Ask a longtime Ann Arbor Hills resident what they do at Gallup Park and you'll likely hear about a kayak trip, maybe a stretch of the paved path near the playgrounds. Ask about Huron Hills and you'll hear about a Tuesday tee time. Ask about the Arb and you'll hear about the peony garden, usually described the way people describe things they visit once a year. Three good answers, three separate outings, three mental boxes that rarely touch each other.
That's the part worth correcting. Gallup Park, Huron Hills Golf Course, and Nichols Arboretum all sit within or at the edge of the neighborhood, and they're stitched together tightly enough by an actual trail that the sensible way to think about them is as one connected loop most residents have pieces of but few have walked in full. This fall happens to be the first one since a round of repair work wrapped up in late spring where the whole loop is in its best working shape since the park's bridge was rebuilt.
Three Errands, Not One Walk
The reason these three places stay mentally separate is that each one solves a different weekend problem. Gallup Park is the water and picnic answer. It's a 69-acre park along the Huron River and Geddes Pond with over three miles of asphalt trail and a livery that rents canoes, kayaks, and paddleboats, which makes it the obvious pick when the ask is "get the kids out of the house on a hot Saturday." Huron Hills solves a different problem entirely. It's a par-67, 18-hole course along Huron Parkway, established in 1922, known for the kind of elevation change that makes a short course play longer than its 5,071 yards suggest. That's a golfer's errand, not a family one. Nichols Arboretum, known locally as the Arb, solves a third problem: a quiet walk with a payoff, especially when its peony garden is in bloom.
Treated separately, none of these three feels connected to the others. Treated as a system, they add up to something a lot of Ann Arbor Hills households are sitting on without quite noticing.
What Actually Connects Them
Huron Hills Golf Course sits directly along Huron Parkway, adjacent to Gallup Park, not a drive away but a shared property line away. Gallup Park itself is an official connector point on the Border-to-Border Trail, the paved regional trail that runs through the length of the park and continues west toward Nichols Arboretum and Fuller Park, with a further link to the Furstenberg Nature Area. Go the other direction on the same trail and it connects east toward Dixboro Road and Parker Mill Park. The Arb itself sits about a mile from the neighborhood, roughly a 30-minute walk, which puts it on the near edge of a route rather than a separate trip.
Strung together, a resident could reasonably do this in one outing:
- Start at Huron Hills for nine holes or a walking round, since the course sits right against Gallup Park's edge
- Cross into Gallup Park and pick up the Border-to-Border Trail
- Follow the B2B west along the river toward Fuller Park
- Finish at Nichols Arboretum, close enough to walk home from
None of this requires a car between stops. That's the part that tends to surprise people who've lived here for years and never connected the dots on a map, because each of the three has always functioned as its own errand with its own parking lot.
Why This Fall Specifically
Infrastructure is the other half of the argument, and the timing lines up in a way that won't repeat next year in quite the same shape.
The vehicle and pedestrian bridge over the Huron River at Gallup Park reopened with a ribbon cutting in October 2024, after a rebuild that doubled the space available to pedestrians and cyclists and added overlook spaces at the center span. That gave the park its structural centerpiece back. What hadn't caught up until this year was the surrounding pavement. In May 2026, city crews finished a separate round of work: repairing the road near the bridge's southern approach and replacing worn sections of pathway around the Youth Fishing Pond, where years of use had left the surface pooling water after rain. The city's landscape architect, Hillary Hanzel, described it at the time as a stopgap rather than a full rebuild, work meant to buy the park a few more years of use while funding for larger improvements gets sorted out. That patch work was completed by the end of May.
Put those two projects together and this fall is the first full season where the new bridge has had two years to settle in and the surrounding trail surface has just been freshly patched. It won't stay this uncrowded and this newly maintained indefinitely. Michigan freeze-thaw cycles work fast on asphalt, and the next round of wear starts the moment winter hits.
The golf side of the loop shifted this year too. Huron Hills' 2026 season pass pricing added a City of Ann Arbor resident discount and, new for the year, a 50 percent discount on cart fees for pass holders, a real change for anyone who's played the course occasionally without committing to a pass. The course stays open sunrise to sunset from March through early December, so it's still in full swing well after Gallup's paddling season starts winding down for the year, which makes fall the natural point where the loop's identity shifts from a water outing to a walking-and-golf one.
The Coffee Bookend
Every loop needs a start or end point that isn't a park, and for this one it's usually Bearclaw Coffee Co., the drive-through at 2460 Washtenaw Ave, a short distance from both the Whole Foods and Trader Joe's that already anchor most Ann Arbor Hills errand runs. It's open daily from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., early enough to grab something before a morning tee time and late enough to catch the tail end of an afternoon walk back from the Arb. It's not part of the trail system in any formal sense. It's just the place enough residents already stop that it functions as the loop's unofficial trailhead.
None of this requires reorganizing a weekend. It just means the golf round, the paddle, and the walk to the peony garden don't have to stay three separate lines on a calendar. They're closer to one continuous stretch of ground than most people who live within walking distance of all three have ever bothered to test.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Ann Arbor actually offers day to day, not just on paper, JoAnn Barrett can walk you through it block by block. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what living near this loop looks like in practice.
