The rail-trail crossroads at Reed City

Two railroads used to cross here, and you can still stand on the exact spot where they did. That is rarer than it sounds. Most of Michigan’s dead rail lines got paved into single trails that run one direction and quit. This is a junction — two long-distance rail-trails meeting at right angles, the seam under your boots at the old depot on the east edge of downtown.

The building is a fake and does not pretend otherwise. It is a reconstruction, a replica of the 1892 Grand Rapids and Indiana station that stood on this ground before the wrecking crews got it, put back up long after as a welcome center — a restroom, a rack of brochures gone soft at the edges. Before the highways, this was where two railroads split the state open. The Pere Marquette ran east and west, hauling out of Ludington, millions of board feet of white pine going out that way before the forests ran out. The Grand Rapids and Indiana ran north and south, Grand Rapids up toward Cadillac. Freight, timber, people who had somewhere to be. The trains have been gone for decades. The geometry stayed.

North to south, that is the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail now, 92 miles from Comstock Park on the edge of Grand Rapids to Cadillac. Since the spring of 2025 the whole run is paved, asphalt from one end to the other, which the state will tell you makes it the longest paved rail-trail in Michigan — the longest that is actually paved, anyway, which is not the same thing as the longest. From the depot, south is 13 miles of pavement to Big Rapids and a college town’s worth of noise. North is the better direction. Le Roy, then the trees closing in, then Cadillac, and fewer people the farther you go.

East to west is the Pere Marquette State Trail, and the name matters, because there is a different Pere Marquette trail two counties over and locals here just call this one the Pere Marquette. 55 miles, Baldwin at the west end, Clare at the east. Sort this out before you clip in. Point east toward Evart and you get 12 miles of clean asphalt. Point west toward Baldwin and the pavement quits on you inside a couple of miles — 17 miles of crushed limestone the rest of the way, packed hard, fine under a fat tire and misery under a skinny one. Same trail. Two different afternoons, depending on which way you aim.

If you have only the one afternoon, ride east. Evart is 12 miles out, paved the whole way, with its own restored depot at the far end to turn you around, a bathroom and a bench and a reason to have gone somewhere. Twenty-four miles round trip is not nothing. But it is a railroad grade, which means there is no grade to speak of — the trains needed it flat and you inherit that. The work is all in the wind and whatever you told yourself about being in shape.

Winter changes the ownership. Once the snow sets, the Pere Marquette belongs to snowmobiles, groomed for sleds, and the quiet you came for gets swapped for two-stroke engines carrying north through the cold. The White Pine keeps a few stubborn people on fat tires who insist twenty degrees is fine. I have been one of them — breath freezing to a scarf, pretending it was a good idea. It was not a good idea. I would do it again.

You park at the depot, 200 North Chestnut, a block off the main drag, and you will not need directions once you are close, because the trails funnel you straight in. A short walk off is Rambadt Park — thirteen sites with electric, warm showers, a band shell nobody is using on a Tuesday. From there a footpath runs along the Hersey River to a little suspension bridge the town calls the Little Mac. All of it built to let you stop, which on a rail-trail is the whole negotiation. How far out before you turn around and earn every mile of it back.

Come in October. The pavement drains and stays rideable when the crushed limestone west of town goes to soup — the maples north toward Le Roy do the thing maples do, and the air off the Hersey River bottom turns cold enough by four to make you regret the shorts. Book a night or two at one of our Michigan chalet rentals, Hersey River Retreat, and ride out of the driveway instead of loading a car at dawn. The rest of what the place is actually for, where to eat and where the water is, lives in the Reed City guide.

Walk it if you would rather. Out past the north edge of town the White Pine crosses the Hersey River on a covered bridge — 151 feet, built in 2000, laid over the trusses of the old railroad span it replaced. A fake depot. A covered bridge that is a railroad wearing a costume. None of it is what it says it is.

Stand on the X anyway.