You’re walking the railroad that named the town

The old railbed east of Evart holds heat the way a driveway does — you feel it come up through your soles by the second mile, off asphalt that used to be steel. No shade worth the name. A red-winged blackbird works the ditch, a diesel pickup drops off on US-10 to the north, and then there’s nothing but your own footfall and the tick of the grade cooling where a cloud crosses. That’s the Pere Marquette State Trail. You are walking the railroad that named the town you’re staying in, which is either a nice piece of symmetry or a joke the map is playing on you. Maybe both.

Here’s the part worth knowing. Sears was Orient first, after the township, and it stayed Orient until the Flint & Pere Marquette put a depot down in 1870 and renamed the place for a railroad surveyor. The rails are long gone. The line isn’t. It runs 55 miles now, Baldwin to Clare. The piece you want is paved the whole way from Reed City through Evart and on toward Clare — 38 miles of asphalt over old railroad ballast. West of Reed City the pavement quits. Crushed limestone the last 17 miles into Baldwin, where the money or the patience ran out. A town outlived the reason it existed, and the reason came back decades later as a place to walk a dog.

You don’t step out your door onto it. Sears sits three and a half miles east of Evart, between US-10 and the grade, so you drive the four minutes into town and start at the restored depot. Downtown Evart has the depot, a river, and parking nobody fights over. Riverside Park runs the bank of the Muskegon there — cedar, cold water, the green smell of a river in August. The shoulder of the highway in gets buggies as often as trucks, because Sears has kept an Amish community for a long while, and you’ll hear hooves and smell horse before you see one. Head west from the depot and at twelve miles you reach Reed City, where the Pere Marquette crosses the Fred Meijer White Pine Trail — 92 of its own paved miles, Comstock Park to Cadillac, closed up end to end in 2025. Two rail-trails, one X on the map, a welcome center in another old depot with a bathroom that works.

Understand what a rail grade is before you love it. It is flat. It is straight for miles at a stretch, because a locomotive won’t climb and won’t corner, and the men who cut this line did not build it for your scenery. What you get instead is distance and quiet and a surface a stroller or a bad knee can handle — the honest kind of walking, the kind you do to think or to not think. Bring water. There is more sun than tree out there.

If you want the quiet without pavement, that’s harder, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Osceola County holds a good stretch of Pere Marquette State Forest — public land, but scattered in parcels the DNR laces together with sand two-track rather than any single named trail. No trailhead sign. No loop with a brochure. You park where a forest road leaves the county road and you walk it, jack pine and oak and the flat silence of ground nobody is trying to sell you a stay on. Take a map you trust. Take more than you think you need.

Closer in, on Big Lake below town, there’s Crittenden Park — a county park, not wilderness, with modern and primitive campsites and a shoreline to walk when the rail grade feels too much like a hallway. Kids, a boat launch, somebody’s charcoal going at six in the evening. Not the point of a trip. A fine slow morning inside one.

The house we keep near Sears drops you inside that four-minute run to the Evart depot and about twenty to the Reed City crossing, which is as close to the trail as anyone needs to be. Come in October. The corn’s down by then, the grade opens up on both sides, and the maples along the Muskegon do the one loud thing this landscape does all year. Summer works if you start before the asphalt takes its heat — before nine, coffee in the car. For the town itself, such as it is, the Sears guide has the rest.

The railroad made this town, then walked off and left it. Now the line’s a footpath. Walk it.