It took 142 land acquisitions, construction of multiple bridges and pathways, mitigation of a network of wetlands and the forward-thinking of early Lake County Forest Preserves commissioners to create the Des Plaines River Trail.
Today, nearly 5,000 acres of vegetation, wetlands and pathways are protected along the Des Plaines River by a uninterrupted 31.4-mile trail, from northern to southern Lake County, which was completed by the forest preserves last October. The last land purchase, a mere quarter of a mile on the south end, took 15 years to finalize.
Commissioners began discussing creation of a greenway to protect the Des Plaines River floodplain and to preserve land along the river corridor as a nature preserve in the early 1960s, according to forest preserves documents.
In the mid-1970s, agency planners and landscape architects began sketching designs for a multipurpose recreational trail system that would follow the river and span the county’s length.
The first purchase was in March 1961, said Linda Carlstone, a forest preserves employee.
“It was purchased with Van Patten Woods near the Wisconsin border. It was that purchase where they said, ‘Let’s start this trail here,’ and they would keep on going,” she said.
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“It takes time because you have to have the money and you have to have the land, and you have to negotiate, and you have to build. Trails aren’t built in a week or a year, particularly a long trail in an urban setting.”
When Randy Seebach, director of planning and land preservation, came to work for the forest preserves decades ago, just a few sections of the trail were done — about 6 miles between Wadsworth Road and Route 173, he said.
“Back then, there were much less regulations in terms of trail development. We put a flag in the tree, had the bulldozer follow us through, and we blazed the trail. Things were much easier back then in many ways,” he said. “But a huge change came in the level of engineering and the level of permitting that’s required nowadays. There wasn’t a Lake County Stormwater Management Commission back then.”
Seebach added that “there are things we did back then no way we could do today,” such as when the forest preserves built a berm to raise the trail out of the floodplain near Gurnee Woods in the 1980s.
“Today, any time you impact a wetland, you need to mitigate,” Seebach said. That involves creating a new one or putting funds into what’s called a wetland bank, used for constructing new wetlands.
“A lot of times, we avoided the wetland impacts by creating boardwalks,” he added. “There are places along the Des Plaines River Trail that flood, so we’ve gone underneath roads in some places. Those areas still flood seasonally. Usually, they’re closed off three weeks a year. We can’t let people go through there when there’s water.”
According to Seebach, the last leg — a 0.3-mile stretch in Lincolnshire east of Milwaukee and Aptakisic roads — was the most difficult. The land owner sold a narrow corridor of 4.4 acres to the forest preserves in late 2014 for a reported $220,000.
“We were working with the landowner for 15 years. We were very patient, and I think patience paid off,” Seebach said. “We had to keep it to a really tight area. The river being right there was a challenge for us.”
“That was one of our most expensive because of the conditions there — we had to put a 500-foot steel sheet-pile wall to keep the river back to protect the trail,” he said, adding that the forest preserves secured permission from both the Army Corps of Engineers and the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission to construct the wall.
All told, Seebach said, the forest preserves has not put together an estimate of how much has been spent on the trail over the past half-century.
But whatever it is, Seebach said he believes it’s worth it.
“I think what is most satisfying working here at the forest preserve is when you finish a project like this and you see families out there using it,” he said. “Sometimes it’s emotional. It really hits home as to what your purpose is here.”
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.