For years, getting from Atlas County Park to downtown Goodrich meant getting back in your car. You'd park at the trailhead off Hegel Road, walk the loop through the park's 150 acres, then drive the half mile into town if you wanted dinner or a coffee. Two separate outings stitched together by a windshield.
That gap is gone. Genesee County Parks confirms that a newly finished non-motorized trail along Gale Road now runs directly from Atlas County Park into downtown Goodrich, no car required. It sounds like a small infrastructure update. For anyone who actually uses the park on a Saturday, it changes the shape of the day.
What used to take two trips
Atlas County Park sits on 150 acres in the southern end of Genesee County, built around Kearsley Creek as it winds through fields and ponds before continuing north toward the village. The park itself has always been solid: an unpaved trail extending the paved Gale and Hegel Road route, open dawn to dusk, dog-friendly with the standard six-foot leash rule, and creek access good enough that locals fish for bass and bluegill along the banks.
What it didn't have was a walkable connection to the rest of town. The park and downtown Goodrich are close on a map and far apart on foot if the only route between them runs along a road with no shoulder trail. That's the piece Genesee County Parks just filled in. The Gale Road trail extension gives park visitors a direct route into the village center, which means the choice between "go to the park" and "go downtown" isn't really a choice anymore. It's one trip with two stops.
The paddle does the same thing the trail does
The connection isn't only for walkers. Kearsley Creek through Atlas County Park is paddleable, and canoers and kayakers can launch from the park and follow the creek down to Atlas Millpond, the same body of water that borders downtown Goodrich. It's a different route to the same destination. Whether you're on the trail or in a boat, you end up at the millpond that anchors the village center, which tells you something about how deliberately Goodrich was built around this one piece of water in the first place.
Where the trail actually lets out
Downtown Goodrich sits directly on the Goodrich Millpond, formed when Kearsley Creek was dammed at the foot of Hegel Road, a structure that dates back to the 1840s. The pairing of the pond and the village's restored historic buildings gives the downtown a look that outside observers have compared to an old New England town center, and it's the kind of comparison that only holds up because the water is doing real work in the composition, not sitting off to the side as scenery.
The small park at the center of it all, known locally as Goodrich Commons, has been the town's gathering point for generations. It's modest in size and hasn't seen a major renovation in years, but it's still where residents fish, eat lunch, and let the afternoon pass. Now that the Gale Road trail feeds directly into this stretch, a walk that starts in the woods at Atlas County Park ends at the water everyone in Goodrich already recognizes.
Cider season adds a third stop, if you're driving anyway
Porter's Orchard Farm Market & Cider Mill sits out on Hegel Road, a few miles from downtown, so it isn't part of the walking loop. But it's the same road, and September and October are its working season: a cider mill pressing its own award-winning cider, a bakery turning out fresh donuts, a corn maze, a petting farm, and pig races that have kept several generations of Goodrich families coming back. The orchard has been run by the same family since 1919, which is long enough that "third generation" undersells it.
What's genuinely new is Porter's Hard Cider Company, a craft hard cider operation the same family launched in 2024. It's built on the same orchard, using the same fruit, but it's a distinct addition rather than a rebrand, and it's worth knowing about if your image of Porter's is still just cider donuts and a hayride. The farm has added a second business without walking away from the first one.
The dinner row waiting at the end of the walk
Village of Goodrich's year-round population runs under 2,000, which makes the concentration of restaurants near the millpond a little surprising until you factor in how much of Atlas Township and the surrounding rural stretches funnel into this one downtown for dinner. Current listings for the area name a real cluster within easy reach of the water:
- Trio Tavern & Grill, a sister restaurant to Blondie's in Grand Blanc, known for a French onion soup regulars come back for specifically
- The Huntsman
- One Eleven
- The Horseshoe Grill
- O'Malley's Galley Restaurant and Catering
- BullRing Sports Grille
- The White Horse Inn
- Big Moe's Kitchen
- Cranberries Cafe, a quick-sandwich stop near the orchard side of town
That's nine sit-down options clustered around a village smaller than most subdivisions in Grand Blanc. It's not a downtown built for pass-through traffic. It's a downtown built to hold onto the people who already live a few minutes away, which is a different kind of density than population count alone would suggest.
Putting the walk together
The version of Goodrich that existed before the Gale Road trail finished required deciding in advance which piece of town you were visiting. Park day. Downtown day. Orchard day, which almost always meant a separate car trip out Hegel Road regardless.
The version that exists now lets a Saturday start at the Atlas County Park trailhead, run along the creek and the new Gale Road connector, and land at the millpond in time for a late lunch at Trio Tavern or a slower afternoon at O'Malley's Galley. Porter's Orchard still needs the drive, but it's the same road you were already on, and cider season only runs through October, so the window to fold it into the same day is closing along with the leaves.
None of this required new construction downtown or a new business opening on Main Street. It required one trail connector finishing, which is a smaller kind of news than a restaurant opening but arguably more useful, because it changes how often people who already live here actually use the two ends of their own town on the same afternoon.
If you're testing out the new stretch this fall, Jackie Stratton is usually somewhere between the Porter's cider counter and the Trio Tavern patio this time of year. Reach out through Jackie Stratton if you want a longtime Goodrich perspective on anything else the town has quietly finished lately.
