Flushing's Riverview Trail, with a 200-foot bridge over the Flint River

The best stretch of the Flushing Riverview Trail is the part where you’re standing over the river itself. The path crosses the Flint River on a 200-foot bridge — long enough that you’re well out over the water, watching it slide by underneath — and later hops Cole Creek on a shorter 72-foot span. For a town trail, those are real river crossings, not culvert hops.

The whole route runs 1.4 miles, a non-motorized path that starts at the Main Street Bridge and threads through forest and wetland along the Flint River. It’s paved and flat, the kind of walk anybody can do — a stroller, a pair of running shoes, a fishing rod. People use it for all three, plus the simple pleasure of sitting over moving water.

It connects to Riverview Park, the green flats along the river that a local businessman first pushed the city to develop back in 1947. A chunk of the park’s walkway went in for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, so this riverbank has been a community project for the better part of a century. The trail itself came together as a partnership between neighboring municipalities, with federal transportation money helping foot the bill — the unglamorous machinery behind a lot of good local paths.

In 2018 the network grew again. A Creekview extension added more than half a mile at Somerset Park, mixing asphalt, concrete, and boardwalk where the ground gets soft.

Go in the morning, before the sun’s high, and walk out onto that long Flint River bridge. The water’s right there below your feet, the woods are quiet on both banks, and for a minute the whole busy world feels a good ways off.