Julie Clark, the executive director of TART Trails, once described the finished Boardman Lake Loop as "a big community hug around Boardman Lake." It is a nice line, and if you have run it at dusk with the water going flat and gold, you understand why she reached for it. But the hug metaphor hides the more useful fact about this trail, which is that it does not belong to any single entity that could let it slide. The City of Traverse City, Garfield Township, and Grand Traverse County all hold a piece of the four-mile loop, and that split ownership is the reason the pavement under your shoes gets fixed instead of forgotten.
Most write-ups about this trail stop at the postcard version: four miles, mostly paved, wraps the lake, connects downtown to the library and a couple of breweries. All true. None of it explains why the loop feels different from the older, patchier trail segments elsewhere in the county, or why a construction crew was tearing up ground near Hull Park in the middle of June while the loop itself kept functioning around them.
The money nobody photographs
The full loop cost real money to finish, and the paper trail on that spending is public. The city's own project page lists a Michigan Department of Transportation grant of $2,512,750 and a 10-year, $3,235,000 bond issued by the City of Traverse City to close the final stretch to Medalie Park, completed in July 2022. That covered construction. It did not cover what happens to the trail five, ten, fifteen years after the ribbon gets cut, which is usually where public trails start to crack, buckle, and get quietly deprioritized behind roads and sewer lines.
Garfield Township closed that gap by putting $800,000 into a dedicated maintenance endowment through the Grand Traverse Regional Community Foundation. That is not grant money that gets spent down and disappears. It is a fund built specifically so the loop has its own line of recurring revenue for repairs, independent of whatever else is competing for the city's general budget in a given year. Compare that to the older TART segment between Three Mile and Airport Access roads, a stretch the trail organization flagged as thirty years old with a base that was failing and at the end of its lifespan, needing a City-approved reconstruction to keep it safe, with no comparable dedicated fund behind it. The Boardman Lake Loop was built with the lesson from that older trail already baked in.
That is the part worth knowing if you use this trail on a normal Tuesday and just assume it will always be there in this condition. It will, but not by accident. Three separate governments signed off on the maintenance plan precisely because the loop crosses their overlapping boundaries, and none of them wanted to be the one holding a decaying asset that the other two could point to as somebody else's problem.
Where the loop actually takes you
The trail earns its keep by connecting places people already have reasons to go. Starting from Hull Park on the north end, which has a boathouse and dock access, the route runs east through a heavily wooded, mixed-surface stretch of pavement, boardwalk, and gravel before crossing the Boardman and Ottaway River on two bridges near the south end. From there it threads past Medalie Park and Logan's Landing, then comes back north along the paved west side, where TART maintains fishing decks and kayak launches for anyone who wants to get on the water rather than just walk beside it.
Along the northwest stretch, the trail runs directly past Oryana Community Co-op, where the Fitness Court sits, a $194,000 outdoor gym built through a partnership between Priority Health, the city, and the county. Keep walking and you pass The Filling Station and Right Brain Brewery, and on the west side the trail brushes Northwestern Michigan College's University Center. None of this required the trail to be rerouted toward attractions. The attractions were already there, on Cass Road and around downtown, and the loop's job was to string them together on foot instead of forcing everyone onto South Airport Road.
What the June construction actually was
If you noticed a detour through Railroad Place and Woodmere Avenue back in June, that was not trail maintenance. The city was pulling a new force main pipe near the TART access point between Hull Park and Franklin Street, with additional excavation on Hannah Avenue near the boat launch and the water treatment plant running from June 22 through June 24. The closures were scheduled to wrap by June 30, and the work sat squarely at the intersection of the trail and the city's actual water infrastructure, a reminder that the loop runs through working municipal land, not a preserved greenway sealed off from the rest of the city's plumbing. That is the same theme as the funding structure: this is infrastructure with multiple stakeholders, not a park that exists in isolation.
The one date worth putting on your calendar this week
If you are reading this before Friday, September 4, that is the evening the Traverse City Track Club runs Loop the Lake, presented by Munson Healthcare, starting and finishing at Hull Park with a 6:00 p.m. start. Runners can choose the 4-mile loop, an 8-mile double lap, or a two-person relay split into 4-mile legs, with team categories for male, female, coed, and masters combined age 100 and up. New this year, Playa Bowls is set up at the finish line serving acai, coconut, and mango bowls, and every finisher gets a wicking running cap. Age-group winners take home a custom clay medal made at ClaySpace, just down the road.
You do not need to register to feel the effect. The race runs through Hull Park and along the full loop on a Friday evening heading into Labor Day weekend, which means foot and bike traffic on that stretch will be heavier and more organized than a normal end-of-summer evening. If your routine is a quiet after-dinner walk on that section, this is the week to expect company, or to plan around it.
Why any of this matters if you already live here
None of this changes what the trail looks like from the boardwalk over Boardman Lake Cove. It changes what you understand about why it looks that way. A four-mile loop that three governments jointly fund and maintain, with a dedicated endowment specifically so it does not end up like the older segments elsewhere in the network, is a different kind of asset than a trail that exists because nobody got around to building something else on that land. The people who use it every day, whether that is a lunchtime run from the NMC campus or a slow lap with a stroller from Medalie Park, are using something that a fair number of local meetings, bond votes, and maintenance agreements went into keeping functional.
If you are the kind of person who notices when a public amenity is actually built to last, that is worth knowing. It says something about how this part of Grand Traverse County plans, even for the things that do not show up on a tax bill.
If you are weighing a move to a neighborhood near this kind of infrastructure, or wondering what a well-maintained public trail system does for property values and daily life in the Grand Traverse area, Joe Van Antwerp has spent years watching how these local details shape where people actually want to live. Reach out for a free consultation.
