The rail-trail that runs under a roller coaster

About midway along the Fred Meijer Berry Junction Trail, the path slips right beneath the hills of Shivering Timbers, the big wooden coaster at Michigan’s Adventure. You hear the screams a while before the track comes into view — pedaling a flat, shady rail-trail while a roller coaster thunders overhead is the kind of contrast you don’t forget.

The trail is a paved, roughly 11.5-mile line laid over an abandoned C&O Railroad grade in northern Muskegon County. That history is why the riding is so easy: trains needed gentle slopes, so the route that once hauled freight now rolls almost dead level under a bike. It threads mostly oak and pine forest, hopping Bear Creek along the way, with Lake Michigan off to the west and the Manistee National Forest to the east — a quiet green corridor for most of its length.

End to end, it runs from the North Muskegon area up through Dalton and Fruitland townships toward Whitehall and the White Lake communities. You can take a short out-and-back or ride the whole thing, and it ties into a wider network of trails reaching farther north. For a chunk of the county, it’s the only way to travel between towns without sharing a shoulder with traffic — families, runners, and commuters all use it for exactly that.

Pack water and pick a direction. Wherever you’re headed, somewhere near the middle the woods will start to rumble, and you’ll round a bend to find a coaster train cresting a hill right over your handlebars — proof that the quietest path in the county runs straight under its loudest landmark.