Apr 29 2008
Lake Lansing Park North
Saturday afternoon, I stopped in at Lake Lansing Park North. I took I-69 from Lansing and exited at Saginaw St./Business 69. I took Saginaw south for a short stretch and turned east on Old M-78. A right turn on Perry Rd. and a left on E. Lake Drive took me to the park’s entrance. Once in the free-entry park, I drove all the way to the end of the park access road. The hiking trailhead starts at a small cul-de-sac there.
Despite what the name suggests, Lake Lansing is not the main attraction for hikers at this park. The park does contain a portion of Lake Lansing shoreline. This section, however, is dedicated to a boat launch. I suppose that it would be possible to walk the park access road to this launch, but this is a bit of an unwieldy addition to the park’s actual trail system.
A short distance east from the parking area is the trailhead. Three loop trails depart from this point. The Green trail is 3.3 miles long. The Blue is 3.8 miles. The Red is short at a mile of length. A Yellow spur shortens the mileage of the Green trail. An Orange spur lessens the distance of the Blue Trail.
I decided to take the Blue trail on Saturday. The terrain was predominantly flat, with a few small hills mixed in. Several dark swamp areas appeared in a few locations.
The forests were largely oak and maple with a few pine plantings. While pine plantings are not always the healthiest forest ecosystems, they do provide for dramatic aesthetic changes on a sunny-day hike. A hiker might be in bright sunshine one moment, but passage into the pine woods can almost completely obscure the sun. Even the temperature sometimes decreases.
The trails in Lake Lansing Park North seem popular with residents of the nearby neighborhoods. I saw about eight to ten people on my Saturday afternoon hike. I was passed by this adventure racer early in my circle route.
As mentioned previously, Lake Lansing is not visible from this trail system. That said, there are many areas of boardwalk and open marsh. These allow for wildlife viewing. Benches and occasional picnic areas dot the route.
It is possible to extend the hike length beyond four miles at Lake Lansing Park North. As mentioned previously, a hiker can walk to Lake Lansing along the park roads to the boat launch. It is also possible to created a rather convoluted route that combines the Blue, Green, Yellow and Orange trails to push mileage above five miles. A few spots in the SE quadrant of the trail system have hikeable bushwack routes and a power corridor extends north to south in the easternmost edge of the park property.
In addition, I hiked a short loop route just to the west of the trailhead. You can find this by following a two-track at the NW corner of the final parking lot and walking around the edge of the baseball field into a northern section of park property. The trail follows a raised dike along the property edge. This trail does not show up on the park’s trail map, but it is easily followed. The distance is roughly 1.3 miles.
Another possibility includes a route through some nearby subdivisions. In the south-central portion of the park trail system, it is possible to connect to Woodwind Trail and Wild Ginger Trail. Subdivision sidewalks and a wide shoulder on East Lake Drive take a walker to the park entrance and allow for the possibility to close a walkable loop.
While doing map study for this blog post, I also noticed an intriguing hike possibility. The aforementioned power line corridor seems to connect in the SE section of the park with an old railroad right-of-way. The satellite photos clearly show a path on the park side of an active railbed. It would be interesting to know if a public entity owns this apparent unused railbed. This path seems to connect to the subdivisions creating a large loop back to the park road. This would be an interesting avenue to explore in the future.
The park trail does the best job of showing the marked “official” trails. You can see it here:
I have marked all of the unmarked “unofficial” trails that I know of on this Microsoft Virtual Earth map:
Here’s the official park website. It has a very interesting history of the Lake Lansing area: