Because They’re There

How does a “walk in the park” become a challenge only the hardiest and most determined locals accomplish? By inviting people to visit every single one of Ann Arbor’s 162 parks. Nearly 100 community members have accomplished this feat in the past five years.

The Visit Every Park Challenge began as a fun staff project with a purpose. Erika Smith took over  the outreach program at Ann Arbor Parks and Recreation in 2015,  “and she hired me shortly thereafter,” says Ryan Poling, now the unit’s volunteer, outreach, and marketing coordinator. “It was like, okay, we need to find volunteer opportunities for people in parks. We need to assess what needs there are, and what volunteers can help with. … Let’s challenge each other to try and visit every park.”

In those early days, staffers tracked one another’s progress via a whiteboard checklist. The Challenge remained an informal staff activity until the pandemic hit.

“Lots of people were just out and about, exploring parks because they had nothing to do,” says Poling. “So [Erika] turned it into a public-facing challenge.”

There were only seven VEP Champions in the first year, but because participants have unlimited time to complete the Challenge, several more were already working on their VEP journey. Participants win prizes (like T-shirts and other swag) at six different milestones along the way, and each year, the number of VEP Champions grows.

“Last year was the biggest year by far,” Poling says. “I think we had over half of all our Champions of all time. Something like fifty Champions completed the Challenge last year.”

Poling thinks both the program’s recent role in the Ann Arbor District Library’s Summer Game (a clue has lived at Fuller Park’s “VEP Lounge”) and positive word of mouth have contributed to its increased popularity.

“We get so many people going, ‘I’ve lived here for thirty years, and I had no idea there were so many [parks], and they’re all so well maintained, and there are all these beautiful nature areas,’” Poling says. “I think it’s great for people to spend time outdoors and find new parks to fall in love with.”

There are almost as many ways and reasons to do the VEP Challenge as there are parks, so we checked in with eight Champions to ask why and how they did it.

Lisa Waxman-Van Alstine, thirty-four, works as a cook at two different Ann Arbor restaurants when she’s not planning outdoor adventures with her two sons. The boys were three and five when they became VEP Champions on November 1, 2024.

“I like to keep my boys outside in good weather as much as possible,” Waxman-Van Alstine says. “When I was taking my boys to Fuller Pool, I saw the Challenge and I was like, ‘I always wanted to do something like this with my boys. … I guess this is time to do it.’” On their busiest day they visited ten parks, and they completed the Challenge in a little under three months.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her younger son most loved parks that had a playground, while the older was partial to Gallup, and to Mushroom Park’s namesake sculptures. Waxman-Van Alstine, meanwhile, felt a nostalgic attachment to Mary Beth Doyle and Pilgrim parks on the southeast side, since she grew up nearby.

She created a VEP photo album, filled with pictures of her sons by park signs. But for a few of the venues, Waxman-Van Alstine sought out some additional company: her brother and sister-in-law, who drove in from Sterling Heights with their resident pooch.

“I didn’t want to go to a dog park without a dog,” said Waxman-Van Alstine. “It just felt too weird.”

It took former GM manufacturing engineering manager Brooks Curtis, sixty-one, about two years to complete the circuit. “I retired in early 2021, so the VEP Challenge helped make sure that I had plenty to do,” he says.

Curtis was hardly a stranger to the Ann Arbor Parks system, having volunteered with the parks’ Natural Area Preservation unit for nearly two decades.

“I’m out in Bird Hills most days of the week doing ecological restoration,” he says, noting that it also happens to be his favorite local park. 

His VEP game plan began with checking the parks he’d already visited. “Then, for a while, I was like, ‘Okay, if I need to go to Kroger, which Kroger do I want to go to, and are there parks around I can visit?’” he says.

Curtis checked off many parks this way, but at a certain point, he recognized that he was going to have to make a special effort to get to those that remained.

“Some of the parks, you can see the whole thing from your car,” he says. “Like, there it is. It’s got a bench and a tree. Okay, I got this one.” He finished in June 2023.

Though Curtis has lived in Ann Arbor since 1985 (and chairs its Environmental Commission), the VEP Challenge introduced him to pockets of the city he’d never previously visited.

“It made me appreciate having all the little neighborhood parks that are out there, and the benefits of those neighborhood parks,” he says. “I think that’s a good, important part of Ann Arbor—having green spaces around that people can get to easily.”

Software engineer Cathy Chow, thirty-two, became a VEP Champion in August 2023, about four months after she started.

Chow was already a regular parks visitor, and she liked the idea of earning prizes for it.

“I tried to combine the Challenge with my other hobbies, like playing the AADL Summer Game, Pokémon Go, biking, hiking, and foraging,” she says. “It was a great summer.”

Cycling, in fact, provided an ideal means of visiting several neighborhood parks on her checklist.

“After work, I’d sometimes take a bike ride in the evening and explore and visit all the parks around a neighborhood,” Chow says. “Or I’d look at the map and plan to visit four or five places.”

