Mile 81: River Forest
First visit: Oct. 2, 2022 Public trail? Mostly Private land? Maybe a little Distance walked: 2 miles
Growing up near the Des Plaines River, just two towns away from River Forest, I probably spent more time at Trailside Museum than I did at either of the city’s zoos. With its timeless forest preserve menagerie, including semi-rehabilitated hawks, owls, turtles and assorted other woodland rescues, it remains a wildly popular place for kids to this day (wildly, get it?). I still enjoy going there to see the resident owls and hawks, who were in the company of a turkey vulture when I first went looking for a trail along the Des Plaines in October 2022.
Of course a place called Trailside would have trails, which mostly run north-to-south along the river through Thatcher Woods almost to North Ave. (near the termination of the Des Plaines River Trail, but not near enough to connect) and south to Lake Street, with some off-trail trails meandering still further south along the river into G.A.R. Woods. There has been discussion over the years about extending the Des Plaines River Trail down here, which would add about 2.25 miles, but for now walkers navigate a hodge podge of both rough and improvised trail, with a section that passes behind the only houses in this town that line the river. Behind a fortified berm, of course. They’ve seen firsthand what it means to live in a watershed, and they’re not going to take nature’s bullying anymore. It’s bad enough how the deer eat all the shrubbery.
Behind the museum is a slough or pond, called Thatcher Glen Pond, one of hundreds that can be seen all along the Des Plaines River. Like the river, the ponds are a source of refuge and nourishment for a variety of waterfowl and are doubtless teeming with frogs and turtles in warm weather – at least the ones that don’t get swamped by algae. They’re also popular for fishing. During warm weather you’re guaranteed to see someone on the banks of the Thatcher Glen Pond tossing in a lure or a bobber, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. While a 2021 population survey found that a third of the fish in this pond are suckers, bullheads, and carp – which are not considered gamefish – there is also a substantial presence of largemouth bass, orange-spotted sunfish, bluegills and black crappie. It’s become a sportsman’s paradise back there.
I see fishing people
I was raised in a fishing family and make at least one trip a year up to Lake Kabetogama in Voyageurs National Park, where plump, shiny walleye outsmart me and then go and tell all their friends. I’ve been lucky enough in life to have also fished in all four corners of the North American continent and all the Great Lakes. Maybe it’s because of this predisposition that I seem always to encounter people who are fishing whenever my travels take me near water. There’s no doubt that’s why I end up talking to them.
This happened to me the first time I walked the river behind Trailside, where I saw two guys across the water casting light tackle on a sunny fall day. How’s fishing? Catching anything? What’s in the water around here? Do you keep or release them? This is my standard line of inquiry, whether I’m in Halifax or Hood River, and this day I stood on the east bank talking to these guys across the way, who, like most anglers I’ve met, seemed happy to tell me about their fishing. But not too loudly, because you don’t want a bunch of other anglers coming over and bogarting your fishing spot. (If I were carrying a rod, I’ve doubted whether people would be as chatty.)
These guys told me they were fishing for largemouth bass and northern pike, though they hadn’t yet caught any that day. One guy was using a jig for the largemouth, and the other guy was using a spoon – two types of popular lures. The spoon, in fact, looked like the classic red and white striped Dardevles my brothers and I grew up using for northern pike in Minnesota. From my vantage point, these guys were only a few yards down the west embankment from 1st Avenue, separated by a guardrail and a thin strip of ragged trees from the cars and trucks flying by behind them. I’d have to assume there are no trails there, other than paths worn to this spot by fishermen. I won’t give away their precise location, other than to say they were in the general vicinity of Silver Creek, a feeder stream that originates near O’Hare Airport.
This view I’ve just described pretty much matched my impression of the Des Plaines River in general: an urban river lined with cement walls, outfalls, and scraggly second-growth woods. Same with Silver Creek, an even more urbanized stream whose merging with the river here is by way of a large cement culvert. I also assumed the water to be dirty, possibly even toxic in some places, due to all manner of defilement as the river flows south through this vast metropolitan region. In the 1960s and 70s it was a known dumping ground, and even now you can see big-ticket litter like car parts and discarded machinery in the river. This was definitely not a place I would expect to have largemouth and northern pike, and I considered that maybe these guys were just hopelessly delusional fishermen – which is of course redundant.
But I was wrong.
Gamefish are returning to the river
I think I may have had a vague notion that somewhere downriver the Des Plaines widens to accommodate barge traffic, and that actual gamefish – not carp and bullheads – could possibly be caught. I thought maybe smallmouth bass, if anything, because they’re a hardy fish that likes a lot of what’s called “structure” and can even be caught out of those cloverleaf ponds you sometimes see dug out of highway interchanges. I might also have thought there’d be bluegill, for some of the same reasons, and because I couldn’t imagine the river supporting anything larger, other than carp. (All you channel cat fishermen: I know, I know.) So maybe my first problem was a failure of the imagination.
