The Muskegon River at Evart

The fishing platform hangs out over brown water and the boards stay wet a week after the last rain, because the Muskegon pushes a cold breath up through the gaps that does not quit. June, July, does not matter. Stand on it a while and your forearms go cold before the rest of you catches up. Below, the current works. You hear it before you see anything move, a low steady drag of water over gravel and sunk timber, the sound a river makes when it means it.

This is the second-longest river in Michigan. Two hundred sixteen miles, start to finish, out of Houghton Lake up in Roscommon County and running southwest across the middle of the peninsula until it lets go into Lake Michigan at the city that took its name. It comes through Evart under US-10 and slows down, which is the part that matters here. Wide water. The kind you can stand in the middle of a town and fish.

Two parks, one river

Riverside Park is two parks, and the river is the thing that splits them. The west side is seventeen acres in the southeast corner of town — a splash pad, ball fields, shuffleboard courts nobody under sixty seems to use, two pavilions, a walking path down the bank. The east side is thirty-three acres of mostly woods, bought in 2003 with a Natural Resources Trust Fund grant, a trail loop worn in by walkers and joggers and the occasional bike. You cannot drive from one to the other without going back through town and over the highway. The river does not care that the city owns both banks.

Each side has a deck built out over the water, and the city calls them viewing platforms — but everybody fishes off them. That is the honest use. A place to stand over the current without waders, drop a line, and find out whether the smallmouth are in a mood.

What’s actually down there

Do not come expecting trout. The cold blue-ribbon water is up in the tributaries — the Hersey and the little feeders — and this stretch of the main river runs warm and slow by comparison. What it holds is smallmouth bass, and a lot of them. The DNR has been running electrofishing counts on the upper river since the 1990s and the smallmouth turn up every pass. June through August is the window, the fish on, the water warm enough to wet-wade if you are stubborn about it. Northern pike work the whole system, May into September, holding in the slack behind timber. Some walleye. Channel catfish down in the deep bends, if that is your idea of an evening.

None of it is glamorous. This is warmwater fishing off a town platform — not a guided drift boat at a two-hundred-dollar day rate. Bring your own worms. The fish is the same fish either way.

Getting on the water

The launch is on the west side, a ramp down to the river with boat and canoe access both. You can back a trailer down it or carry a kayak to the edge and shove off. Parking is the park’s own lot, which on a July Saturday fills with tubers and their coolers and on a Tuesday in September holds two trucks and a heron.

If you did not bring a boat, there is J&J’s River Run, a livery at 205 East 7th Street, a few blocks off the water. They rent canoes, kayaks, rafts, and tubes, put you on the Muskegon, and run the shuttle so nobody has to strand a second car at the takeout. Store hours run nine to eight Monday through Saturday and noon to eight on Sunday, by appointment until Memorial weekend and full time into the summer. Call first. The number is 231-287-0008 and the river does not keep office hours.

The campground sits on the bank, electric and water at every site, open the first of May through the end of September. You can sleep twenty feet from the current if standing on the platform did not get you close enough.

When to come, and where to sleep

Everybody floats in July. July is when the tubes come out and the ramp backs up and the water down the middle of the park turns to a slow parade of coolers and sunburn. Fine. But the fishing is better after they leave. Come the first two weeks of September, when the smallmouth are still on, the water is warm enough to paddle in a t-shirt, and the crowd that clogged the ramp in July is back at a desk somewhere. The mornings turn cold enough to want a jacket you can shed by ten. The river smells like iron and cut weed and wet gravel, and there is nobody on the platform but you.

Base yourself on the water. We keep a house up the bank, close enough that you can fish before the coffee is done and be back before anybody else is awake. The rest of what the town is and is not — where to eat, when the rail-trail is worth the legs — lives on the Evart page, and the seasonal write-up covers the color once the water goes cold.

Walk out on the platform first. Let the cold come up through the boards.

Then decide.