2012_12_27 Espenscheid Forest Preserve Hike On Bike Trail

Wilma and I have hiked here a couple times before. We even walked a short segment of the bike trail. The bike trail is a single width trail that goes in an almost dizzying path through part of the forest here. Amazingly, it is about 3 miles long according to Base Camp. It seems to have been up hill the whole way too. :)

 It was something done by a local bike club (Rock Cut Trail Crew) with permission from the forest preserve district.

 Wilma and I saw two deer in the forest and two bicyclists.

 The district trail map does not show the bike trail, but the bike club had one on their web site.

 This trail is just diabolical. I was never sure where I was, and not even sure what direction I was headed most of the time as the sun was behind the clouds all day. Many places there are temptations to take a short cut between trail sections that run adjacent to each other, but it is a loop trail and one might easily get confused as to which way one should go. At least one place it seemed to cross itself and I was somewhat confused as to where to go and had to think about it for a few seconds.

 All in all a great hike. The grade changes made it seem a lot farther than the just about 3 miles that it is. Counting the distance to and from the trail head to the car it was 3.5 miles.

ETA 12-28-12: This is not an easy hike, although it is not real long. Much of the trail you have to walk in the bicycle ruts, and in some places the rut was not wide enough to comfortably do so. In a few places there was standing water that had frozen over into ice.

There was also the typical bike tail obstacles where they have put trees across the trail with ramps made of smaller material. Thankfully, in most cases these had bypass lanes around them. I hate these things. They are usually too big to comfortably step across, especially in the ice and snow, and are unstable when stepped on.