Mile 33.3: Gurnee (DPRT)
First visit: Jan. 30, 2023 Public trail? Yes Private land? No Distance walked: 5.8 miles
If you are from the Chicago metro area, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the umbrella term used to describe it: Chicagoland. It’s always seemed to me an odd label, without any real peer anywhere else that I know of. There’s no Miamiland, at least that I’ve ever heard of. No Kansas Cityland, or Denverland, or Seattleland. New York has Gotham, I suppose, but you don’t see it attached to, say, area car dealers, as in “see your Chicagoland Chevy dealer.” Do Chevy dealers north of Manhattan say, “see your Gotham Chevy dealer?” Somehow, I doubt it. Regardless, Chicagoland sounds to me less like a region and more like an amusement park. Disneyland! Legoland! Chicagoland!
These kinds of free-association mental wanderings often accompanied my real-life trail wanderings along the Des Plaines River, and this particular line of alleged thought was in my alleged mind the day I first walked the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT) through Gurnee, the first Illinois community of size along the river. Gurnee actually has some interesting history, some painterly landscape, and a developed arts scene – it’s home to the Lake County Symphony Orchestra – but for most of us in Chicagoland, Gurnee is known principally for one thing: the Six Flags Great America theme park. That would have been a great place to call Chicagoland, I was thinking, reminded of a long-extinct indoor amusement park in Bolingbrook called Old Chicago.
And in the endless, dizzying maze that sometimes passes for my consciousness, this kid from River Grove was then reminded of something else from my prehistoric childhood: a roller coaster called the Little Dipper, which was once a centerpiece of Kiddieland, another sadly extinct amusement park at the corner of North and First Avenues – an errant Skee-Ball’s throw away from the Des Plaines River. That iconic little roller coaster was bought, restored and resurrected by Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, where it thrills the pre-K set to this day, and I wondered about the preposterous possibility that the same Des Plaines River might be viewable from atop the same Little Dipper, albeit some 35 miles north and light years removed from its original home.
The answer is, sadly, no. But in some small, possibly cosmic consolation, you can see Great America from the DPRT, where the trail briefly runs alongside Washington Street before passing under it. And right before coming across something much more interesting to me than the Little Dipper – well, maybe not much more. But, as it turns out, much more consequential to the river.
I’ll get to what that was in a moment, as it constitutes another long-winded sidebar. But first I want to say just a few things about the river, the trail, and the community.
Country to suburb
The section of the DPRT that passes through Gurnee is an extension of the section between Wadsworth Rd. and Mill Creek, and can be accessed from several locations, including a spot on Kilbourne Rd. designated specifically for this purpose. The first time I went there was right after a heavy snowfall – though I didn’t know there’d been a heavy snowfall, because that same snowfall by my house was only an inch or two. Here it was eight or nine inches, drifting to over a foot, and trudging through it in standard hiking boots was way more cardio than I’d bargained for. I turned back after about a half-mile, just past the DPRT 10-mile marker where a raft of mallards routinely gathers at a bend in the river. I say this because when I went back a week later, on a warmer and brighter day, when the snow was easier to walk in – there were tons of ducks there yet again, more ducks than I’ve seen in a group probably ever in my life. And they didn’t like me being there. Lots of very vocal complaining. I sensed the threat of a coordinated attack.
The trail section north of Skokie Hwy. runs mostly parallel to train tracks, and among numerous ponds, sloughs and lakes teeming with all kinds of birds noisily engaged in springtime activity when I returned a few weeks later. From this part of the trail you can also see horses in paddocks, whereas a little further south, near Grand Ave. and Gowe Park, suburban civilization begins to more obviously assert itself. Just above Washington St., where the tallest Great America structures can be seen from the trail, is a monument to the first African American settler in Lake County, Amos Bennett, who farmed 150 acres in the area beginning in the 1830s. The trail here, as it is throughout Lake County, is mostly compacted gravel and mostly level, with an occasional dip and hill here and there. It’s pretty easy to walk, and if the basin here weren’t flooded during my visits, it looks like it would be easy to go off trail as well.
I did, in fact, go off trail for a bit, just north of Skokie Hwy., on March 15, where I had a chance encounter with a kayaker coming downstream. He was the first person I saw on the water, which isn’t surprising in that I walked the river mainly during the winter, and was as much a harbinger of spring as the frogs I’d been hearing, who I’d thought were a bit premature given their bogs still had crusty spots of ice in the mornings.
The first wastewater plant
Just beyond Washington St., slightly north of the second I-94 bridge over the Des Plaines, and near DPRT mile marker 11, is the first place I saw treated wastewater flowing directly into the river. This discharge comes from a treatment facility operated by the North Shore Water Reclamation District, located on O’Plaine Rd. and visible from the trail. (O’Plaine, by the way, is one of several early variations on the river’s name, and one of several O’Plaine Roads along the river.) It’s a surprisingly robust discharge, I thought, though I don’t have much experience in such matters. Emerging from behind (and under) a flimsy and broken fence/gate enclosure, the water was clear of any visible sediment, and the channel had been carved fairly deep and wide, especially at its mouth – from where you can see the I-94 overpass. There is a smaller stream that appears to come from the same source, just a few yards north of the reservoir, and while it also emerges from behind/under a fence, it looks less obviously manmade. But it was also discharging at a pretty good clip the day I saw it, so it may be as much a part of the design as the main discharge channel.
