Our First Steps on the Chicago Outerbelt Trail

I recently stumbled across this Thrillist post introducing me to something called the Chicago Outerbelt - a 210-mile trail traversing Chicago and its surrounding suburbs that was recently discovered a couple of years ago.

Why do I say discovered?  Apparently, much of the trail has been in place for years or decades but has been hiding in plain sight to everyone living in the city or hiking near it until a few hikers decided to see if they could link the varying state parks, city parks, and forest preserves into one continuous trail.  Turns out they could.

I won't go into too much detail on the trail since the article above - and the articles it subsequently links to - go into much greater depth (although a comprehensive map and markers for sites is still in its very nascent stages).  But I can appreciate the immensity of both the find and the trail length. 

The Outerbelt is listed as a thru-hike, meaning, for intrepid adventurers, one could traverse the trail as though traversing the Appalachian Trail - stopping to camp every night after hiking about 15 miles every day.  At this pace, it'd still take a backpacker two weeks(!) to get through the trail.  The nowhere near as long as the Appalachian Trail, it's still one-tenth as long, which is amazing considering it was unknown three years ago.  It spans the length of the city, touches the border of Wisconsin, juts out into the western suburbs, snakes down near the Indiana border and returns to the Loop (its defacto starting point is apparently Buckingham Fountain).

I have no desire to thru-hike the route (I have a desire to spend one peaceful night in a tent at some point somewhere but the idea of pooping in the woods for days on end doesn't really appeal to me),  but I do want to bite it off in chunks.  Realistically speaking I can probably cover three to five miles per trip, which means I'll need 42-70 trips (or weekends) to run the whole route. 

It's not so daunting though.  It provides a goal that I never thought possible in the Chicago area that could take a couple of years to accomplish (miles and miles of hiking trails!).  Today, my wife and I finally took our first steps on the trail - winding our way from 18th Street and the lake through Maggie Daley Park.

• Here's our first three-mile leg.
• Here's a view from the Police Memorial Park.
• Here's a view from the Shedd Aquarium.
• Here's Buckingham Fountain.
• Finally, here's a mix of prairie and city at Maggie Daley Park.