The Missing Mile on the Wheelway, and the Loop Petoskey Rides Instead
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
The orange detour signage between Magnus Park and East Park has been up long enough that newer residents assume it's just how that stretch of shoreline looks. It isn't a construction detour in the usual sense, gone in a season. It marks roughly 150 to 200 feet of trail that dropped into Little Traverse Bay during a coastal bluff collapse, part of a longer run of erosion that engineers now treat as one continuous problem along the section locals call the Miracle Mile.
If you've been waiting for that gap to close before you plan your fall riding route, you should stop. Here's why, and here's the loop that already works without it.
In October 2024, the Top of Michigan Trails Council brought engineering firm Baird & Associates to Petoskey City Council with a 50 percent design for repairing the washout. Trails Council executive director Brent Bolin told the council something worth sitting with: even in the best case, with full funding in hand and construction starting immediately, the repaired trail wouldn't be ready until 2026.
That best-case year is the one we're in now, and as of the most recent public update last October, permitting was still on hold and construction had not begun.
A year later, Baird's engineer Rory Agnew returned with the completed basis of design report, the step that turns concepts into permit-ready documents. The plan itself is specific: a cobble beach built through dynamic revetment (the same "design with nature" approach coastal engineers use to absorb wave energy rather than fight it), a regraded and revegetated slope, a bridge connecting the trail across the new topography, a maintenance path down to the beach, and full repaving through to Magnus Park to serve as the construction access route. It's a real plan with real specifications, not a sketch.
What it doesn't have is funding. Agnew told council that permitting applications are developed and ready to file, but currently on hold because of the funding gap. The project's price tag now sits near $20 million. Against that, the money actually secured is an $800,000 grant from Michigan's EGLE program and roughly $100,000 raised independently by the Trails Council. That's less than five percent of what the fix costs, which is the real reason the 2026 completion estimate quietly expired without anyone updating the sign.
None of this makes the Wheelway a small thing to lose. Bolin's own figures put its value at about $10 million in economic activity generated annually and more than 116,000 users a year, a number that only grows once the corridor is whole again. A mile of missing pavement is sitting between the region and money it's already capable of drawing, and the arithmetic between what repair costs and what's been raised suggests this isn't closing this year, or reliably next year either.
None of that means Petoskey stopped riding. The city's other in-town trail system, the Bear River Valley Recreation Area, has quietly become the default route for people who used to think of the Wheelway as the only option.
Start where the official route begins, at 101 East Lake Street, and the ride threads a genuinely different kind of scenery than the bayfront stretch. The path runs from Sheridan Street to Lake Street on pavement, with an unpaved continuation south past Sheridan that follows the river to Standish Avenue and Riverbend Park, part of the same North Country National Scenic Trail corridor that runs through the city. Petoskey has an official Trail Town designation from the North Country Trail Association, and this valley segment, along with the NCMC Natural Area and a piece of the Wheelway itself, is the route that earns it.
The stretch has its own draw that the shoreline trail doesn't: a quarter-mile engineered whitewater course running from the Sheridan Street Bridge down toward the bay, the only run of its kind in Michigan's Lower Peninsula. You don't need a kayak to appreciate it. Standing on one of the pedestrian overlooks and watching paddlers work the drop is its own reason to walk that way instead of the bayfront.
A practical loop for anyone treating this as their regular route rather than a detour:
Stop at Grain Train Natural Foods on the way back through downtown if you timed it for lunch. The whole Recreation Area sits just two blocks from the Gaslight District, close enough to either trailhead to work as a natural turnaround point for a shorter ride.
The mistake is treating this like a seasonal closure, something that reopens once the weather cooperates or a construction crew finishes a punch list. It's a $20 million coastal engineering project with permits sitting idle because the money isn't there yet, and the one completion year anyone in a position to know offered has already arrived with the funding gap still open.
That's not a reason to stop riding in Petoskey. It's a reason to stop planning your routes around a gap closing and start building them around the Bear River Valley loop as the actual, durable in-town circuit, the way locals who've stopped checking the Wheelway detour signs already have. The bayfront route north toward Bay View is still there when you want open water views. The river valley is there every day, whitewater included, whether or not this year's council meeting brings news on the funding gap.
If you're weighing what a stretch like this means for daily life in a place you're already invested in, that's the kind of texture that doesn't show up in a listing description but shapes how a neighborhood actually lives day to day. For more on what makes Petoskey worth paying attention to, from its trail system to its market, Genna Hill is always glad to talk through what's changing here and what it means for the people already calling it home.
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