Poka-Bache: the eighty-mile idea

2006 - present

The idea: Every trail in this section until now belongs to one county. The Poka-Bache Connector belongs to the region. It is a State Visionary Trail, initially proposed in 2006 on the coalition's own account, drawn to connect Pokagon State Park near Angola, in Steuben County, with Ouabache State Park near Bluffton, in Wells County, Ouabache pronounced Wabash, passing through DeKalb and Allen counties between them. The Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council counts the connector at 81 miles, traveling through four counties and seven cities and towns, and connecting over 121,000 people, 140 recreational areas, 10 libraries and 50 schools within a mile of the trail. The City of Fort Wayne and The Post and Mail count the same trail at 82 miles, and a state grant release of 2022 counted 85.2. The length is printed as its sources give it, dated, with the planning council's 81 the current planning figure; a trail still being built does not yet have a final odometer.

The name: The connector's name is built from the two parks it joins, Pokagon at the north end and Ouabache at the south, and the joining is the whole of its meaning: no single city or county could build it, so it exists as a coalition first and a trail second. The Poka-Bache Coalition's stated mission is to complete the State Visionary Trail between the two parks by fostering collaboration between public and private entities across northeast Indiana, and the connector forms part of the United Trails Plan covering twelve northeast Indiana counties. It is, in structure, the Greenway Consortium idea of 1975 redrawn at four-county scale.

Fort Wayne's part: Allen County's segment of the connector is the Pufferbelly Trail of the previous article, Fort Wayne's portion of the state trail, running from downtown to the DeKalb County line. The arrangement explains the Pufferbelly's odd biography: a city trail, built in city phases with city ribbon cuttings, whose gaps mattered out of proportion to their length because an eighty-mile state route was waiting on them. When the Golden Spike section closed the Washington Center Road gap in December 2025, the remaining break in Fort Wayne's segment was a single road crossing, the Coliseum Boulevard bridge, and the coalition's count of the whole route stood, in Whatzup's reporting of the bridge plan, at 60 percent complete or funded. The other forty percent lies mostly north and south of the county, in the smaller communities the connector was drawn to serve.

The long rhyme: The connector's endpoints were Fort Wayne trail names before they were state park names in a plan. The scout committee of 1964 called itself Pokagon-Kekionga and hiked between the same geography. The portage in the first article of this section ran from Kekionga toward the Wabash the southern park is named for. Poka-Bache is the third system in this record to draw the same line on the map, after the Miami carrying place and the scouts' hiking trails, and the first drawn to be ridden end to end.

Sources:

1. Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council, Poka-Bache Connector page (the 81 miles, the four counties and seven towns, the 121,000 people).
2. Poka-Bache Coalition, About page (initially proposed in 2006; the mission; the United Trails Plan).
3. City of Fort Wayne, Rivergreenway page, as read November 2026, and The Post and Mail, December 2025 (the 82-mile count); WBOI news release, 22 April 2022 (the 85.2-mile count).
4. Whatzup, Pufferbelly bridge report, as read 2026 (60 percent complete or funded).