Mile 44.3: Libertyville (DPRT)
First visit: Dec. 13, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? No Distance walked: 8 miles
Libertyville was the first time on my walks that I felt especially conscious of a residential community living on the river. I would pay closer attention to this aspect of the river’s story after walking here, and in fact I quickly began working in visits to Pleasant Prairie, Gurnee, Des Plaines, Riverside and Joliet – the towns that seemed to have the most concentrated residential presence on the Des Plaines River.
I can’t recall that I’d ever even been to Libertyville before, and even in my planning to come here I wasn’t interested so much in the town itself, but rather a section of the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT) that I hadn’t yet walked. I chose to start my walk at Adler Memorial Park simply because it looked like a convenient place to park. I never saw any accounts of this park, or this section of trail, that described the view of the houses directly across the river on West Des Plaines Dr., but that is among the first things a visitor to the park will see, whether that visitor is a river walker, like me, or a disc golf player, for whom the park is evidently intended.
That’s what they’d see first if they didn’t see a bald eagle first, which is what happened to me on this early and very cold December morning. I’ve seen bald eagles before, usually on fishing trips in places like northern Minnesota and Alaska. And it’s possible I’ve even seen them in Illinois, having been out to the Mississippi River west of Galena where they’ve had an increasing presence over the last thirty years or so. But I treasure every eagle sighting, and Libertyville counts as not only my closest sighting to home, but my first ever on the Des Plaines River. Even before I turned my car off, with the windows closed and the radio on, I was sure I’d heard the distinctive eagle chirrup, and sure enough, I saw it circling almost literally over my head above the parking lot. It occurred to me that it might have been sizing me up.
During my second walk in the area, on an unseasonably warm and sunny Super Bowl Sunday, I saw two guys fishing, a third fisherman walking to his secret spot, and a kayaker getting ready to put his boat in the water – all of them my first sightings of 2023. And all somewhat apprehensive about water that one of the fishermen told me was just barely above 32 degrees. I also heard songbirds in the woods, the first reliable sign of spring, and saw a large raft of ducks near what is surely the ugliest pedestrian bridge on the river, near Oak Spring Rd.
Living in a riparian zone
The way in which Libertyville is situated on the river calls to mind the concept of riparian zones, and what that means in biologic, civic and legal terms. I wasn’t necessarily thinking that the first time I walked down the wide, sloping lawn of Adler Memorial Park – though if I’d studied up a little on David Adler beforehand, it might have at least crossed my mind. A noted early 20th century architect from Chicago, Adler purchased a country house in Libertyville in 1917, which is now the Adler Arts Center, and built a gazebo down the hill on the Des Plaines River for his wife Katherine, a writer. Much of this park was part of his original estate, and though the gazebo is gone, it isn’t hard to appreciate the view the Adlers enjoyed. It seems doubtful, however, that the view would have included the storm drain outfalls projecting from the berm across the river, and the tops of homes projecting from the trees.
The notion of living on the river, any river, prompts thoughts of recreation and nature, and maybe of flooding as well. For some it may also spark concern over potential exposure to waterborne pollutants. But what I found myself wondering about was homeowner responsibilities around the river and its banks, to the extent they even exist.
Several preserves I’ve visited during my walks feature displays explaining what a riparian zone is, and why it is important to preserve them. But I’m sure we’ve all seen private properties built right up to the water’s edge on lakes, streams and oceans, which at least appear to be built right over or into the natural shoreline. I saw plenty of instances of this all along the Illinois portion of the Des Plaines, and the nature of the coexistence seemed to vary by location. In Libertyville, for example, the homes on Riverside Drive feature manicured back lawns that slope down to the water, where there may be retention walls, stairs and piers, all of which are undoubtedly private property. You can see similar arrangements in parts of Des Plaines and Riverside. But there are also instances where homes are set well away from the water, and where the buffer zone isn’t a lawn or a wall, but an expanse of marsh and woods that could have occurred there naturally.
