Valhalla & beyond

It was a lovely day. I was straddling my bike, looking south from Maguire Park, waiting for the signal to turn at Jolly Road. A stranger with an affable face and a tan jacket pulled his bike alongside me. Typical Sunday duffer, I thought.

Suddenly, he turned and bared his teeth. River Trail madness was upon him.

Cyclists, runners and strollers are discovering major new links and extensions that were added last fall to the crown jewel of Lansing’s park system. At Maguire Park, the system’s unofficial new hub, visitors load and unload bikes and head off on trails going in four directions.

Behind me, to the north, stretched five miles of river-hugging ribbon, starting from the Turner Dodge House in Old Town, winding through downtown Lansing, along the Grand and Red Cedar rivers and Sycamore Creek.

To the west, on my right, lay the newest stretch: the South Lansing Pathway, 5.8 miles of straight asphalt zooming all the way from Aurelius to Waverly road, freshly laid last fall. More a no-frills commuter trail than scenic ride, the new pathway lets you build up a fierce head of steam if the mood hits.

To my left was the trail’s latest frontier: the link to Delhi Township’s zig-zagging fivemile Sycamore Trail, completed November, heading south under I-96 to the woods and water of Valhalla Park.

Which way to go?

The stranger curled his finger and pretended to spray his mouth with silver paint, the prelude to martyrdom and glory in this summer’s other on-thetrail epic, “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

“I live, I die, I live again! To Valhalla!” he cried.

Nothing riles up a mild-mannered cyclist more than a new stretch of asphalt. Two fast-growing groups, the Friends of the River Trail and Lansing Bike Party, are supporting and enjoying the trail in exponentially growing numbers, along with tens of thousands of regular and occasional users.

In the second half of 2015, Ingham County will draw up plans for a county-wide network of non-motorized trails, funded in part by a new six-year trails millage passed last fall. The public will have a chance to weigh in on the process as Ingham County looks toward linking up with trails in neighboring counties and, in turn, a state-wide system.

This is the year of Valhalla and beyond.

The first gritty inch

Friday morning, bikers and moms with babies in strollers cruised along one of the oldest sections of the Lansing River Trail, a straight stretch along Cedar Street just south of downtown Lansing. In the 1970s, this was the first gritty inch in the brush-whacking, easement-hunting struggle to piece together the Lansing River Trail. Boxcar-sized oil drums were stacked here by the dozen.

“You couldn’t even see the river,” Jim Blair said. “It was a tunnel of trash and trees.”

Blair, 70, was among the pioneers who first threaded a non-motorized trail system into the motorized home of General Motors and Motor Wheel as a Lansing City Councilman from 1974 to 1999. Friday, the Grand was very visible, framed by a fringe of wildflowers and a ribbon of black trail. Blair sat on the loading dock in back of the 99-year-old Standard Oil distribution hub at the corner of Cedar and Kalamazoo streets, taking in the tranquil scene. Up to the mid-1970s, the river was backyard to dozens of factories, shops and lumberyards, a dumping ground for everything from rusting machinery to couches, washing machines and cars.

GM trucks pushed mountains of snow off the Elm Street Bridge — along with whatever was buried under the snow, from shopping carts to motorcycles. The river was tainted by sewage from the city and fly ash from the Board of Water and Light.

“It was a cesspool,” Blair said. “If you fell in without your rubber gloves, you had to get a tetanus shot.”

The oil drums and railroad tracks are long gone, and the Standard Oil building, which Blair owns, is home to the League of Michigan Bicyclists.

In the early 1970s, the Friends of the River, an early coalition of Lansing businesses and environmentalists, were looking for ways to make the Grand a fit habitat for humans.

“We figured that if the public can’t see the river, they won’t want to clean it up,” Blair said.

Urban trails are ubiquitous now, but in the 1970s, less than a handful of American cities were experimenting with them. Blair took the Lansing City Council on a bus trip to Toledo to see trails along the Maumee River. He studied another pioneering urban trail system in San Antonio.

Blair rallied the Council to approve the first section of the River Trail, from Riverfront Park to the Kalamazoo Street bridge.

“The first 10 years was just buying land, trading easements, getting rights of way,” Blair said. “It was everybody’s backyard.”

The nascent trail proved popular with bicyclists, so Blair pushed for a 10-foot width instead of eight. To make his point, he arranged for two bicyclists to pass each other in a hallway at City Hall before a City Council meeting.

Fortunately, Blair said, the city’s parks department took up about 20 percent of the city budget back then, with three landscape architects on hand.