The fact is that the river supports an amazing array of gamefish, including walleye. I’ve spent literally my entire life going to northern Minnesota and Canada to fish for them, and here they are almost literally in my backyard.
Of all the reasons to feel encouraged about a river so brutalized by urban expansion, I don’t think there’s a better gauge of recovery than its fish populations. In part that’s because they reflect the health of the larger marine community in the river, which in turn reflects the water quality. These fish have to eat, and the things they eat also have to eat. Still considered “impaired”, the Des Plaines is a relatively short and shallow river, and the optimist in me sees it making a Lake Erie-like comeback. I’m still not sure I’d eat a walleye out of it, but I met plenty of anglers who do.
Gamefish are predators, subsisting mainly on a diet of other aquatic animals such as frogs, turtles, crabs, and of course other fish. Northern pike, which are like freshwater barracuda, have also been known to go after birds on the water, especially babies. These are generally the most popular species with anglers, and include smallmouth and largemouth bass, bluegill, catfish, walleye, sauger and northern pike. Setting aside for the moment that anglers may occasionally exaggerate, I’ve spoken to fishermen from Kenosha to Channahon who report catching or seeing all of these fish in both the river and its neighboring lakes and sloughs.
But you don’t have to take the word of a fisherman — which is good life advice in any case. At many fishing spots, especially in the forest preserves, there is signage to indicate which fish species are present, and what limits apply to your catch, all set by the IDNR. And I’ve seen all these gamefish listed at various points along the river. Then there’s the fishing derbies, which seem most popular in the Big Basin area near Channahon, where the river is large enough to accommodate a small armada of fishing boats. Joliet occasionally hosts bankside derbies as well, and there have been canoe and kayak derbies in Lake County. This is both testimony and endorsement for the river’s improved health. Without fish, there’d be no fishing derbies.
What the officials have to say
The IDNR is responsible for monitoring fish populations in the river, and its 2021 Des Plaines River Fact Sheet shares some amazing information. The IDNR employs electrofishing surveys to measure fish populations throughout the state – which means they shock the waters in a given area and stun fish to the surface (not a lethal jolt, like the Fish Dispersal Barrier) – and the 2020 results show how populations of gamefish are returning as the water conditions improve.
Smallmouth bass, a personal favorite, had a record high presence in 2020, with both trophy-sized fish and juveniles in abundance, “indicating very good reproduction, which was a first for the previously degraded river, suggesting good prospects for coming years,” according to the Fact Sheet.
Other gamefish species had similarly encouraging numbers, and though the greatest concentrations of fish tended to be downstream, most of these fish were present throughout the whole river. I’ve heard of people catching northern pike in the river near the Jean McGraw Preserve in Kenosha, and I spoke to guys near the Russell Road canoe launch in Lake County and at Columbia Woods in Cook County who were there for largemouth bass. In early May I met a guy near the site of the old Armitage Dam, near River Forest, who told me, straight-faced, that he was tying on new tackle because a giant channel cat had just busted his line.
The Fact Sheet goes on to note that the IDNR has been conducting these fish surveys since 1974, when only 20 species of fish were found. As of 2018, 64 species had been collected. They are no longer dominated by carp, goldfish and bullheads, which are actually decreasing as gamefish gain, along with smaller prey like rosyface and blackchin shiners, and the orangethroat darter, which the DNR classifies as a “sensitive indicator species”. Besides the tightening of wastewater regulations, the IDNR credits the addition of the McCook Reservoir to the Deep Tunnel system (see my River Grove story) for the ongoing improvement, as it takes on a lot of the CSO discharge that has historically plagued the river.
Daily fishing reports for the river are hard to find, although not so for some of the more popular lakes. Some of the Forest Preserve Districts provide occasional updates (see Lake County’s here), but otherwise you’re at the mercy of sporadic postings at sites like the Windy City Fishing blog and the Fishidy app. I’ve also found a trove of Des Plaines fishing videos on YouTube, which can be sorted by date – but not all of these videos are forthcoming with locations, which isn’t surprising.
One step forward, two steps back
So the good news is that gamefish have returned to the Des Plaines. But the bad news is that the gateway that facilitated them is scheduled to be closed off. That gateway is the Brandon Road Lock in Joliet, the only natural egress from the Illinois River, from whence come all these wonderful gamefish. The problem is that it’s also a natural egress for Asian Flying Carp, which are literally on the verge of entering and devastating the Great Lakes.
The existing Fish Dispersal Barrier — a network of electrified grids in the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Romeoville — and a line of flood fencing between the Canal and the Des Plaines River are our current defense against this nightmare scenario, and there is zero chance that the San Ship Canal will be closed off to prevent this. So, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has an approved $858 million plan, called the Brandon Road Interbasin Project, to install a similar electrified defense system at the Brandon Road Lock, which in theory will prevent the carp from getting into the river, which is how they make it to the Fish Dispersal Barrier today. That barrier won’t be selective in which species it electrocutes or deters, which means that after 2030, when the project is expected to be done, gamefish will be able to swim out of the Des Plaines, but they won’t be able to swim in.