TRAIL BLAZER

Nearly four miles into our mid-morning trek on the 17-mile-long Leelanau Trail, Julie Clark makes this confession.

- Heather John Durocher

“I’m the worst person to walk with.”

Nearly four miles into our mid-morning trek on the 17-mile-long Leelanau Trail, Julie Clark makes this confession.

“My family hates it. I think my co-workers just want to kill me some days,” she adds, letting out a low, rippling laugh. “If we’re driving anywhere, if we see a gas line or utility coordinator, immediately I’m like, ‘Where does that go?’ Yeah, it’s super annoying, to walk or drive or bike with me.”

Of course, none of this can possibly be true—she is a perfectly pleasant walking partner, someone who is both attentive to the conversation at hand (“How about you? How old are your kids?”) and friendly to passersby (“Have a great ride!” she cheerfully tells a couple of cyclists; “Go Blue!” she shouts to an older man standing near a bench, donning a U-M winter hat). And yet, as the person who arguably knows our region’s 100-plus-mile trail network better than most anyone else, there may just be a teeny-tiny kernel of truth in her words. Meant in the very best way possible, of course.

“Our goal, our vision, is that every house is a trailhead,” she says of Traverse Area Recreation and Transportation Trails (TART), the organization for which she’s served as executive director for the past decade. “So, this doesn’t mean there’s a swath of land up to every front door, but how could you safely access the network? You should be able to do that, whether it’s a nicer shoulder on a road or … there’s a lot of rail around here that is not utilized—so in the meantime, while there’s not a lot of rail on it, how do we activate it?”