Thorn Creek Trail, near Sweet Woods

We have been doing more new bike trails this year and finally made it to the Thorn Creek Trail, TCT with the northern end of the trail near Glenwood, Illinois (in the southern Chicagoland area).

This is a very nice, paved and mostly wooded trail and we were able to ride 30 miles on most of the main parts of the trail.

We rode the Old Plank Road Trail, OPRT last year ~ about this time of year ~ which runs from Joliet to Park Forest, and there was an extension to the trail that was under construction that connected to the TCT but it was not quite rideable at the time. That section of the trail is now complete and we rode that part of the OPRT this year too.

New Extension to Old Plank Road Trail © Photo Dale Kiffel

The photo on the left is the a fence along the new extension to the Old Plank Road Trail. Although we did not ride the rest of the OPRT on this trip, you could ride quite a few miles on these 2 trails.

As for our Thorn Creek Trail, we started our trip at Sweet Woods Forest Preserve near Glenwood and went mostly east toward Lancing then turned around when the trail ended, went past where we started and continued south to Sauk Trail Woods forest preserve where the trail loops around Sauk Trail Lake where we headed back north again. On our way back we rode the New part of the Old Plank Road Trail.

I took quite a few photos and some videos of the trails but have not had a chance yet to complete the official ride report and trail pages for this website. I will post those but it usually takes a while (sometimes a long time) so I wanted to at least do a quick blog post ~ which I guess I just did. 🙂

Bridge on the Thorn Creek Trail – Photo © Dale Kiffel

Although my main goal with my bike trail photos (and sometimes videos) is to document the trails ~ with good photos ~ one of the guys that I ride with a lot, Dale Kiffel, often gets more artistic photos of the trails or sites along the trails and I had to post this last photo on the right of one of the main bridges on the TCT by Dale.

For more official bike trail pages and ride reports from those of us who have actually ridden, photographed and documented the trails, see the other 45 (and counting) Illinois and Wisconsin Bike Trail pages here.