Then, as now, the trail’s budget was a patchy quilt of federal grants, state and municipal funds and private donations. Besides Blair, its champions included city planner Jon Bauer, who proposed the project in 1968, Ted Haskell, the first parks director to supervise the project, and Douglas Finley, who, with Blair, led the charge against its many opponents.

A Parks Department map of the trail’s history looks like a link sausage of tiny parcels, laboriously finagled from businesses, factories and a now-defunct Conrail line along the river. Some businesses donated easements for a dollar.

Thanks to careful planning and patience, the trail’s six-mile main line is an unbroken string of underpasses and boardwalks with no at-grade crossings. A biker can ride from the Turner-Dodge House in Old Town all the way to MSU without stopping once or dodging one car — quite a feat in a town that cradled the automobile industry.

Crego-centric

The River Trail curled under Kalamazoo Street and hooked up with MSU´s trail system in 2000. The same year, another patchwork of tricky downtown links, including three bridges, brought the River Trail to historic Moores Park and southwest Lansing. About two miles east, a gorgeous, wildlife-rich ride from Potter Park, running south through Scott Woods Park to Hawk Island Park, was finished in 2008.

The spur to Hawk Island not only furthered the goal of linking the area’s most popular parks; it opened a lot of urban eyes to the potential of a larger trail system. Snaking through several habitats, from wetland to woods to open lake, it’s a birder’s paradise with owls, orioles, herons, kingfishers, goldfinches and even that punk-rocker of woodpeckers, the foot-tall pileated. I saw two of them at once on a walk last year, and that’s never happened to me anywhere else, even on hikes in the Upper Peninsula. (Check the Friends of the River Trail’s Facebook page for occasional birding tours.)

Deer criss-cross the trail regularly. In spring, trillium cover the hillside and mating carp splash in the shallows. Carpets of forget-me-nots run riot well into August. All of this is a 20-minute or so ride from downtown Lansing.

Last fall, some unfinished business from the 1980s was finally resolved, resulting in another new discovery for River Trail users. A new one-third-mile path branches from the River Trail just east of Aurelius Road to Crego Park, Lansing’s biggest park.

With its obscure location and oblique access, people have been slow to discover the park, according to Brett Kaschinske, Lansing Parks Department director.

Kaschinske joked (maybe) that members of his staff asked him to keep quiet about it.

“They know about it as their own little paradise,” he said.

Crego was closed in 1986 after industrial waste was found from testing of fire retardants. FMC Corp. of Philadelphia spent $8 million to clean up the waste.

The park is newly outfitted with walkways, benches, kayak landings and a fishing dock that stretches over the deepest part of 15-acre Fidelity Lake, funded by a $500,000 grant from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund and $250,000 from Lansing’s parks millage.

The park can also be reached by turning north from Mt. Hope Road onto an obscure stretch of Fidelity Road, across from Evergreen Cemetery, but that’s nowhere near as fun as finding it on a bike.

“It’s a great way to start out or finish your ride, on a bench overlooking a 15-acre lake,” Kaschinske said.

Gung ho

The River Trail is well suited to a solitary ride, but the trail has a social side as well.

Jeff Potter is a “gung-ho co-host” of Lansing Bike Party, an informal gang of cruisers modeled after Detroit’s Slow Roll, which often draws thousands of weekly riders.

Lansing Bike Party has mushroomed fast since it started in 2009, with a handful of MSU staffers going out for a bike ride and a beer after work. This year, the group leaped from 200 Facebook members to 1,000, with about 50 people on hand for each ride. Every week, the group sets out on slow cruises to destinations suggested by members. Potter said the rides go to “all points of the compass,” often keyed to musical events or new restaurants.

The group isn’t afraid of taking to the streets, but the River Trail, Potter said, remains “key” to bike culture in Lansing.

“We include the River Trail on nearly every ride,” he said. “It’s really nice for beginning riders. They don’t have to interact with cars.”

The group draws lifelong cyclists, social butterflies and curious duffers. They’re often the first to use a new stretch of trail.

Bike Party has been to Valhalla Park a dozen times already this year, once with a boom box blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The Valhalla ride is usually on Tuesday, but it’s best to check the group’s Facebook page to keep up with its sudden and unpredictable impulses. River Trail madness can’t be scheduled.

Meanwhile, the River Trail’s more buttoned down, semi-official support group, the Friends of the River Trail, is growing as fast as the Lansing Bike Party. The nonprofit started a year and a half ago when about a dozen River Trail fans got together, with the blessing of Mayor Virg Bernero, to brainstorm ways to support the trail. Now the group has about 120 members. About half are voting members, paying at least $50 in annual dues, and half are regular members, at $20 a year.

