The Hersey and the Muskegon near Reed City

Wade in past your knees and the Hersey finds you. Not the current — the cold. It comes up through the neoprene at the top of your boots and works down into your arches until your feet stop filing reports, and this is the whole argument for a trout stream, this ache, water running colder in July than anything has a right to. You can throw a rock across most of it. A brown trout does not care how wide the river is. It cares that the water is cold and moving and smells of iron and cut cedar, and the Hersey delivers all three.

Here is the thing people get wrong, and I got it wrong too. Reed City sits on the Hersey. It does not sit on the Muskegon. The Hersey runs through town. There’s a strip of park along the bank, the Linear Park, threading between Rambadt and Westerburg, and then the river keeps going and hands itself to the Muskegon down at the village of Hersey — a bend where the small cold water disappears into the big brown one. Two rivers. Two reasons to show up.

The small river

The Hersey is twenty-one miles of cold water, a tributary that helps hold the Muskegon down where its temperature counts. The DNR and the watershed people call it a blue-ribbon trout stream. That’s not a tourism-board phrase — it means somebody went out in waders on a gray morning and counted fish. It runs browns, smallmouth, the odd northern pike that wandered up from the bigger water. Bring a rod that can throw under overhanging brush. You will lose flies. Everyone loses flies.

The reason it fishes the way it does is a piece of demolition. There was a mill dam down at Hersey, the kind of thing every Michigan town threw across its river in the lumber years and then forgot about for a century while the pond behind it went warm and silted in. In September of 2006 they took it out. The Village of Hersey, the DNR fisheries crews, the Muskegon River Watershed Assembly. Years of meetings and permits and then the filthy work of hauling out the sediment stacked up behind it. No ribbon on it. No plaque worth the drive. Just a river that got some of its temperature back. There’s still one dam left upstream — the Nartron — and they’re working on that one too. That is the part I keep thinking about. Not the fish. The undoing.

The big river

The Muskegon is the other trip, the one for anybody who’d rather sit in a boat than stand in the cold. Wide, forgiving water. Slow enough that a family with small kids can float it, deep enough in stretches to hold walleye and smallmouth. You don’t need to own a thing to get on it.

Down in Evart, twelve miles east on US-10, J&J’s River Run rents canoes, kayaks, rafts, and tubes and drops you on the Muskegon. The address is 205 E 7th Street. The tube float runs about four hours end to end, and the owner picks you up at the takeout and drives you back to your car — which is the arrangement you want, nobody stuck leaving a second vehicle at a gravel launch. It’s a summer operation. Call before you drive out. The danger on water this gentle isn’t the water, it’s the sun, so wear more than you think and drink more than you brought.

At the confluence itself, where the Hersey meets the Muskegon in the village, there’s Blodgett Landing — a small campground on the point, twenty-nine sites, with canoe, kayak, and tube rentals a few steps off the bank. The Pere Marquette State Trail passes within half a mile. That’s the old rail bed, fifty-five miles of it running Baldwin to Clare, and the paved stretch between Reed City and Evart shadows the water for twelve miles. You can ride from one put-in to the next and never touch a road. Reed City calls itself Michigan’s Crossroads because two rail-trails meet here, the White Pine and the Pere Marquette — and for once the town’s own bragging holds up.

When, and where to sleep

The float is a July and August thing. The Muskegon warms up, the liveries open, the tubes come out. The fishing is a shoulder-season game — spring, when the water is high and cold and the browns are stupid, and fall, when they’re mean. Summer works for both if you fish early and float late, before and after the heat.

Base yourself in town. one of our Michigan chalet rentals, Hersey River Retreat, puts you a short drive from the Hersey’s in-town water and about twenty minutes from Evart and the Muskegon liveries, which is the right radius — close enough to fish before breakfast, off the river and showered before the mosquitoes work the bank. For the rest of what the town is and isn’t, the Reed City page lays it out. If you’re coming for color instead of fish, the fall piece covers the trail and the timing.

Wade in first, though. Let the cold find your feet. Then decide.