Kishwaukee River Front Path 10-27-12

ETA 11-20-12
I submitted this path to TRAILLINK. They put it in, so I added a review and a photo.

Wilma and I have not walked much of this path before, although we did walk short segments of it on a previous expedition to hike the trails inside Spencer Conservation Area. It is a paved bike bike path in good shape and well maintained.

The south east end starts at Doty Park in Belvidere at South State Street along the Kishwaukee River. It follows the river south west through Doty Park, the Burgess Street Boat Launch site, and than along River Road up to Belvidere Park.

It has a number of options to continue along the river in Belvidere Park before continuing on inside Spencer Conservation Area. There is a good sized loop inside Spencer as well as a spur that goes out to Appleton Road at the NE corner of Spencer.

The path continues along Appleton Road to Beloit Road and follows Beloit Road all the way up to Belvidere North High School. There are a lot of spurs and pieces of the path that we did not walk on. We did not walk the section along Appleton and Beloit Roads at all. Not much in the way of scenery there.

Base Camp said the total length we walked was 5.3 miles.

It looks to me like the Spencer trail map does not accurately reflect all of the paved sections of path we wlked on. It seems to show part of it as unpaved but it was definitely paved as we walked above the ponds. Spencer has a bit of a park versus a forest preserve feel to me - not too surprising as it is in the middle of town. I don't remember seeing any drinking water in Spencer but there were toilets, picnic areas, benches, and a lot of other typical park and FP facilities present.

This map of the path as it passes thru Belvidere Park and Doty park is drawn with north to the right. There were plenty of typical park type facilities along these segments - benches, trash cans, picnic facilities, water fountains, toilets. There are places to fish, and playground equipment as well as other park facilities. We saw a lot of geeese and ducks, along with a number of squirrels. There is also a disk golf course inside the park.

We probably won't walk this path again as I prefer the woods over a paved bike path, but it is a nice walk, and you never know. I think it is plowed in the winter so if we get a lot of snow it might be worth another walk.

Towards the end of the video we walked back through what the Spencer map calls the festival grounds. There is some neat stuff there. A couple of log cabins, an old school house, some gardens, and a black smith shop.