The Friends’ annual meeting for 2015 is set for July 13 at the Lansing City Market. Bernero spoke at last year´s meeting and is expected to come this year, too.

Tony Beyers of East Lansing, one of the group’s most active members, said there will be a lot to talk about this year.

“With the new (Ingham County Trail) millage, we have an opportunity to influence what direction it goes,” Beyers said.

The group has about $7,000 in dues and donations at its disposal as well. The first use of the money is a $2,000 informational sign and map at busy Maguire Park, with half paid by the Friends and half paid by the city.

Another new amenity for busy Maguire Park, a bike repair station with tools and an air pump, was paid for by $1,600 grant from the Tri-County Bicycle Association, with money raised by the Dick Allen Lansing to Mackinac bike ride, more commonly known as the DALMAC.

Spoking out

Urban trailblazers are resigned to patchy, fits-and-starts financing from multiple sources, but the Ingham County trails millage passed last fall promises a period of growth and stability. The millage is expected to bring in about $3.5 million a year, and the county will spend the rest of 2015 deciding how best to spend it.

Ingham County’s Trails and Parks Task Force, a panel of 11 county commissioners, hired a design consultant, Mannik & Smith, this week, to begin planning in July. Mannik & Smith is already working with the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance on planning trails.

“They’re going to help us spoke out and get us to other places,” said Timothy Morgan, Ingham County parks director.

This fall, the county will sort among existing plans for new trails, extensions and maintenance needs. Morgan said communities, townships, cities and the general public will be included in the planning process. (Watch the Ingham County Parks Department web site for notice of planning charrettes, with dates yet to be set.)

Morgan hopes to have a master plan in place by early next year, in time to write grants that would leverage money from the county trails millage.

Kaschinske has already sent Morgan a list of Lansing River Trail maintenance priorities, including a new underpass for Oakland Avenue and pavement fixes on the east end of the Lansing River Trail as it heads through the woods toward Kalamazoo Street and MSU. Kaschinske said he’d also like to enlarge the parking lot at Maguire Park, which fills up on many weekend afternoons.

The Friends group is pushing for a new boardwalk on a section of trail just west of Aurelius Road, where Sycamore Creek tumbles into the Red Cedar. The bottleneck of asphalt there is crumbling because of frequent flooding. (The detour, when necessary, is epic.)

Morgan said that the county has its sights on farther horizons.

Nothing has been decided yet, but the millage will probably help revive longplanned projects such as a link from the Lansing River Trail’s east end at MSU to Meridian Township and a southern link from Holt (and Valhalla) to Mason. Crossing US-127 will be a formidable engineering hurdle, but county consultants are studying the options.

The infusion of money might help break another logjam on the river and finally extend the north end of the trail from Old Town to Tecumseh Park and the surrounding neighborhood. More than 15 years ago, the trail hit a dead stop at its north end because of contaminated properties and stonewalling landowners.

Morgan said that all existing plans are on the table this year, along with “those that haven’t been dreamt of yet.”

Despite the complexities of putting a trail system together, the goal, Morgan said, is simple: “connecting communities, places of interest and businesses so we can give people other options than jumping in the car and driving to and fro.”

Anecdotal observation, especially in Maguire Park, points to a big spike in trail usage overall, but a longoverdue survey would be a useful part of the planning  process. (A 2004 survey by MSU estimated about 70,000 users from May through September of that year. About 56 percent were Lansing residents, 15 percent from East Lansing and 29 percent from elsewhere. One of the most interesting findings was that over 50 percent of users did not drive a car to the trail.)

If, or when, the next wave of extensions is completed, Michigan’s growing rails-to trails system, with over 2,500 trail miles on 119 trails, will be within reach.

In 20 years or so, Morgan wants to see Ingham County trails connected to Eaton, Jackson and Clinton counties, to the state trail system and, eventually, the American Discovery Trail.

“Someday you won’t get to an ending point,” Morgan said. “You’ll just get to the next trail and the next.”

Friends of the Lansing River Trail

Annual meeting 5:30 p.m. Monday, July 13 Lansing City Market 325 City Market Drive, Lansing friends.lansingrivertrail.org Or contact Tony Breyers at tony@lansingrivertrail.org or Kevin Shaw at kas0624@yahoo.com

To check the trail’s flood status, go to:

lansingrivertrail.org/floodstatus

For info

on upcoming charrettes and public meetings on Ingham County’s non-motorized trail plan, go to:

pk.ingham.org

Lansing Bike Party

Hosts several informal rides per week around Lansing.

Contact Jeff Potter at (517) 347- 1689 facebook.com/groups/ lansingbikeparty