For about nine months, the Paint Creek Trail did not run the way it was built to run. A bridge near the Rochester end, at mile marker 31.7, came out in September 2025 so a new one could go in, and anyone walking or riding the trail south toward Rochester Municipal Park had to peel off onto a detour through Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve, cross at the Woodward Avenue crosswalk, and pick the trail back up on the other side. On June 9, 2026, the City of Rochester posted the update residents had been waiting for: the bridge was finished, the barricades were coming down, and the trail was open end to end again.
That reopening matters more than a single bridge usually would, because the Paint Creek Trail is not really one trail with a few decorations along it. It is 8.9 miles that four separate communities, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Oakland Township, and Orion Township, each fund and maintain in pieces. When one piece goes down, the rest of the trail keeps functioning, but the thing that makes it feel like a single loop, the ability to start at Rochester Municipal Park and end up in Goodison without leaving the path, goes away until that one piece comes back. This past year, it did. Now it's back, and it came back just in time for the season Oakland Township residents actually use the trail for.
What the Detour Actually Cost
The bridge itself was not a small patch job. The replacement was a single-span, prefabricated steel truss structure roughly 14 feet wide and 70 feet long, engineered by Anderson, Eckstein & Westrick with funding pulled together from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, the Transportation Alternatives Program, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, and Oakland County. Part of why it took nine months instead of a normal construction season is that the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy restricts work on the creek from October through April to protect spawning activity, so crews had a narrow window to actually get the structural work done.
For trail users, the practical effect was simple. If your route ran from the Rochester trailhead north toward Goodison, or the reverse, you were not walking the trail anymore for that stretch. You were walking through Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve and picking your way back to the path at a street crossing. It worked, but it was a workaround, and workarounds are the kind of thing you stop noticing you're annoyed by until they're gone.
Two Cider Mills, One Quarter Mile
None of this touched the part of the trail most people associate with fall in Oakland Township: the unincorporated hamlet of Goodison, where the trail runs directly past two cider mills that sit about a quarter mile from each other and could not be more different in what they're actually selling.
| Paint Creek Cider Mill | Goodison Cider Mill | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Owned by Oakland Township since 2005, donated by the Nicholson family | Independently run, family operation |
| Building | 1950s structure with a restored Fitz waterwheel, built on the site of an 1835 gristmill | Small standalone building, dirt lot with room for maybe seven cars |
| Known for | The restored waterwheel and the history marker out front, more civic landmark than storefront | Pistachio nut bread, described locally as the reason regulars keep coming back |
| Right now | Meeting and event space, public restrooms, and a ground-floor retail space the township currently lists as vacant | Open daily Labor Day through late November, then weekends through Christmas Eve |
| On-site extras | Second floor houses Oakland Township Parks and Recreation offices | Hay bales and a picnic area for kids, no formal seating |
The Paint Creek Cider Mill is the one with the history marker, the waterwheel, and the second-floor township offices. It functions as much as a public building as a business, and its own park directory page currently lists the ground-floor retail space as vacant, available for whoever wants to run it next. The Goodison Cider Mill is the one people mean when they say a place hasn't changed. It doesn't have township offices upstairs and doesn't need any. What it has is cider and a bread recipe that's kept people driving out of their way for it for decades.
Neither mill would be worth the quarter-mile walk between them if the trail weren't there connecting them. That's the part that's easy to miss when you're just thinking about which mill has the better donuts.
The Trail Is the Reason Both Mills Work
Bear Creek Nature Park sits close enough to Goodison that it functions as the third stop in the same loop. The park protects 107 acres of hardwood forest, marsh, and open field between Snell and Gunn Roads, with limestone trails wide enough to be ADA accessible and a pond that draws frogs loud enough to hear from the boardwalk. Every September, the park hosts Goodison Good Time, a free annual festival with live music, games, and crafts, timed to catch the same crisp weather that makes the cider mills worth the trip.
None of these three stops, the mills or the park, depends on the others to exist. But the reason people treat Goodison as a destination rather than three separate errands is the trail running through all of it. Take the trail away for a season, the way the Dinosaur Hill detour effectively did for the southern half, and the loop stops being a loop. You can still drive to Goodison Cider Mill. You just can't walk there from Rochester Municipal Park anymore, and that changes what the afternoon looks like.
Why the Trail Breaks Into Pieces at All
The reason a single bridge closure could disrupt travel for nine months, rather than getting fixed in a normal construction window, comes down to how the trail is actually run. The Paint Creek Trailways Commission, formed in 1981 under Michigan's Urban Cooperation Act, is an intergovernmental agency with representatives from Rochester, Rochester Hills, Oakland Township, and Orion Township. Each community contributes equally to the operating budget and pitches in different in-kind services, engineering from one, sign-making from another, meeting space from a third. The commission even licenses utility easements instead of granting them outright, a policy that generates a little over $9,000 a year while keeping the right-of-way under the commission's own control rather than a utility company's.
That structure is a big part of why the trail feels seamless when you're on it but gets patched unevenly when something breaks. A bridge failure in Rochester is Rochester's project to fund and manage, on Rochester's timeline, even though the consequences show up for someone walking from Goodison who has never set foot in downtown Rochester. The same four-way arrangement is why a resurfacing project or a new connector, like the pathway link to the Polly Ann Trail up in Orion Township, can happen on one end of the trail without touching the rest.
This Fall Looks Different Than Last Fall
Rochester Municipal Park hosted its Art & Apples Festival in mid-September this year, the kind of event that draws people to the southern trailhead the same way Goodison Good Time draws them to Bear Creek at the northern end. Last year, and for most of this year, getting from one end to the other meant a detour. This year, for the first time since the bridge came out, it doesn't.
If you're the kind of Oakland Township resident who treats a fall Saturday as a chance to walk the full stretch from Rochester to Goodison, grab cider at whichever mill you're loyal to, and let the kids climb the hay bales while you finish a donut, the trail is finally set up to let you do that in one continuous walk again. It's a small thing to get back. It's also the thing that made this corridor worth walking in the first place.
For more on what makes this part of the township tick, our Oakland Township neighborhood guide keeps a running account of the corridor. If you're curious what a home along the Paint Creek Trail is actually worth this season, or just want to talk through what's changing nearby, Helm & Associates is glad to walk through it with you.
