Mother Nature and the Fates worked with me on Black Friday to allow for a trip to the Hennepin Canal Trail. Temperatures in the low 40’s (F) and gray, but notably rain-free skies are about the best one can hope for from late November here in Northern Illinois, so I packed up the trike and took the 45-minute drive down to Bureau Junction.

The Canal and its trail are part of a massive, linear park system in northern Illinois that looks like an inverted “T” on the map. This is because the park consists both of the canal itself, which runs more or less east-west, connecting the Mississippi River to the Illinois River just east of Bureau Junction, as well as its feeder canal, which runs north and south from Rock Falls to meet the main canal at... well, at point about 11 miles west of the little town of Wyanet.

I’ve ridden on the main canal trail only once before, but I’ve wanted to get back to it, and the holiday provided the perfect opening for it. I headed out with the loosely identified goal of riding to that junction of the feeder and main canal, which is about 22 miles from the starting point at Lock 2.

(You start at Lock 2 because Lock 1 is located on private property and is apparently usually under water - it’s somewhere out there...).

I say “loosely identified goal” because, while I’ve ridden longer distances than the 44 mile round trip this would require, the days are much shorter and the canal trail - with a mixture of soft surfaces and poorly maintained asphalt - is slow going. I purposely gave myself permission to stop shy of it - this was supposed to be fun, after all - and it turned out keeping it loose was a good thing. More on that in a bit.

Even in the middle of summer, this trail is an excellent place for the person who wants long stretches of solitude in the company of nature. In the late autumn, this is amplified, as the cooler temperatures keep most people away. As you ride along this admittedly unnatural nature path, it’s easy to begin reflecting back on Walden - particularly the parts where Thoreau is poetically recounting the bits of nature he’s observed.

This is aided by the fact that, for long stretches, the canal is paralleled by Big Bureau Creek to its south. While the canal is a study in straight lines, Bureau Creek sits as its natural mirror, its meandering curves an opposing reflection of organic growth serving to remind us that our technological accomplishments may be many, but that Lady Gaia still does it better.

If you are a regular - or even occasional - reader of this journal, you might find the name of the creek seems familiar. This is because it starts about 30 miles to the north as the crow flies, very near my home. But the creek itself does not travel like the crow - it takes a very leisurely and winding path down to the Illinois river, and I cross it frequently on my rides. As encountered here, close to its terminus, it also serves to remind that the difference between a “creek” and a “river” is largely an arbitrary happenstance of naming.

None of which is to take away from the man-made portions of the canal trail. The first time I came to this site it was with the intention of finding and seeing Lock 12, where my great-grandfather worked as a Lock Tender. I made it there and enjoyed the sensation of walking in his space, trying to see things as he must have seen them. But they are different, of course, and the locks between 2 and 12 have all been modified - the lock doors removed (or deteriorated away) and each lock now offering its own little waterfall as the canal travels eastward.

Venturing further west, rewards the rider with a view of times past.

Making the way to Lock 16 finds the old gates and machinery still in place, and the view on the approach is particularly good, as the canal appears to make a fairly dramatic drop at this point. It reminds that, while the trail appears mostly flat, the canal itself is rising for the entire ride towards the junction.

Between Locks 17 and 18 rewards with a view of another of the man-made wonders to this place. It’s the first intact aqueduct on the eastward ride. These are massive cement troughs that carry the canal over other waterways - essentially a bridge for the water.

And in this case it is carrying the canal over... can you guess? Yup - Bureau Creek (again).

I say intact, because there are at least two other spots earlier in the canal where they used to appear, one of them being my great-grandpa’s spot at Lock 12. Entropy has taken them - Illinois is preserving the park, but it’s clear that there isn’t a budget allocation to maintain the canal itself. This makes reaching one of them still in place a bit of a treat.

I continued on from there to Lock 19, just outside of Wyanet. This spot offers an exit up to what appears to be one of the former lock tender houses - they lived on the canal next to the locks at which they worked. It’s neat to see from one perspective, but the signs of entropy are here as well.