While I would encounter other discharge streams downriver, including those from stormwater pumping stations and various – and often indeterminate – industry and power plants, this is the first of 21 wastewater treatment plants (by my count) that discharge directly or indirectly into the Des Plaines. One of these, in Stickney, is the largest in the world, and though it discharges into the Sanitary and Ship Canal, the San Ship in turn merges with the Des Plaines in Lockport. I discuss the significance of the San Ship elsewhere, but at the risk of understatement, these wastewater plants collectively represent an almost unquantifiable impact on the river. But I’ll try to quantify it anyway.
Based on publicly available data, some of which seems as murky as the water being treated, I estimate these facilities are discharging, on average, roughly 2.5 billion gallons of treated water daily that ultimately ends up in the Des Plaines River, the vast majority being wastewater. The equation is complicated by areas employing combined sewer systems, where sewage and stormwater mingle, an antiquated but common configuration especially in Cook County. I would argue that stormwater is naturally occurring, and would have ultimately ended up in the Des Plaines anyway, but in any case it’s a relatively small percentage of the total discharge. (To read more about stormwater in the Des Plaines, click here.)
This is an amazing volume of added water, all the more so considering that almost all of it originates as tap water drawn from Lake Michigan, which never had any kind of connection to the Des Plaines River prior to the opening of the Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1900. Granted that some of these communities still get their tap water from aqueducts, including Joliet (though Joliet is moving to Lake Michigan water by 2030, when its current source is projected to go dry), this is still, to quote a favorite expression of a former business colleague, de minimis.
I present a table below of the wastewater facilities and their average daily loads, at least the ones I could identify. All of them naturally claim to meet all local, state and federal water quality standards, which I think is mostly true, despite finding multiple records of violations. Though these stats don’t include private industrial or energy production discharge, they do include discharge from the MWRD’s TARP, or “deep tunnel” flood control system (which I deal with separately here), which mostly gets routed through wastewater plants except in times of severe flooding. Note that no Wisconsin agencies, in either Racine or Kenosha Counties, discharge into the river, instead directing their processed wastewater into Lake Michigan.
One last thing before moving on: the day I saw the discharge stream in Gurnee, I must acknowledge that it looked every bit as clean and clear as the water I saw at the river’s source in Union Grove. I would say the same for the other discharge streams I happened to come across. This tells me that solids and sediment, at least, have been effectively removed before joining the “receiving stream,” as the MWRD terms it. As for whatever else may be in that water: we are left, for better or worse, to the mercy of agencies such as the IEPA and the Illinois Dept. of Public Health, which operates the Illinois Wastewater Surveillance System, to monitor and enforce water quality standards, which includes a bewildering array of potentially deadly toxins including chemicals and bacteria.
If this makes you nervous, let me add that I took a tour of the MWRD’s Kirie wastewater plant in May, and was surprised to learn they chlorinate the treated wastewater before it is discharged. I also recommend joining one of the virtual tours offered by the MWRD. I’ve mentioned these elsewhere, but let me repeat here that they’re super informative, professionally done, and free, and may help allay some of your concerns. But as a citizen and taxpayer myself, I am and always will be loath to completely trust any government agency, no matter how impressive their tours.
| Facility name | Location | Agency | Receiving stream | Avg. daily discharge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mill Creek WRF | Old Mill Creek | LCPW | Mill Creek | 1.66 m/gals |
| Gurnee | Gurnee | NSWRD | Des Plaines River | 21.13 m/gals |
| Waukegan | Waukegan | NSWRD | Des Plaines River | 21.13 m/gals |
| Libertyville WWTP | Libertyville | City of Libertyville | Des Plaines River | 4 m/gals |
| Vernon Hills (NCT) | Vernon Hills | LCPW | Des Plaines River | 1.66 m/gals |
| Highland Park | Highland Park | NSWRD | Skokie River | 21.13 m/gals |
| Des Plaines River WRF | Buffalo Grove | LCPW | Des Plaines River | 1.66 m/gals |
| James C. Kirie | Des Plaines | MWRD | Higgins Creek | 52 m/gals |
| John E. Egan | Schaumburg | MWRD | Upper Salt Creek | 30 m/gals |
| Terrence J. O’Brien | Skokie | MWRD | N. Shore Channel | 333 m/gals |
| Hanover Park | Hanover Park | MWRD | DuPage River | 12 m/gals |
| Stickney | Stickney | MWRD | San Ship Canal | 700 m/gals |
| Calumet | Chicago | MWRD | Little Calumet River | 354 m/gals |
| Lemont | Lemont | MWRD | San Ship Canal | 2.3 m/gals |
| Woodridge Green Valley | Woodridge | DuPage County | DuPage River | 12 m/gals |
| Knollwood | Burr Ridge | DuPage County | Des Plaines River | 10 m/gals |
| Nordic | Addison | DuPage County | Springbrook Creek | 0.5 m/gals |
| Romeoville WWTP | Romeoville | Village of Romeoville | Des Plaines River | 294 m/gals |
| Division St. WWTP | Lockport | City of Lockport | San Ship Canal | 1 m/gals |
| Eastside WWTP | Joliet | City of Joliet | Hickory Creek | 6 m/gals |
| Channahon WWTP | Channahon | Village of Channahon | Des Plaines River | 0.5 m/gals |
| Total avg daily discharge: | 2.47 billion gals |