Bureau Creek

The Road Less Traveled by Erin Wade

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:

The right kind of gravel

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.

Approaching the curve

Approaching the curve

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.

Bureau Creek

Bureau Creek

And then, rolling past the creek, you arrive at the entrance to Knox Grove.

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...

Rare Opportunity by Erin Wade

This past Friday offered up a rare home office day, and an even rarer opportunity to ride my trike for actual transportation.

The overwhelming majority of my riding is recreational. Though I’m on country roads most of the time, it’s on loops designed to get me back around to my start, and to enjoy the trip along the way. This is a reality of my work situation - I travel a lot, and none of it is within a reasonable ride distance from home. When I’m not off-site I work out of a home office, which is wonderful, but my spouse objects when I bring the trike inside to ride the 10 feet from the bedroom to the office...

Friday presented with the perfect confluence of location and opportunity - working from home, and enough open time to ride, rather than drive, to the post office.

It’s an eight-mile ride one-way, almost entirely on rural backroads. It’s about a half-hour round trip by car, all things considered, and takes somewhere between an hour and 10 minutes to an hour and a half cycling (depending upon the day and depending upon me).

I always enjoy riding, but there’s something extra-special to me when I get the opportunity to ride to an actual destination. This might sound odd to the folks who commute via pedals on a regular basis, but it makes for an additional feeling of purpose to the ride that I really enjoy.

Now, to be clear, I’m not trying to claim any particular level of virtue here. While I try to do what I can for the environment - driving fuel efficient cars, using LED lighting, etc - I don’t for a moment delude myself into thinking that this very occasional 16-mile trip even rates as a drop in the bucket in comparison to my routine motor vehicle usage. This is, in fact, one of the things that people often don’t think about with respect to country living - a natural consequence to being away from everything is that you have long distances to get to everything. You spend a lot of time in the car.

But that sense of purpose is there, and I enjoy it.

And so I gear up for the ride and get the trike ready, checking the bags to make sure I have enough room in there for any mail that I might be bringing back. I also check and double-check to make sure I have the mailbox key (which I have forgotten at least once on on of these forays). Then I hit the road with my sense of purpose in hand (or maybe in the bag - my hands are occupied with steering after all - have to re-think that metaphor) and head out.

I ride the same route that I drive for the trip, but it’s all different at cycling speeds. You get a chance to see the things along the way and enjoy them at a more human level. This can be, of course, both for the better and the worse.

The better is this hill, which appears early in to the third mile of the ride.

Hill pic

It’s a relative high point that drops rapidly into the valley carved by Bureau Creek. It is, unsurprisingly, the source of my top-speed measure for this ride (coming in at 34.55 gravity-assisted mph). It’s warmer, at 39°, but still winter, and the snow still sits along the sides of the road and banks of the creek.

The bad is the dogs which chase the trike - virtually every single time on this route - a mile or so afterward. They chase the car as well, when I drive this way, though the feeling is very different, as any cyclist knows. I’ve been riding in the country a significant portion of my life, and I’ve been chased by dogs many a time; You learn to contend with it. But I always worry about the dogs where this is allowed to occur. Whether car or bike, when they are chasing they are in the middle of the road, and there is no variation of this scenario that is safe for the animal. Growing up out here I lost two dogs to the road, so perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this, but still...

A few miles later and I’m rolling up to the post office to check the mailbox. Lock the wheels on the trike, get the key from the bag (which I have ensured has room for any mail I might pick up), go inside and open the box to find... nothing.

This is not a terribly uncommon occurrence, opening the box and finding it empty. On most days, when I take some time out of the work schedule to drive to the mailbox I’m frustrated to find it bare, my efforts fruitless, my time wasted.

But this day is different. This day I got to ride, and ride with a sense of purpose. The fact that it is empty doesn’t take away from that. If anything, it means that at least I didn’t have to spend still more time sitting in my car just to find out there was nothing there.

This day I got to ride.

Early Winter Along Bureau Creek by Erin Wade

We haven’t technically reached winter yet, according to the calendar. That date is still a couple of weeks off. Still, we’ve had snow on the ground here in Northern Illinois since before Thanksgiving.

This means that the winter cycling starts earlier this year, I suppose.

This past week’s Sunday ride was a 13-ish mile ride across familiar territory here in Northern Illinois. According to Cyclemeter’s weather feature the temperature was sitting at 29°, with a gentle wind at about 6 mph. And of course, even though it’s not technically winter, our early season snowfall has the benefit of offering a change in scenery just as the bright colors of autumn start to degrade into a uniform tan...

the road ahead

Bureau Creek (say "crick") Westbound

Bureau Creek (say "crick") Eastbound

This is one of my favorite spots to stop along the way of this route. Bureau Creek (say "crick") is smaller here, but it eventually winds its way all the way under the Hennepin Canal down to the Illinois river near Bureau Junction. And while it’s wintry enough, with snow on the ground, it isn’t yet cold enough to freeze the moving water:

I don’t think I noticed the little guy coming forward at the center to the left of the rapids while I was taking the video. A little proof that life continues out here even when the white stuff covers the ground.