Mile 62.4: Des Plaines (DPRT)
First visit: Nov. 29, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? Also yes Distance walked: 10.45 miles
The day it dawned on me I was on some crazy quest to walk the Des Plaines River, I went to Des Plaines to pick up a Christmas gift for one of my grandnieces, and stopped at the Des Plaines Historical Society to see what information they might have about the river. Not much, as it would turn out, but the staff there was super nice, and they did have one piece of information that shocked me: there had once been a WWII Nazi POW camp on the river, and in fact was situated off a trail I had just walked a few days earlier.
Opened in May 1945 and closed 11 months later, the camp had almost 200 POWs at its peak. Called Camp Pine, in what is now Camp Pine Woods, it was originally built during the Depression to house WPA workers, and would serve as a Girl Scout camp in the 1950s. Some other facts I found surprising: it was actually one of two POW camps on the river, the other down in Channahon; there were four POW camps in Cook County alone; and there were thirty-seven throughout Illinois.
I didn’t know any of this, nor had I seen any markers along the trail to enlighten visitors about Camp Pine. Des Plaines has a rich history, which includes the first McDonald’s franchise in 1955, and I’d bet more people know about that than about the Nazi POW camp.
Downtown Des Plaines sits at the axis of the Des Plaines River and a rail line stop built near a grist mill there. In 1859 the stop was named Des Plaines, after the river, even though a town called Rand was already being platted. In the meantime, the post office needed a name to facilitate mail delivery, so it was already using the train stop name of Des Plaines. Possibly because it was easier to just go along with the post office, the Rand subdivision was renamed Des Plaines in 1869, and the town incorporated in 1873. And as it happened, Des Plaines was the second town named after the river, because the town we now know as Gurnee was then named O’Plaine, another of the river’s names.
The Des Plaines River Trail in Des Plaines
What I refer to as the Des Plaines portion of the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT) also passes through small sections of Glenview and Park Ridge. At nearly ten miles in length, it is also the longest of the DPRT trail sections I walked, though unlike in Lake County, the trail here encounters several interruptions. Hikers are forced to walk roads to get around them, which I discourage, or retrace their steps back to the car to drive to the next trailhead. This pattern of trail interruption continues in Cook County until the trail ends at North Avenue.
Walking south from the former site of the Villa Venice, you first walk into Allison Woods, whose circuitous trails link to the circuitous trails at the River Trail Nature Center, one of my favorite spots in Cook County. Located on a beautiful stretch of the river, it’s a great, family-oriented preserve with nicely groomed and boardwalk trails, a variety of nature exhibits, and a collection of animal ambassadors, including hawks and a coyote. When I visited, in early March, a sign was posted lamenting the loss of their resident bald eagle, who’d resided there for 20 years.
From here the trail continues across Lake Ave. into Camp Pine Woods, site of the former Nazi POW camp. The camp is gone but will serve here as a brief segue to the subject of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), programs begun during the Great Depression as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program. These groups provided work, shelter and meals to single men aged 18 to 25 who were enlisted to improve America’s public lands, forests and parks. Trails, shelters and pavilions in the area’s forest preserves, and in state parks like Starved Rock and Rock Cut, were originally built during this time, and hikers along the DPRT can still see the remnants of their work. Though many of the shelters have since been rebuilt or replaced, most of the original stone bridges and retainer walls remain, as do some of the barracks’ foundations. These nearly 100-year-old artifacts are still commonly seen in the Cook County Forest Preserves, and at numerous points along the DPRT in Des Plaines.
My first time on this section of trail I started at Beck Lake and went north, ignorant of Camp Pine’s history, and after a roughly five-mile hike I decided to go for a beer at the Log Cabin Bar, where I watched the U.S. beat Iran in the World Cup with a roomful of enthusiastic Poles. I’m not in the habit of giving business plugs (although I did do it for the Brat Stop), but if you’ve just finished the Des Plaines section of the DPRT, this is the coolest place for a beer. It felt authentically Polish, but what do I know. I enjoyed the company of boisterous, welcoming bar mates who would lapse into Polish any time they couldn’t make their point in English, which made it authentic enough for me.
The Big Bend area
Most of the lakes bordering the Des Plaines River are abandoned quarries, many dug to provide construction material for nearby interstates (though there are some natural, spring-fed lakes too), and this includes Beck Lake and, a little further south, Big Bend Lake, which sits across the river from what I think of as the Big Bend neighborhood. Des Plaines in fact has a substantial residential presence along the river, starting with this neighborhood and continuing into the downtown area and south towards Algonquin Rd. Except for a mid-rise apartment building downtown, however, none of this is visible from the DPRT, which gets cut off at Northwestern Woods and resumes south of the Methodist campground off Algonquin – a modern-day curiosity dating back to the 1860s.
While I did walk the DPRT through this area, I also wanted to see these residential neighborhoods along the river, so I had to drive to them and walk around, which is easier to do around Big Bend than it is further south by Shagbark Lake, where I felt like a prowler. The Big Bend area, unsurprisingly situated in the crook of a big bend in the river, is an interesting little neighborhood that I picture constantly threatened by flooding. Using the terrain view on Google Maps it looks like a lot of residential lots have been cleared here, possibly for this very reason. I saw small docks and boat launches where I am sure I trespassed, and an ancient overflow ramp connected to Big Bend Lake. I was also able to see the neighborhood by going off the DPRT just west of I-294, a detour I don’t encourage because of the muck and a jungle-like preponderance of wild rose vines.
After skirting Belleau Woods, the DPRT takes a sharp right turn off Miner St. in downtown Des Plaines, which is the last view of the river until a brief reunion at the I-294 overpass near Riverside Dr. Except for a short trail stretch south of Touhy, this is the last hikers will see of the river before Chicago city limits, where the trail gets cut off again. It’s a disappointing stretch of the DPRT south of downtown, and though there are some opportunities to go off trail, they’re very far off trail, and overrun by dense, unforgiving thickets of wild roses. I did it, and I don’t recommend it.
There are two other items I feel are worth mentioning related to Des Plaines. The first is the Izaak Walton League off of River Rd. south of Oakton. My father was a member of the Izaak Walton League, which has a little country lot on the river where they’ve long taught an appreciation for nature and conservation from the outdoorsmen’s perspective. Like Ducks Unlimited, but on a broader scale. My brothers and I would partake in their river clean-up projects when we were young, and join in their drunken turkey raffles when we became more “mature”, thanks to my dad’s membership and enthusiasm.
Also in Des Plaines is Higgins Creek and Willow Creek, the former a cement-lined canal that enters the MWRD’s Kirie Water Reclamation Plant just north of O’Hare Airport as a relative trickle, and exits carrying 52 million gallons a day of treated wastewater from most of northwestern Cook County. (The Kirie facility is one of three combination WWTP/TARP sites; more on that in the River Grove section.) This discharge creek merges with Willow Creek inside O’Hare, and Willow Creek, after taking on even more discharge from within O’Hare, in turn merges with the Des Plaines River downstream in Rosemont, across from the All Saints Cathedral cemetery, where all that wastewater enters from beneath a grand-looking triple-arch bridge. For more information about wastewater treatment, see my Gurnee section.