For as long as most people have been walking it, the West Bloomfield Trail has had an unspoken rule: you go out, you hit Haggerty Road, and you turn around. The trail runs 6.8 miles as a crushed-limestone corridor from Sylvan Manor Park on the east side through Orchard Lake, Keego Harbor, and Sylvan Lake to that western edge, and for years Haggerty Road wasn't really an endpoint so much as a place where the pavement's intentions ran out. You could see On The Dunes, the bar and sports venue that sits just north of the trail there, and you could see traffic. What you couldn't do was keep walking anywhere that felt like it went somewhere.
That's no longer accurate, and the reason is a construction project that's been running in the background for the better part of a decade, one town over.
The Handoff That Was Always the Plan
The West Bloomfield Trail was never designed to be its own island. Its western terminus was always meant to link up with the Michigan Air Line Trail, a separate 7.5-mile corridor built along a 1880s rail bed running through Commerce Township, Walled Lake, and Wixom. The two trails share a border at Haggerty Road. For a long stretch of time, though, the Air Line Trail's own construction hadn't caught up. Its first phase, roughly 5.5 miles from Haggerty Road to Wixom Road, was finished and open, but the second phase, a 2.4-mile stretch that had to thread through downtown Wixom itself, was still in planning and design. Trail users on the West Bloomfield side could get to Wixom Road. Downtown Wixom, and the Huron Valley Trail waiting on the other side of it, stayed out of reach on foot or by bike.
What Actually Finished This Year
That gap is what closed. The CW2 Trailway Management Council, the joint body formed in 2009 by Commerce Township, Walled Lake, and Wixom to oversee the corridor, has completed Phase Two. John Hensler, the council's trail manager, described the construction as essentially done earlier this year, with the remaining work limited to signage and finishing touches rather than paving or grading. The trail's own website is now posting photos from a Phase Two ribbon-cutting event.
The route required real tradeoffs to build. A portion of on-street parking in downtown Wixom was removed to make room for the pathway, and the project depended on funding from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation after an earlier Michigan Department of Transportation grant application stalled over matching-fund requirements. Chris Frey, the supervisor for West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation, has been on record about what the connection means from his side of the border: any added connectivity to the West Bloomfield Trail is a gain for the community and for the broader trail network, not just a Wixom improvement that happens to touch West Bloomfield at one corner.
The Mileage That Changes the Math
Here's the part that matters if you actually use this trail rather than just read about it. The West Bloomfield Trail alone is a 6.8-mile there-and-back proposition, which is a fine dog walk or evening ride but not much of a destination trip. Add the completed Michigan Air Line Trail's 7.5 miles and you're looking at close to 14 miles of connected, non-motorized pathway before you even reach the Huron Valley Trail on the far side of Wixom, which extends the ride further still toward South Haven as part of the statewide Great Lake to Lake Trail system.
Go the other direction from the West Bloomfield Trail's eastern end at Sylvan Manor Park, and you connect to the Clinton River Trail, which runs another 16 miles through Pontiac to the east side of Rochester, where it picks up the Macomb Orchard Trail. Which means the same trailhead that used to represent one modest loop now sits in the middle of a corridor that stretches from a downtown two counties away on one side to the edge of Rochester on the other. A rider who used to treat Sylvan Manor Park as the whole trip now has to decide which direction to commit to.
What's Actually Waiting in Wixom
The reason this matters beyond the math is that downtown Wixom isn't an empty stretch of road. The completed Phase Two route runs past Drafting Table Brewery and Trail's Edge Cafe, both sitting close enough to the path that riders who make it that far have somewhere to actually stop. Gunnar Mettala Park in Wixom adds restrooms and drinking fountains along the way, which matters more on a 14-mile out-and-back than it ever did on a 6.8-mile loop that stayed inside West Bloomfield.
Before this year, riding west from Haggerty Road meant passing through Commerce Township and Walled Lake on a trail that eventually just stopped at Wixom Road, short of anything resembling a downtown. Now that same westward ride has a reason to keep going: an actual second town center, with a brewery and a cafe positioned as trailside stops rather than incidental businesses a few blocks off.
Riding or Walking It Honestly
A few details are worth knowing before treating this as one seamless ride. The original West Bloomfield Trail segment is unpaved, crushed limestone, while the Air Line Trail's Phase Two section through downtown Wixom is a paved pathway, so the surface changes underfoot somewhere around the Haggerty Road border. Road crossings along both trails are marked with push-button warning beacons, with one exception: the M-5 crossing in Commerce Township uses a dedicated pedestrian and bike bridge rather than a street-level crossing, which is worth knowing if you're riding with kids or planning your route around traffic.
A few practical notes for anyone deciding where to start:
- Sylvan Manor Park, on the eastern end in West Bloomfield, has parking and connects directly to the Clinton River Trail if you're headed toward Pontiac or Rochester instead.
- Arrowhead Road has one of the trail's two bike repair stations, along with a second at Sylvan Manor Park.
- Haggerty Road, at the West Bloomfield-Commerce Township line, is the handoff point between the two trail systems and sits near On The Dunes.
- Gunnar Mettala Park in Wixom is the practical stopping point on the far end, with restrooms available before the return trip.
The West Bloomfield Trail also runs through the West Bloomfield Woods Nature Preserve, where the Swamp Pier Overlook remains a short detour off the main path rather than something you'd stumble into by accident. Dogs are permitted on the trail and are allowed off-leash in some sections, which is a detail from the trail's own reviews worth knowing before you head out with one.
None of this required the West Bloomfield Trail itself to change. What changed is what happens once you stop being able to see the end of it. A local's habit of turning around at Haggerty Road was a reasonable response to a trail that, until this year, genuinely didn't go anywhere past that point. That's no longer the honest read on it.
If the trail system running through your backyard is starting to look less like a loop and more like a route worth planning a whole Saturday around, that's the kind of local detail Crain Homes tracks closely, not because it changes what a home is worth, but because it changes what living near one actually feels like.
