Michigan Trails & Greenways Alliance

Welcome to our new Michigan Trails Finder website! Michigan is currently a national leader in trailway development, with over 2,000 miles of rail-trail and non-rail-trail corridors and growing fast! Did you know that over two-thirds of Michigan counties either have an existing trailway or are in some stage of developing one? Michigan currently ranks second in the nation for the most trailway mileage.

Michigan Trails Finder

This map is intended to primarily provide information on Michigan’s multi-use trailways, i.e., broad linear corridors capable of accommodating a variety of public recreation and transportation uses. Single-use pathways may show up on the map if they were included as part of the GIS information received from the source. The map uses a Google interface which means that when any non-trail map attribute is updated in Google, our map will also show the updates. It is MTGA’s intent to update the trails data layer on at least an annual basis. Many thanks to Michigan State University Remote Sensing & Geographic Information Science Research and Outreach Services (RS&GIS) for their valuable work on this project and to the Kellogg Foundation for awarding a People and Land Grant to fund it. We would also be remiss if we did not mention the hard work of the Connecting Michigan Task Force members who with the help of the RS&GIS staff decided the format for the website and the attributes that would be needed to construct the database behind it.

The database reflected in this website marks is a work in progress. Not all trailways have been mapped, nor have we received all the data for existing GIS Trails data. There may also be updates needed for new trails or extensions to trails for which we have not received information. Please notify us of revisions needed at any time. We are extremely grateful to the following organizations which supplied us with their GIS trails data for use on this website:

• Michigan Center for Geographic Information
• Northwest Michigan Council of Governments
• Southwestern Michigan Commission
• Saginaw Bay Greenways Collaborative
• Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development
• The Greenway Collaborative, Inc.
• St. Clair County
• Oakland County Planning
• GLS Greenlinks
• Jackson Community GIS
• Grand Valley State University
• Tri-County Regional Planning Commission

It is our hope that they will continue to provide us with their updates and that more GIS departments will see the value of making their trails information available to trail planners and trail users alike.

Our data also contains information on proposed trailways. If you would like to view this layer, please send us your request and we will allow you access to this information.

It is our hope that this map will be a continually improving resource for trail tourists and trail planners alike. Feel free to link this site to your own website so that your web audience may have access to this centralized portal of trailway information. Please spread the word about this site to appropriate partners so that they may too avail themselves of this resource.

We are also interested in hearing from anyone who is interested in advertising on this website, which will help cover the cost of hosting and maintaining this site.

Happy Trails!