I couldn’t do an actual count, but my impression is that most homes built near the Des Plaines River do observe some degree of natural riparian zone, though the exceptions can be dramatic. That they do so seems largely the result of practicality (reduced exposure to flooding and erosion) and public land location, though local zoning and certain other legal restrictions can also affect this.
“In the simplest terms, riparian buffers that are located on private property are the responsibility of the landowner,” according to Ashley Strelcheck, Water Resources Professional at the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission. “Illinois Drainage Law says that landowners are responsible for the drainage that occurs on their property and that landowners must accept surface water flowing naturally from higher ground.”
This, and the routing of wastewater, are the laws that most directly impact how private properties live on the river, and in most instances are probably the only laws that do. It’s otherwise up to the landowner, at least in Illinois, whether to maintain a natural riparian buffer, and what that would look like.
But there is something else I noticed as I began researching riparian zones on the Des Plaines River: a heightened attention and sensitivity to the Des Plaines watershed in general. I found this, and/or the physical manifestation of it, to be among the most heartening and encouraging things I discovered as I ranged further and wider along the river. There are numerous organizations devoted to watershed preservation, restoration and management, which include public and private interests that collectively reflect an increasing recognition of our fraught relationship with our environment.
This is a quite different attitude than prevailed during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, not least in its scope and reach, and it’s especially pronounced in Wisconsin and Lake County. It’s no coincidence, then, that some of the most unblemished views of the river’s natural beauty should be seen up north. But it’s also no coincidence that a town like Libertyville would have both natural riparian buffers as well as “turf grass all the way up to the river,” as the SMC’s Strelcheck says. Because there isn’t much in the way of a legal framework around the terms of river living.
The trail’s ever-changing moods
While the section of the DPRT that runs from Belvidere Rd. to E. Park Ave. offers some of the most scenic stretches of the river – especially around the amazing Independence Grove Forest Preserve south to Oak Spring Rd. – the trail takes a sharp left turn away from the river just past Rockland Rd., at around DPRT mile marker 19. This takes hikers away from sights such as the Lloyd Lewis House, a Frank Lloyd Wright home built on the east bank of the river, and the Libertyville Wastewater Treatment plant, which discharges into the river from behind a senior community on the river’s west bank. You can still see about a half-mile of river from Riverside Park and Red Top Park, across the way, but these aren’t accessible from the DPRT, which at this point veers dramatically east towards the Old School Forest Preserve.
This Lake County Forest Preserve is beautiful, and a tremendous testament to prairie restoration since these lands were acquired in the mid-1970s. Besides the forest preserve, the trail here runs through parts of the Des Plaines River Greenway and the Old School Open Space Conservancy, all of which provides a full-scale immersion in the rehabbed watershed. Having said that, it’s still one of the most disappointing stretches of the DPRT to me, because it’s nearly four miles of trail that is nowhere near the two miles of river it’s avoiding. When viewed on Google Maps, it’s hard not to think that the trail takes this drastic detour mainly to avoid clusters of upscale residential properties nearer the river.
But the fact is that it also keeps recreational users (like me) away from the Open Space Conservancy, which has allowed it, with the help of a dedicated corps of volunteers, to return to a state similar to when the area was first settled. I will discuss this in the Mettawa article, even though parts of this portion of the DPRT may technically be in Libertyville or Vernon Hills. That’s a challenge I faced several times when trying to equate sections of trail to the towns they pass through and/or border. It’s an admittedly arbitrary distinction on my part, though there seems to be disparity even between authorities like Rand McNally and Google Maps when it comes to certain suburban borders.
In the meantime, I’d like to add here that a visit to the Old School Forest Preserve puts you literally steps away from Lambs Farm, whose butter cookies were a favorite of my mom’s, and which remain as wickedly addictive today as they did when my parents first brought me there a million years ago.