The Mill Creek trestle on the Wadhams to Avoca Trail

Walk far enough west of Port Huron on the Wadhams to Avoca Trail and the ground simply drops away. You find yourself sixty feet up, crossing the Mill Creek valley on a wooden trestle 640 feet long — a tall timber bridge built in the late 1800s to carry trains, now decked and railed so you can stroll across it and stop at the overlooks to watch the creek wind through the trees below. It is the kind of view you usually have to earn with a hard climb, handed to you on a flat path.

The trail is flat for a plain reason: it used to be a railroad. The Flint and Pere Marquette laid this line around 1890 to link Yale with Port Huron, and the grade barely tilts because steam locomotives could not abide a hill. Over the decades the route passed through a string of railroad companies and ended up with CSX, which sold the bed to St. Clair County in 1999. The county pulled the rails and turned twelve-plus miles of it into trail, running through Kimball and Clyde townships and the little community of Avoca.

Now it carries walkers, cyclists, in-line skaters, and even horseback riders instead of freight. The southern stretch near Kimball Township is paved; farther out the surface turns to packed limestone, soft and quiet underfoot. Either way the going is gentle enough for a stroller or a first-time rider, which is exactly what makes the trestle land so well — you amble along through ordinary farm country, and then the whole valley opens up beneath your feet where a train once thundered across.