Ann Arbor residents have long taken pride in their city’s park’s system.  The system is so well-funded that it often creates imaginative parks in areas that would be ignored in other areas.

A great example is Olson Park, once known as Northeast Area Park.  The park is located on the site of an old gravel pit at the intersection of M-14/US-23 and the Ann Arbor Railroad.  Entrance to the park is from Dhu Varren Road in a bit of a no-man’s-land area of Ann Arbor.

Given this location, one might wonder if the place is worth a trip.  But it really is.  The gravel pit has filled with water and the land has become the site of some nice marsh, woodlands and old field areas.

In recent years, Olson Park has been developed a bit for soccer fields.  And a parking area has also been constructed.  But the trails are still open to hikers and mountain bikers.  Visitors will find over five miles of trail.

Here is an old hike report from my files that describes the trail:

05/30/02

Went on a weird little hike the other day. NE area park is a developing park of a few hundred acres on Dhu Varren Rd. in Ann Arbor.  The mountain bikers have created a neat up and down trail system here of about three miles.  The terrain is actually very fun to hike, but here’s the weird thing.  Parts of the trail are near the M-14 right of way.  Some parts go near a railroad.  And the pleasant little lake is actually an old gravel pit. Despite all that I had a good time.  No one else was out hiking and since no one really spends much time along freeway and railroad rights of way you are likely to see fewer people here than Pinckney.  And with a short neighborhood walk, you can link up with the Leslie/Black Woods trail systems.  You could probably hike 30 miles in Ann Arbor pretty much off road – lots of tight dirt trails.

Here are two maps of the park:

http://tinyurl.com/2rrzuh

http://www.mmba.org/library/maps/NEAP.gif

If you doubt the natural qualities of an old gravel pit, here is a bit of a natural overview of the park:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbowman/birds/se_mich/locations/olsenprk.txt

I plotted the park boundaries on Microsoft Virtual Earth:

http://tinyurl.com/29whq3

Visitors of this park have to realize that Leslie and Black Pond Wood Parks are just to the south and can greatly extend hiking mileage in this area.

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