The White Pine Trail Out of Big Rapids

The asphalt holds the day’s heat long after the sun quits, and by evening the river air slides in under it — cold, mineral, carrying silt and cut grass and a diesel note that hasn’t had a source in a hundred years. That is the tell. You are standing on a railroad.

The Grand Rapids and Indiana ran its first train up to Big Rapids on October 1, 1870, and for forty years the line existed to move one thing south: white pine, the tall stuff, felled by men who did not live long and stacked and loaded by men who lived shorter. The grade you walk on now was cut for that. Flat, because a loaded log train hates a hill — straight, because the railroad bought whatever it took to keep it straight. The pine went. The line stayed — hauling tourists for the Pennsylvania Railroad once the forests were stumps, then hauling less, then nothing, until the state took the corridor in the mid-1980s and let it go quiet.

What it is now is the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail — 92 miles of asphalt from Comstock Park, on the north edge of Grand Rapids, to Cadillac. The longest paved trail in Michigan. Third-longest paved rail-trail in the country, if you keep score, which the corridor does not. The Big Rapids-to-Reed City stretch got paved first, back in 1998. The last raw mile went under asphalt in the spring of 2025, and they cut the ribbon that July — the whole thing finished end to end, a job that ran twenty-seven years and outlived some of the people who started it.

String the route on a map and it reads like a timetable nobody keeps anymore — Rockford, Cedar Springs, Sand Lake, Pierson, Howard City, Morley, Stanwood, then Big Rapids, then Reed City and Le Roy and Tustin and the finish at Cadillac. Most of those were whistle stops. Some still have the depot, or a replica of it, or a plaque on the ground where the depot stood. You pass the ghost of a scheduled world at whatever speed your legs allow.

You reach the Big Rapids trailhead the way freight reached it, off US-131, exit 139, then M-20 east through downtown until you cross the Muskegon and the depot staging area sits a tenth of a mile past the light. Park there. Head north and about a mile out the trail lifts onto its longest bridge, 319 feet over the Muskegon, the water brown and fast and loud underneath — this is the part nobody photographs well and everybody remembers, the temperature dropping as you cross, river cold coming up through the deck. Keep going and you hit Paris, where the trail runs straight through Paris Park: camp cabins, a canoe launch, a fishing spot on the river. Head south instead and the town’s Riverwalk feeds you in along the water before the corridor commits to farmland and the long straight toward Reed City, where the White Pine meets the Pere Marquette State Trail at a rebuilt depot — and if your legs and your judgment failed at the same time, you could keep going east toward Clare.

I came to do the flat easy ten out of town and back. I did not do that. The thing about a rail grade is that it never tells you you’re climbing, because you aren’t — there’s no summit to turn you around, no honest hill to say enough — so you keep unspooling north, one milepost, another, the river on your left, until you look at the light and understand the arithmetic of the return trip all at once. Twenty-three miles. My legs filed a complaint the next morning.

Come in October. The line was cut through hardwood as much as pine, and the maples along the water turn before the ones inland do — a week, maybe ten days, when the light comes in sideways and cold and the smell shifts from cut grass to wet leaf and woodsmoke. Bring a windbreaker you will take off in the first mile and put back on at the bridge. The trail is flat and paved and forgiving, which means you go farther than you meant to, which means the walk back is longer than the walk out. Everyone learns this once.

Base out of Big Rapids and the trail is a five-minute drive from most of where you’d stay. one of our Michigan cabin rentals, Timber Bluff Retreat, sits close enough to the depot to ride to it, which matters after a day when nobody wants to load a bike back onto a car. The Big Rapids page has the rest of the homes and the honest version of the town. Want to know where to eat after a day like that — the Where to Eat in Big Rapids note covers it. Want the town first, read Staying in Big Rapids.

The pine is gone. The grade the pine paid for is still here. Walk it.