of the Nation and means it. The corridor was a railroad first, laid in 1872, then dismantled a century later and left for dead. William Field was a fruit grower and a county commissioner in the early 1980s. He wanted the dead line turned into a trail. His fellow commissioners did not. So in 1982 he bought the corridor himself and handed it to the state — and Michigan, which had never paved a rail-trail before, paved the northern half in 1989 and the rest by 1991. The legislature got around to putting his name on it in 2014 — fifty-some years late for the railroad, thirty-some late for Field. Nobody out here is in a hurry.

What you ride through is farmland doing its actual job. Apple and cherry orchards. Asparagus fields in their ugly, productive spring. Dairy pasture, pine, hardwood, a Christmas-tree farm near Rothbury that smells like December in July. The trail threads four small towns between the endpoints — Rothbury, New Era, Shelby, Mears — each one a place to get water and stop pedaling for a minute. New Era has Country Dairy, which will sell you ice cream you did not earn on a flat trail but will eat anyway. The grade is close to nothing. It was a railroad, and railroads hate hills.

Start in Montague. The trailhead sits at the east end of Spring Street, downtown, next to the Trailway Campground — parking for something like seventy cars and a restroom that works, which on a rail-trail is not a small thing. Walk two blocks first, to the corner of Dowling and Water, and look up. Forty-eight feet of weathervane, topped with a replica of the Ella Ellenwood, a schooner built in 1869, back when this town shipped lumber instead of hosting cyclists. Largest weathervane in the world — or so Montague says, and no one has come to argue.

Then head north. The whole run to Hart is a day if you’re honest with yourself about lunch and the wind, which comes off Lake Michigan and does not care which way you’re going. Ride out with it and you’ll pay coming back. Most people turn around at New Era or Shelby and call it enough. It is enough.

Come in late September. Everybody rides it in July, sweating, swatting, fighting the same headwind — and July is fine, July is a fair month, but it is not the month this trail was built for. September is. The mornings come in cold enough for a jacket you’ll strip off by ten. The orchards hang heavy and the whole corridor smells like apples going soft on the ground, which is cider and rot at the same time, and both are correct. Fall color hasn’t peaked. It’s about to. You’re a week early — and that’s the right week.

The house we keep in Montague is a short roll from the Spring Street trailhead, close enough that you can leave the car parked all weekend and let your legs do the driving. Come back sunburned on one side, from the one direction the trees didn’t cover. The full write-up on the town lives in the Montague guide, and if you want to know where to eat after twenty-two miles, we wrote that down too in Where to Eat in Montague.

The asphalt was warm when we started. By the weathervane it had gone cool. That’s the whole ride — you leave in one season and get back in another, and the bike doesn’t care, and neither, after a while, do you.

Stop at Country Dairy in New Era. Get the ice cream.