A four-season outdoor county

Osceola County is the kind of place where the outdoors is always close. A big share of the county is public land — much of it part of the Pere Marquette State Forest — so hunting, hiking, and getting lost in the woods are easy to come by. The Osceola-Missaukee Grasslands State Game Area up north is a popular spot for bird and small-game hunting.

Rivers run all through it: the Muskegon River (good for fishing, canoeing, and tubing), the Hersey River, and the Pine River, which starts in the county’s northern townships and becomes one of Michigan’s fastest, most popular canoeing rivers downstream. Add the two big rail-trails that cross at Reed City and the DNR’s motorcycle-only Evart trail, and there’s something for every season — biking and paddling in summer, hunting in fall, snowmobiling and skiing in winter.

For a lot of buyers, that easy access to woods, water, and trails is the whole reason to be here. It’s worth checking how close a property sits to public land, a river, or a trailhead.