Green Point: a wild riverbank inside the city

A few minutes from downtown Saginaw, where the Tittabawassee River swings past the south side of the city, the pavement gives out and the place turns wild. This is Green Point — a stretch of dense oak-and-hickory forest, woodland ponds, marsh, and restored grassland sitting right across the river from the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, one of the largest wetland complexes in Michigan.

It’s a working nature center, not just a patch of green. Roughly 2.5 miles of trail wind through it, with a boardwalk out over the wet ground and a study pier where you can stand over the water. In spring the place fills up with migrating songbirds dropping in to rest; the rest of the year you might turn a corner into a wild turkey or a whitetail deer, and there are warblers and frogs and the general racket of a healthy marsh. You can drop a line off the riverbank, and when the snow comes the trails turn into ungroomed cross-country ski lanes.

Green Point hasn’t always been here in this form. The city ran it as a nature center until budget cuts forced it to close in 1988. Five years later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stepped in and reopened it as the interpretive front door to the Shiawassee refuge — a way to teach city kids about a wetland most of them would never otherwise reach.

That’s the quiet trick of the place. You can be looking at strip malls one minute and standing in a floodplain forest full of birds the next, with the Tittabawassee sliding by and the city somewhere behind the trees.