Mile 50.7: Mettawa (DPRT)
First visit: Dec. 21, 2022 Public trail? Yes Private land? Maybe a little Miles walked: 7.75 miles
While I didn’t set out to walk the whole Des Plaines River, at some point – maybe 10 or 15 miles into it, my dread of cabin fever possibly clouding my judgement – I decided to see if it could even be done. I knew there were trails here and there, especially in northern Illinois, not to mention paths in parks and forest preserves. But the crux of the biscuit (apologies to Frank Zappa) was walking the river. As in, the river. And it turns out, unfortunately (spoiler alert), you really can’t walk the whole river. But I wanted to see how much you could if you really tried, and if that meant stretching the definitions of trails, public access, and even what it meant to be near the river, then so be it.
Accordingly, I occasionally bent even my own parameters, which were pretty flexible in the first place. Mettawa, for example. Elsewhere on this fan site I declared my intent to count only the miles that were within a turtle’s walking distance to the water, or something equally nuts. But I’m making a roughly four-mile exception here in Mettawa, with the simultaneous caveat that given the nature of the terrain here, it’s possible a determined turtle could in fact get to the water. But I couldn’t.
Starting around mile marker 19 on the Des Plaines River Trail (DPRT) in Libertyville the trail veers sharply away from the river and towards the Old School Forest Preserve, and doesn’t approach the river again for the next four miles of trail. This felt unsatisfactory to me, and though I found a few ways to cheat the trail, such as public parks and private enterprises on the opposite bank, this section of river was as inaccessible in its way as an area I will get to later that I call Desolation Boulevard.
The difference between Desolation Blvd. and here, though, is that this four-mile detour offers an opportunity to experience the Des Plaines watershed and see some of the most heartening displays of its restoration and revival anywhere in Illinois. In two particular ways, the watershed is just as consequential to the story of Chicago (and greater Chicagoland) as the Des Plaines River itself. I will deal with one of those ways here, in Mettawa, and the other in the River Grove section.
Mettawa, it turns out, is the only town on the Des Plaines River, besides Chicago, whose name derives from Native American origins. To quote Wikipedia: “The name of the town derived from Potawatomi chief Mettaywah, who lived in the area before signing the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and being displaced to Kansas.” (The proverb that no good deed goes unpunished comes to mind.) The Wikipedia reference goes on to say that Mettawa was founded by area residents in 1960, working with a common goal of protecting their rural area from encroaching commercial development. This town is almost as old as I am, and all these years later seems to have somehow held to this ideal while its neighbors seem to have paved over everything.
Unsettled by settlers
I’ve struggled at times to distinguish terms that often (to me) seem interchangeable: watershed, basin, spillway, greenway; wetlands, marshes, bogs, savannahs. Just when I think I understand prairie and forest, I get tripped up by grasslands and woodlands. To simplify things, at least for myself, I view all of them as parts of a whole. A whole what, you may ask, and fair enough. For lack of a better term, which kind of goes to the core of the matter, I view the whole as a complex ecosystem, and the Des Plaines River as its heart. The health of this ecosystem is tied to the health of the river, and vice versa, and all of it is in turn tied to us who, for better or (usually) worse, are also part of this ecosystem. That most of us see ourselves being outside of this ecosystem, to the extent we’re even aware such a thing exists, speaks to the profound challenges it continues to face.
Settlers who began arriving in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries made life-changing impressions on this ecosystem, first with agriculture and industry, then with urban development and “improvement”, stripping, gutting and building over the land and sending all kinds of effluents into the river. And these practices continue today. The legacies of this behavior can literally be seen everywhere along the river, preserves notwithstanding.
This stripping and gutting of the environment meant that much of its native biology – plants, animals and people – were removed, displaced and/or eliminated. I don’t mean to turn my Des Plaines River travelogue into another Silent Spring, but I couldn’t help thinking about this everywhere I went, from its source in Union Grove, where it is surrounded by farmland, to its confluence with the Illinois River, where the Dresden nuclear power plant belches exhaust along its south bank.
