Find the top rated bike trails in Marshall, whether you're looking for an easy short bike trail or a long bike trail, you'll find what you're looking for. Click on a bike trail below to find trail descriptions, trail maps, photos, and reviews.
It's a great round trip, and it can open up to the sun & wind and other times plant life closes in for some shade.
While smooth, most of the trail is ballast & crushed stone, which for me made it very hard to keep my speed up.
I might consider skipping this one and looking elsewhere.
A good that's slightly marred by a brief urban stint, you'll thankfully spend most of your time in a nature setting with this route.
Mostly flat, you'll get both sun & shade with this trail, though sights are few.
You can also use this trail to link up with multiple other trails in Portage, including Millennium Trail, Lovers Lane Bikeway, Romence Road Bikeway, Shaver Road Bikeway, and Northwest Portage Bikeway.
GMPT is a enjoyable but short trail that's full of tight twists and turns to the point riding a bike might be a bit iffy.
You might want to walk this one but I do recommend it.
The parts of the trail not on Ravine Rd seem great. Sure, the downtown route is a bit tricky but they have center lines to mark the bike path now along arcadia creek and the festival site, etc. My real complaint is they were not able to find a solution for nearly a couple of miles along Ravine Rd, other than a small segment on the property of Kalamazoo Public School Transportation, where someone on inline skates or a small bike could enjoy a small break from a narrow bike lane. Is that what they hoped they would be able to do all along that side, but only the Kalamazoo owned public transportation would agree to it, and the rest, you have to use a fairly narrow bike lane. The exception is that the last quarter mile or so, on the south side of Ravine before Douglas Ave, there is a really nice bike lane, with extra shoulder on the right of it. Why couldn't that have been extended further up? I have even used that against traffic when coming back before crossing over to the right side of the rd, because it is such a wider area than the bike lane on the north side of Ravine at that point. After all this time, it would have been nice if they found some options to improve that segment. The rest of it, I really like though!
We rode from Bailey Park west on the Linear trail to the end. While the surface was pretty good, the fact that there are several busy road crossings, no signs or maps, no water or restrooms, made this trail undesirable. What a shame that the city of Battle Creek doesn't spend a few bucks to make this trail top-notch.
I don't know why it's called the River Valley trail since most of it goes right next to the highway, with only occasional views of a river and no valley to be seen. We rode 20 miles starting in Galesburg. The first couple of miles were scenic, through a wooded area but the next 10 miles were along the highway - BORING AND UGLY. When we got to Kalamazoo, we found several detours because of unsafe bridges. That forced us to cross busy highways. While the trail surface was mostly good, the location of the trail was terrible.
This trail is one of those half-urban, half-nature trails. It's a bit difficult to stay on the urban parts, as trail markings are a bit rare, with the trail really hitting its stride in the nature segments.
A mix of urban & nature.
The nature segments are excellent, beautiful and lush but the urban parts can be difficult to stay, as markers are few.
It's a nice easy ride and a great route for students commuting to and from campus. However, it's kind of squeezed between apartment complexes and residential areas in spots, which kind of cuts into the scenery a bit.
Nice, straight trail. Plenty of places for parking and amenities in each town. I wish it were paved all the way through, but in general the crushed limestone isn't a huge obstacle between towns. Highly recommend!
The sheer length of the trail is what makes it really worthwhile in my opinion. It covers South Lansing, Downtown, Hawk Island Park, Potter Park Zoo, and MSU's campus, which is a nice sampling of Greater Lansing. It's also nicely forested and quite scenic, especially in the fall. With that being said, the downtown stretch and the bit between Aurelius and Kalamazoo are both in need of repair; everything else is pretty much perfect, though!
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