Ask anyone who lives near Boardman Lake how long the loop trail has been there, and most will guess wrong. It feels older than it is, the way a good park always does once you've folded it into your routine. But the four-mile ring around the lake, the one that lets you walk from Hull Park to Oryana to the library without touching a car, only became a complete loop in July 2022. Before that, for more than thirty years, it was a half-finished idea with a missing western stretch that forced walkers and cyclists back onto 14th Street or Woodmere Avenue to close the gap.
That gap closing is the thing worth understanding if you live in Central Traverse City right now, because it changes what "walkable neighborhood" actually means here. This isn't a trail that has always framed the area. It's a very recent piece of infrastructure that rewired how people move between home, groceries, work, and a pint of beer, and most residents are still discovering what that rewiring makes possible.
A Thirty-Year Gap, Closed in Two Summers
The Boardman Lake Loop Trail didn't arrive all at once. City records show Phase 1, the stretch from 14th Street to Northwestern Michigan College's campus, wrapped in July 2021. Phase 2, which pushed the trail south to Medalie Park and added a boardwalk over Boardman Lake Cove along with additional bridges, finished a year later in July 2022. That second phase is the one that mattered most, because it's what turned a collection of disconnected trail segments into an actual loop you could ride or walk without doubling back.
The advocacy behind it stretched back decades. Community accounts credit the late Ted Okerstrom, longtime general manager of the Park Place Hotel and a co-founder of the VASA ski race, as one of the people who kept pushing the vision of a trail that fully encircled the lake, long before the funding or the political will existed to build it. What he and other advocates were imagining in the 1990s didn't become a rideable reality until 2022. That's a long runway for a four-mile trail, and it's part of why the loop still feels newer than the neighborhood around it.
The payoff was immediate. Within two months of the final segment opening, the trail recorded more than 60,000 visits, according to TART Trails, the nonprofit that maintains it. That's not a slow build. That's a neighborhood that had been waiting for this connection and started using it the moment it existed.
What's Actually On the Loop
The reason the loop matters more than its length suggests is that it isn't a nature trail bolted onto the edge of the neighborhood. It runs directly past the places people already go. Starting from Hull Park at the north end, where a small boathouse and dock give direct water access, the trail heads south along the lake's eastern shore past the Traverse Area District Library and into the stretch that connects to Oryana Community Co-op, The Filling Station Microbrewery, and Right Brain Brewery. Keep going and you reach NMC's University Center before the trail crosses to the lake's western side.
That western half is the part most people underestimate. It includes the boardwalk section over Boardman Lake Cove, built during Phase 2, with resting platforms and lookout piers that give a clean sightline across the water, plus kayak launches for anyone who wants to get onto the lake rather than just around it. The loop closes at Medalie Park near Logan's Landing on the south end, where a picnic shelter and river overlooks mark the trail's connection point to the longer Boardman/Ottaway River Trail heading further south.
None of that is scenery for its own sake. It's a functional route. A resident on the north side can walk to the co-op for groceries, cut over to the library to return books, and end at a brewery for dinner, all without leaving the loop. That kind of errand-running by trail is a fairly new option in this part of the city, and it's the direct result of a project that only finished four years ago.
Labor Day Weekend Belongs to the Loop
The clearest sign that this trail has become part of the neighborhood's calendar, rather than just its geography, is Loop the Lake. The race returns on Friday, September 4, 2026, kicking off Labor Day weekend with a 6 p.m. evening start timed to finish before dark. It's presented by Munson Healthcare and organized by the Traverse City Track Club, and this year it adds a new finish-line partnership with Playa Bowls, which will serve açaí and coconut bowls to everyone who crosses the line.
Here's how the event breaks down for anyone planning around it:
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Date | Friday, September 4, 2026 |
| Start time | 6:00 p.m. |
| Start and finish | Hull Park, north side of Boardman Lake |
| Course | Boardman Lake Loop Trail |
| Distance options | Evening 4-mile race, 8-mile two-lap option, 4-mile relay (split evenly between two runners) |
| Team categories | Male, female, co-ed, and masters (combined age 100+) |
| New for 2026 | Finish-line açaí and coconut bowls from Playa Bowls |
The relay category is worth flagging if you've got a running partner but neither of you wants to commit to the full loop. Splitting it into two four-mile legs turns an evening jog into something closer to a neighborhood block party, which is more or less what Hull Park becomes on race night regardless of whether you're registered.
Why the Timing Matters More Than the Distance
Four miles isn't a long trail by regional standards. The Leelanau Trail alone runs seventeen miles from Traverse City to Suttons Bay, and the broader TART Trail network stretches over ten miles between the west side of the city and Acme. What makes the Boardman Lake Loop different isn't its size. It's that the loop sits entirely inside a neighborhood people already live in, connecting front doors to grocery stores to breweries without requiring anyone to drive somewhere first.
That's a genuinely new pattern for this part of Traverse City, and it's easy to forget how new because the trail already feels load-bearing. Dog walkers use it every morning. Parents push strollers along the flat, fully paved sections near Hull Park. Cyclists commuting from the south side use the loop as a shortcut into downtown rather than a recreational detour. All of that behavior is only four years old, which means the neighborhood is still, in a sense, figuring out everything the loop makes possible.
If you're already living near the lake, Labor Day weekend is as good a reason as any to walk the full loop instead of the fragment you usually stick to. Start at Hull Park, go the long way around past the boardwalk and the kayak launches, and end at Medalie Park before circling back along the east side past the brewery patios. It's an hour and forty-five minutes at a walking pace, according to trail mapping data, and it's the same four miles that took thirty years to finish and only four to become essential.
Whether you're settling into this stretch of Central Traverse City or you've been circling the lake for years, understanding what actually surrounds you, the businesses, the timelines, the small civic wins that shaped it, tends to make the neighborhood feel more like yours. If you ever want to talk through what a home near this part of the loop is really like to live in day to day, Found Realty Co is glad to have that conversation. Find happiness at home. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever you're ready.
