The 36-mile trail being stitched along the Grand River to the lake

The Grand is Michigan’s longest river, and for most of its run through Ottawa County you can’t really follow it on foot — the bank is private land, farm field, floodplain woods, a bayou you can’t get around. The Idema Explorers Trail is the county’s long answer to that: a planned 36.5-mile, non-motorized path that will trace the river’s south side all the way from Grand Rapids out to Grand Haven and Lake Michigan.

It’s being built the slow way. Land gets bought. Bridges and boardwalks go in. A stretch finishes and links two parks that used to be islands of green, and suddenly you can ride or walk a piece of river you never could before. Robinson Township sits in the middle of the route. It has watched new miles of paved trail thread through it, tying riverside parks into one place you can travel under your own power.

The finished trail will follow the Grand River Greenway through a fine run of places — quiet bayous, old county farmland, steep ravines, and boat launches. In time it will join Kent County’s piece of the greenway. Then the whole thing will reach from the edge of Grand Rapids clear out to the dunes.

The name honors the Idema family, longtime West Michigan backers of this kind of public-land work. What they’re paying for is simple and rare: a green corridor along a working river, free to anyone with a bike, a stroller, or a good pair of shoes. The gaps are still real, so the map still has holes in it. But every year there is a little more river you can finally follow on foot.