At Evart, the Muskegon River turns into smallmouth water

The Muskegon River doesn’t pass by Evart so much as wind through it, looping around the edge of town on its way south. That river is the reason there’s a town here at all. In the logging years it was a moving highway — millions of feet of pine cut upstream rode the current down toward the sawmills, and Evart sat at a useful spot for sorting the logs as they came through. The lumber baron Delos Blodgett founded the town in the early 1870s, right on the water that made it worth founding.

The pine ran out a long time ago, but the river stayed, and it turned into something arguably better: one of the best warmwater fisheries in this part of the state. The reach between Evart and Big Rapids is the top of the Muskegon’s serious smallmouth-bass water. The bottom there is rocky, and rocky bottom means crawfish and clouds of aquatic insects — the exact groceries a smallmouth wants. Float it in summer and you’re throwing at bronze fish holding behind rocks in fast, clear current.

It’s not a one-trick river, either. The same water carries walleye, northern pike, the occasional long-nosed gar, and — pushing up from the big dams and lakes downstream — migratory steelhead, brown trout, and stocked Chinook salmon at the right times of year. Few rivers hand you a smallmouth on one cast and a steelhead a season later.

Evart leans into the water it’s built on. Trails and parks line the riverbank, and the town’s annual claim to fame, the big hammered-dulcimer gathering at the county fairgrounds, plays out within earshot of the same current that once carried the logs. The pine is gone; the river just kept doing what rivers do, and the fish moved in.