Well spring is here and it feels great to get out on 2 wheels and ride again! Now that I have been out to my main trail (the Paul Douglas Trail) a few times this year I have come across a number of obstacles that I wanted to mention.

Flooding again on Paul Douglas Trail

The first obstacle that I wanted to mention is the flooding in the usual place on the Paul Douglas Trail. This is on the west side of the trail along Huntington/Freeman road.

You can get around this pretty easily by going out on the road for about 1/4 mile then back to the trail again but it is getting a little old and I don’t know why they are not able to resolve the problem.

Normally if the water is not too deep I just ride through it. In this case there is also a lot of debris like branches and piles of sticks and I did not want to try to ride over the debris or take the chance of running into something in the water and end up having to stop and get soaked.

The road – Hunting/Freeman – is not all that busy so I don’t mind too much but I would rather be able to just stay on the trail.

The next obstacle on the Paul Douglas Trail is that it is still closed east of Ela on the south side of the trail where they are doing construction on the new tollway ramp at Central. There is no practical way around this. You could go north on Ela to get to the other side of the trail to do a loop of this part of the trail but I usually just turn around because I prefer trails to roads and Ela is 2 lanes and has more traffic than I like to deal with.

One interesting thing is that there are a few signs that say that this part of the trail will be “Closed Until Summer 2018“.  Well that is nice to know but a little vague. Does this mean until the start of the summer, some time during the summer or their deadline is by the end of summer? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see when that part of the trail opens up again.

Those are the main obstacles on the Paul Douglas Trail that I am aware of (I don’t usually ride the northwest extension of the trail that goes into Crabtree Nature Preserve so I don’t have an update on that part of the trail at this time).

I also have some additional construction related obstacles just getting to the trail myself from my neighborhood but I have found ways around those. The only other thing about this trail that I wanted to mention is that they burned down the brush on the northwest part of the mail loop (near Algonquin and Huntington/Freeman) and that looks pretty crappy at this time.

I’m sure that will grow back fairly soon and I think the idea is that it will be healthier and come in better than it was before but I guess we will just have to wait for that to happen.

Well that’s it for the Paul Douglas Trail updates for now (and I thought that this was going to be a quick update!).

Enjoy the great riding weather that we have coming!