I&M Trail from Marseilles to Split Rock (near La Salle)

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As I mentioned recently, we just rode another part of the I&M Canal Trail last week (Monday, 10/15/12) and I have selected and posted photos of our trip with our existing bike trail pages. Illinois and Michigan Canal Trail and Bike Ride

This particular ride was a continuation of a ride on the I&M (Illinois and Michigan) Canal Trail that we did way back in 2003 from Channahon to Marseilles. The photos for this trip should be much better quality since the old photos were actually from a pre-2003 generation camcorder and the new photos are from our fairly current DSLR cameras.

These trail photos are more like my usual photo tours of the other bike trails written up on this site, where I provide more information on the trails and try to capture the feel of the entire ride, rather than the photos that I did recently that were specifically meant to capture the fall colors on the bike trails that I selected for this year (although there were still some nice fall colors on this I&M Trail ride).

We did a little over 40 miles on this ride and once again I was impressed with many parts of the I&M Canal Bike Trail. This is a fairly rugged (if you are used to asphalt) multi-surface trail. Most of the trail was crushed stone but there were also some grass and dirt sections. We had to clear and/or carry our bikes over some fallen trees on one part of this ride. Lock on the I&M Canal Trail west of Ottawa

After our first ride on the I&M Trail I did some research on the history of the I&M trail (both online and at the library) and I have been very impressed with the significance of the history behind this trail (once the Illinois and Michigan Canal that connected Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River and shaped the history of Chicago and the mid-west US).

On this trip we rode past the Fox River Aqueduct and Locks #11 and #12 just west of Ottawa, Il. There are quite a few signs and maps posted along the trail that give you some of the history of the part of the trail that you are on. so not only is this a nice, scenic bike ride, you can also pickup some interesting history on this ride.

The I&M Trail goes right past Buffalo State Park which seemed like a nice area but we did not get a chance to go into the park. The trail is also just north of Starved Rock State Park but I did not see a way to get to Starved Rock from the I&M Trail. This is probably possible but we had a limited amount of time (there is only so much daylight this time of year) and we were not able to explore as much as I would have liked to.

OK, enough talk about the I&M Canal and our ride. Here are the latest photos from our ride from Marseilles to Split Rock (7 photo pages):

Actually, you can just take the links at the bottom of each photo page to go to the next one, but I am including all of them here in case you are interested in a particular part of the trail.