The days may be getting shorter but bike riding season is not over yet!

A friend of mine and I went out yesterday to explore some new trails and found the Jane Addams Bike Trail (starting at the southern end near Freeport, Il (west of Rockford) and rode north to the Badger State Trail (which  connects to the Jane Addams Bike Trail at the Wisconsin border) and then on to Monroe Wisconsin! So I guess you could say that we were on the Bike Interstate! 

Rock Walls along Jane Addams Bike Trail

It was cool on Saturday but still an excellent day for a ride. I brought my camera and got some photos but I haven’t had a chance to put together an official “trail page”  on this site yet but I hope to do that real soon. I did do a little research on the Internet on both the Jane Addams Trail and on Jane Addams the person and I found that to be very interesting.

As for the bike trail itself and our ride, we did 20 miles each way (40 total) and the trail is a very packed down crushed stone and/or dirt in most places. You can tell that it is a popular place for snowmobiles in the winter.

The trail was out in the country and very scenic. Lots of wooden bridges crossing over wandering streams. This is another rails to trails project and there are many signs that you are riding on a converted railway.  There are also a few passages through some fairly high rock walls as in the photo above.

If you don’t like crowded trails, then this is a great trail for you! We did not see a single other person on the trail for about 8 or 9 miles and then we only saw a few other riders, walkers and joggers total.

As for the trail conditions, the trail was totally dry and clear from the trail head in the south (around Freeport) to Monroe, Wisconsin. There were a few holes in the trail that you needed to watch out for and some of those seed ball like things (the size of baseballs) that I had to dodge a few times, but that was about it as far as obstructions go.

Scenic View from the Jane Addams Bike Trail (photo by Dale Kiffel)

Well, I’ll try to get a “more proper trail page” with the rest of the photos out here asap but I guess this blog entry will have to do for now.

And on another topic, I contributed a bike trail article for a start up magazine a few weeks ago which earned me the right to meet the Chicago area CBS news person Bill Curtis at his house this weekend! That was really quite interesting and I’ll have more to say on that later, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Stop back soon.