She appreciates Bird Hills’ size and biodiversity, and she has a soft spot for Black Pond Woods. “At a certain time of year, in the pond area, you see so many frogs,” Chow says. “The most I’ve ever seen. And the elevation makes [hiking] fun. … Because it connects to different parks, you can make it a bigger hike. And I’ve found some cool mushrooms there.”

Her favorite park, though, is one shared by many VEP Champions: Postmen’s Rest, named in honor of the mail carriers who regularly checked in on pioneering female journalist Anne B. Mueller, who lived to age eighty-five in her modest home nearby.

“There’s a bench swing, and you’re kind of hidden away,” says Chow. “It was such a nice moment to be outside and watch the cars go by. Like a reprieve in this cozy, small park. … The name makes so much sense to me—a working person taking a moment of rest from their journey, their day.”

Pediatrician Brian Kennedy completed the Challenge in fall 2023. He had company: his wife, Kimberly, three of the couple’s grown daughters, one daughter’s spouse, and two grandchildren.

“Many times, we’d have a little picnic at the best or last park on our list,” he says.

The family started the Challenge in March 2023 at the behest of the couple’s daughter Theresa, thirty-five, a dental hygienist.

“I had a health scare and didn’t get any real answers … until mid-July,” she says. “During that time, I decided I wanted to try to have the best summer ever with my kids and live life to the absolute fullest.

“I had remembered reading about the Challenge in 2020, but that year, it felt so important to me to complete it.”

The Challenge gave the Kennedys a reason to gather weekly toward a common goal. It also cast a new light on their hometown.

“Going to every park gives you a view of how distinct and special the Ann Arbor neighborhoods are,” says Brian. “We all had different favorites.”

His top picks included Furstenberg and Bird Hills, while Theresa and her daughter were fond of Depot Park, which is “just a tiny corner with flowers planted,” she says. “This challenge really helped me a lot over the summer of 2023.”

Pioneer High and U-M alum Elijah Richards, twenty-six, first talked about biking his way through the VEP Challenge over the course of a week or so with his brother, Adam, and their friend, Ries Plescher.

“We were trying to think, like, which days would work, and there was only one day where we were really free for a lot of time,” says Richards, now a PhD student in civil engineering at U-M. “I think the idea started as a joke. Like, ‘We could just do it all in one day!’

“Then we started seriously thinking, well, [the parks] are pretty close to each other, and it’s not like there are a thousand of them.”

So at 4:30 a.m. on June 16, 2024, the three young men started their marathon park journey near Hill St. and S. Division.

“The first ten or so parks that we went to, it was still dark,” said Richards. “Ries is the one who drew the map and planned the route. … We started in the middle of town, hitting as many as we could that were near the middle, then sweeping out and around, going all the way around the city.”

The trio had hoped to wrap things up by 7 p.m. Their end time was closer to 9:30, shortly before sunset, making it a (still wildly impressive) seventeen-hour quest. Poling had been in contact with the three throughout the day and met them as they finished at Fuller Park’s VEP lounge, bringing along their prizes.

“I think he also just wanted to witness it,” Richards says. “And my mom came to pick us up. We were originally going to bike back home and then go out to dinner, but we ended up just parking our bikes at Fuller, because we were so tired, and getting a ride. We ate dinner at Frita Batidos afterward.”

Though Ann Arbor has long been Richards’ hometown, he found the experience of traversing so much of it by bike to be revelatory—Terhune Pioneer Memorial Park in particular.

“It was quite close to my mom’s house, so I was surprised that I’d never heard of it,” he says. “And there were graves there of some of the earliest European Americans to make it here to Ann Arbor. I had no idea there was a park like that you could go to.”

We’ll end this tale with an asterisk: retired teacher Beth Kennedy (no relation to Brian), sixty-seven, was very likely the first unofficial, non-staff VEP Champion: She visited every park in 2017 (and blogged about it) on her own.

“I always enjoyed walking, and in 2017, I decided to try checking out a few different parks instead of the usual two or three that I always walked in,” Kennedy says. “Then I decided to try to do them all as a personal challenge and began on July third. My goal was to finish by Halloween.”

As she’d planned, Kennedy finished her self-directed circuit on October 30, 2017. At the time, there were 152 parks in Ann Arbor, and some were difficult for Kennedy to find and access. (“There were many secret entrances,” she writes in her wrap-up blog post. “I had to climb through brambles, through backyards, across driveways, park illegally, go over and under fences, across ravines, around hills, between fences, over water, under low trees, and behind school yards.”)

Kennedy didn’t learn about the official, public-facing VEP Challenge until 2024, and by that point, ten more Ann Arbor parks had been added. She set out to finish her quest and earn her prizes and championship status that fall.

“One of the last ones that was on the ‘new’ list was just listed by its address: 2570 Dexter Road Park, which I really had a lot of trouble finding,” Kennedy says. “It turns out the reason why was that it was a recent acquisition, and really had nothing on the space. It was just a chunk of land. So I kept driving back and forth by it and finally parked my car nearby and walked the space. Not too interesting in itself, but it is a bit interesting in that it shows how active the parks project actually is. It’s always in play and growing.”