And Lock 19 is where I decided to turn back - about 11 miles shy of my goal. By the time I arrived there it was nearly 2:00 PM, and making that distance had taken me over an hour and a half. I wanted to get back to my starting point before dark, and I knew I wouldn't be able to make it the rest of the way and back.

Part of that is, as I mentioned at the outset, due to the fact that the trail is slow-going. My average speed for 2020 overall is 13.34mph, but for this ride I came in under 10 - at 9.89mph to be precise (all according to Cyclemeter). I’d like to blame it all on that, but I also had a series of (mildly) unfortunate events at the outset.

I wanted to take video of the start of the trail, with the plan to post that to YouTube and share it. I figured on doing video of the space between Locks 2 and 3. It’s a short distance - a little over a half-mile. But while I have ridden the trail once before, and I did remember that the section that runs under Route 26 goes down and then up, I did not recall how steep the rise was. My phone was in my right hand, holding it steady for the video, so I couldn't shift down to make it up the little hill and came to a stop about 2/3 of the way up - I just couldn't keep the pedals going.

Fortunately, there was no one in the immediate vicinity to see just how pathetic I was, and I still wanted to get that video, so I locked on the brakes, got off, and turned the trike around for another run at the hill, holding the phone in my left hand, and figuring I would edit the successful run in when I got around to working with the video. Right hand free I was able to shift down and so up the hill I went and... stopped about 2/3 of the way up.

This time, though, it wasn’t because I was pathetic (no - really). The pedals locked up and would not spin, neither forwards nor backwards. So - something was wrong.

A visual check confirmed nothing was out of order on at the front or rear sprockets, so I was going to need to check the driveline underneath the seat. I didn’t want to lay the trike on it’s side directly on the ground, so I started to pull out my fleece pullover to pad it, and then realized that I still had the container of wipes that I’d tossed in the bags at the beginning of the pandemic, so that stood in as a buffer layer for the wheel.

What I found, once I got under there, was this:

One of the seat straps had dangled down and gotten caught in the chain idler. I’ve been riding trikes with these seats for over three years now, and I’ve never had this occur - I don’t know if they were tucked up in there and came loose, or if I’ve just been lucky, but either way, today was their day to muck things up. I pulled the one in the idler loose and made sure to tuck it and all of the straps under the seat back up on, and was back on my way.

This was not a catastrophic event, but it definitely put a kink in my starting time. Add in taking pictures and such, and there was no way for me to do the whole thing and be back before dark.

And speaking of entropy, there was one other event on the way back. At first, I just noticed it as a rattle coming from the left front wheel area. But ultimately it became this:

Yup - that’s the left front fender, just laying there on the trail. The rattle started when the front connector failed. I could see that once I stopped to investigate, but I had hoped maybe it would hold at the back for the rest of the ride back to the car.

Which meant, of course, that the back connector failed approximately five minutes later.

So I strapped it my rack with a bungee and rode the rest of the way back to the car. And in case I needed a reminder of why fenders are a good thing on a recumbent trike, the softer sections of the trail stepped up - or maybe I should say sprayed up - to remind me. Repeatedly.

I am a firm believer that even a bad day riding is better than a good day doing a lot of other things, but I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t take a bit of the enjoyment out of the remainder of the return trip. For example, I hadn’t been cold for any of the trip ahead of this, but I started to feel it on the way back (and I’be checked Cyclemeter - the temperature didn’t change - it was all just me).

But overall, I still enjoyed the ride. The mechanical issues aren’t the trail’s fault. Besides, one was just a brief impediment, and the other is either repairable or replaceable. And at the end of the day, I still came in at just under 31 miles, which is a good distance for me in general, and especially for this time of year. I think that trip to the junction of the feeder and main canal may have to wait for summer tho - I’ll need some more daylight.

Applied Life

Hennepin Canal - Lock 2 to Lock 19 - Black Friday Ride /November 29, 2020 by Erin Wade

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