I have a section of a pretty regular route, my ride to check my mailbox, that has a couple of pretty enthusiastic dogs on it. One of them is an Australian Shepard that is clearly interested in running along and herding the trike (and routinely approaches 20 mph), and the other is a brown and white dog that is, I think, more concerned that I’m an interloper that must be dealt with (he seems, shall we say, less friendly than the Aussie). I also worry that they are out on the road when I’m riding by. These are not heavily traveled byways, but as a child in the country I lost more than one dog to the road for similar reasons.
There’s a road that more or less parallels the road the dogs are on less than a mile to the west. Taking it would avoid the dogs, add some variety to an otherwise very familiar route. It also rides through a wooded area, part of it a tiny preserve - Bartlett Woods or Knox Grove, which astonishingly has its own Wikipedia page - given to the county by a landowner a few generations ago. The road has a lot to recommend it.
The problem, of course, is that it is gravel.
I don’t love gravel roads - a topic that has come up here once or twice before. But I slowed down as I approached this road on my return trip and gave it some consideration:
As I looked down the road it was clear that it was the right kind of gravel, which is to say that it’s a gravel road with virutally no gravel on it. It was wet, so it was going to be slower and sloppier than the usual road, but I wasn’t especially in a hurry, and the combination of (presumed) canine absence and allure of variety helped me make my choice.
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I’d been down this road before by car once or twice, primarily to see the aforementioned preserve, but it had been several years. And while the first portion of the roadway was standard Illinois backroad scenery (open fields - empty this time of year), it wasn’t long before I was rewarded for choosing the road less traveled.
Most of the roads in my part of Northern Illinois hew to a grid system, but a few remnants from the era of horse and wagon routes do remain. This was no exception. As you approach the woods you can see the s-curve in the road, probably undertaken to gain the best angle for crossing the creek.
As you get there, of course, you get a view of the creek itself. This is Bureau Creek, which I’ve mentioned here many times before. Many small Northern Illinois waterways are rather dull affairs due to long-standing human intervention. The area has undergone significant alteration over the years in order to provide dry land for agriculture, and so streams and waterways were channelized in order to abet drainage. For the most part, Bureau Creek seems to have been spared that and, if anything, enhanced by additional volume from the drainage systems. In part this may be due to its size. It is unclear to me whether there is a clear, explicit definition to separate a creek from a river (and searches don’t help much on this topic), but Bureau Creek could probably have been called a river under other circumstances - in many places, for example, it is wider than the Little Vermillion River a few miles to the north.
All of this means that the views along Bureau Creek often offer exactly the sort of thing you are looking for from a waterway.
And then, rolling past the creek, you arrive at the entrance to Knox Grove.
This has not been a place well loved by the county. The little foot bridge and the sign are almost the entirety of the improvements here, and neither is new. It would be easy to look at this sort of situation and remark that it is a sad one, but it’s somewhat understandable. The woods here are small, and largely part of a watershed. When LB and I visited it years ago we found the ground soft and difficult to traverse, and she was nearly carried off by mosquitos. Not every natural area is inviting to, nor needs to be maintained for, humans.
Once past the entrance to the grove, the side-journey was pretty much over. This section of road is slightly less than two miles long, and it’s somewhat of an anachronism for our area. While northern Illinois is intensely rural, most of the backroads are paved. A few months back, when I posted about my nemesis - a particularly abusive section of rocky roadway - some folks opined that I just needed to get different tires for my trike. This is a fair suggestion, but the reality here is that gravel sections appear only intermittently. If you were looking for an extended gravel ride - and people do - I literally think about Bob Sharpe over at Old Man Gravel every time I approach a road like this - it is challenging to find continuous, connected gravel roadways in our area for more than a 3-4 mile stretch.
For me, mostly that’s just fine - pavement is my friend. But it is nice to to periodically take the less trodden fork.
Okay - time to ride...