In come the invaders
The thing about removing native flora and fauna is that it doesn’t necessarily replenish itself after the carnage stops. It is often the case that other opportunistic species, most of which are introduced by humans, colonize in their place, and often flourish in the absence of natural predators that would otherwise keep them in check. This is true of animals and plants, where invasive species crowd out native species and throw off the natural balance, often with disastrous results. Hence the signs I saw posted all along the Des Plaines River drawing attention to both habitat restoration and invasive species.
Certain types of non-native plants have become so widely established that most casual observers don’t even know they’re invaders. And while some are more benign than others, several species have become a certifiable menace – and I speak from personal experience, having been repeatedly tangled, scratched, and punctured by wild roses, which I’ve accepted as my punishment for going off trail. (I hiked parts of the St. Lawrence and Madawaska Rivers in eastern Canada last year, and they’re as much a scourge there as they are here.) Garlic mustard and common buckthorn are likewise thriving and devastating.
For all of the harm they’ve done, and by extension that we’ve done, some of the most encouraging things I’ve seen on my hikes are human efforts to halt and reverse the damage. This often begins with eradication, both by excavation and controlled burns, the latter favoring native plants that re-seed and spread in the wake of prairie fires. This is rarely a one-and-done strategy, so burnt fields are a fairly common sight along the trails. I saw this all along the river, from Wadsworth to Hodgkins and from Lockport to Wilmington.
The best defense is a good offense
It is also the case these days that as new land is made available for public use, it is seeded with native plants. The first example that comes to mind is Centennial Hill, a mound of limestone rubble scooped out for the McCook Reservoir that rises between the Des Plaines River and the Sanitary and Ship Canal in Lemont. The MWRD, which owns this land, makes a point of promoting its habitat restoration work, including prairie and wetland rehabilitation around its wastewater treatment facilities. I would see many other examples of this around MWRD TARP, or “deep tunnel” sites, which I discuss elsewhere.
These examples reflect an increased awareness and respect for the Des Plaines watershed in general, with a diverse array of public and private entities working to restore native habitat. What’s really encouraging, in my view, is that this seems largely driven by public interest, as various public agencies respond to the concerns and demands of constituents who are tired of flooded streets and basements and foul-smelling waterways. Healthy, native wetlands have proven to be among the most effective natural ways to address such problems. I doubt such efforts were made by MWRD’s predecessor agencies just a generation or two back.
Besides remove-and-replace work, which can be a lengthy and expensive process, public education is an important component in efforts to restore and preserve the Des Plaines River watershed, because it increases awareness and support. As I’ve already said, the trails, forest preserves and nature centers I visited along the river feature numerous signs and exhibits meant to draw attention both to the environmental threats they are battling and to ways the public can help. I saw many examples of volunteer recognition and recruitment programs and noted the prevalence of native plant sales promoted by different Forest Preserve agencies. MWRD hosts periodic open house events at their wastewater facilities, featuring native plant and tree giveaways.
Back on the trail
The four-mile stretch of the DPRT that passes through the Old School Open Space Nature Conservancy offers an immersive study in the river’s ecosystem, teeming with black and white oaks, sugar and black maple, black ash and wild black cherry. There are also patches of plants bearing whimsical names like monkey flower, dragonhead, moneywort and jumpseed, and a large population of the rare water pimpernel. I don’t actually know what any of these are, and would undoubtedly be hard-pressed to identify them on the trail even with a field guide. But I trust and appreciate the experts who say these plant species are supposed to be here, and that changes in public land use are helping them make a comeback.
Past this stretch the trail returns to the river at Townline Road, where it continues south into the Capt. Daniel Wright Woods and the Half Day Forest Preserve. These are especially beautiful and well-maintained trail sections, and on the day of my first visit, just before a blizzard, I saw one of the most remarkable sights along my 100-ish miles of Des Plaines River hiking: a natural spring bubbling up from the riverbed at the west end of a pedestrian bridge.
By that point I’d already hiked downriver trails near the Sanitary and Ship Canal, where it isn’t unusual to see signs warning of buried pipelines, and I’ll admit to fleeting concern that I might be seeing the effect of a burst pipe. But I quickly determined that no such pipelines are present in this area, and that there were no obvious signs that the burbling disturbance was anything but water. Furthermore, it was keeping the otherwise icy water flowing, which attracted a raft of ducks who weren’t happy to see me. Had this been anything other than water, the ducks would have had the good sense to get away from there.