The Potawatomi: 17 miles of rooty singletrack near Pinckney

Ask a southeast Michigan mountain biker where they learned to ride. A lot of them will say “the Poto.” The Potawatomi Trail loops through Pinckney Recreation Area. It’s a long ribbon of singletrack, close to 17 miles around the full loop, and it has been chewing up tires and lungs for decades. It is roots and short steep climbs almost the whole way. Sometimes sandy, rarely flat. It earns the soreness in your legs honestly.

The trail starts near Silver Lake. It threads past a string of small kettle lakes left behind by the glaciers — Crooked Lake, Pickerel, Halfmoon. You don’t have to ride all 17. The system nests shorter loops inside it. The Crooked Lake loop runs about five miles, and the Silver Lake loop closer to two. So you can pick a bite-sized ride or commit to the whole thing.

Bikes and hikers share the dirt. The park asks riders to go clockwise while walkers go the other way, so the two meet face-to-face instead of by surprise. Volunteers from the local mountain-bike club groom a few miles for fat-tire riding in winter. They’ve spent years fixing erosion and rerouting the worst of the wet spots.

It sits about twenty minutes northwest of Ann Arbor, which is part of why it stays busy. Close enough for an after-work lap. Big enough to feel like real backcountry once the parking lot is out of sight. Come on a fall morning and the loop runs gold and red, the lakes flat as glass between the climbs, your own freewheel ticking down the next descent.