Name: Sand Ridge State Forest
Address: Forest City, Illinois
Size: 7,100 acres
Activities: Hunting, hiking, picnicking, trap range, archery range, camping, backpacking, cross country skiing, dog training, equestrian trails, geocaching, hunting, hiking, mountain biking, picnicking, and snowmobiling.
Reservations: The 27 class “C” sites in Pine Campground, are reservable. Group campsites can also be registered in advance. There are 12 primitive backcountry campsites along 55 miles of trail, they are reservable in advance but the trail is so lightly trafficked it shouldn’t matter much.
Pros: Quiet, beautiful, largely unoccupied by other people, tons of trails, prickly pear cactuses grow abundantly here. Turkeys are everywhere.
Cons: Water is not available on the trail. You have to cache your water in advance if you’re backpacking, as there is none available on the trail itself. The map is accurate, but don’t trust the scale.
Report:
Located just a little south of Peoria, Sand Ridge State Forest is not like any other corner of Illinois that you’re picturing. It’s basically a desert. The Illinois River flows a few miles west of the forest, but not one drop of drinking water is found outside of the big campgrounds. The water is there, supporting an entire evergreen forest and farmland, but it’s not above ground where you can drink it. There are points in the park you could dig as far as four feet down to get to the water source, and since that’s not in line with Leave No Trace Practices, you need to plan ahead. This means two things for the average backpacker: That you need to cache your water in advance; and that prickly pear cactuses grow here.
Native Illinois prickly pear cactus. Say it out loud, it’s a real thing. It’s not made up like unicorns, it’s real like narwhals.
If we get into our Wayback Machine and go to late summer 2020, we will see that I had been stuck at home for about six months. My casually planned backpacking trips were cancelled suddenly, and against my will. So, like many of us, I stayed home. Watching the news, and the covid numbers, for months on end was both helping and not helping. By summer, I’d pretty much decided that Illinois’ response was about the best you could ask for, and our neighboring states were maybe mucking up a little much for my taste (sorry, Wisconsin.) The upside of this, was that it inspired me to stay within state lines, and get to know Illinois a little better.
Chicagoans, and I am guilty of this, have a tendency to default to Wisconsin or Michigan for our camping adventures, but Illinois is right here, waiting for us to go and explore it. When Labor Day rolled around, and I was firmly losing my mind, I picked the first proper backpacking trail I could find within state lines and went there, with a partially baked plan. Enter Sand Ridge State Forest.
The Yellow Trail at Sand Ridge State Forest is a 15-mile loop that goes through upland boreal and evergreen forests, and low farmland. The higher elevation is on the north end, and the lower elevation is on the south. Sand Ridge State Forest lives up to it’s name – prepare for sand. You don’t need to prepare for beaches, because there is no water, but sand is everywhere. The trails are sometimes wide fire lanes, and sometimes winding footpaths, but the one constant is sand. If you’re going to do this loop keep in mind that sand is an unstable thing to walk on. If you’re used to walking the well-worn paths on the Ice Age Trail, or trodding up and down the boardwalks at Starved Rock State Park, this trail will be far more work on your body. I wore a pair of trailrunners with a little, essentially, mud flap on the back and I think that worked in helping me hike that surface. If you’re hoping to speed through the trail, bear in mind that it’s a lot like walking on a soft beach in parts.
This would have been a much greater challenge for me had it not rained for two out of the three days I was on the trail. I’d complain, but the rain tamped the sand down and I think that made it easier to walk.
The map for Sand Ridge State Park is, technically, a good map. But is it a useful map? Sort of. It’s got a learning curve, I’ll say that. The park itself is bigger than the map suggests, and there are places where the map suggests the trail might not be as long as it is. The topography is not well communicated on the map. The Yellow Trail in particular is not well supported by park staff, which might be exactly what you’re looking for. The signage on the trail itself is good, if sparse. Wayfinding is accurate and clearly marked, but sometimes the only way to really “feel” like you’re headed in the right direction is by watching the campsite numbers change.
I lucked out and managed to speak (masked) face-to-face with park staff, a few minutes before I hit the trail and I made some logistical changes because of that conversation. Primarily, I decided against my plan to go counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. The trail is a two-way street, but you might want to navigate it clockwise because then it’s easier to cache water ahead of time, without doubling back too much.
I took a leisurely three days to do this trail. A more ambitious hiker could easily do it in one or two nights. You won’t find expansive dramatic vistas at Sand Ridge, but you will be able to watch insects and birds flit about fallow farm fields. You might hear woodpeckers hunting for grubs among the canopy. You might find the hawks riding air streams hunting for prey to be too majestic. You will probably get bored of seeing all these central Illinois native cactuses, because they are so abundant. If that’s not interesting enough for you, then I suggest you consider what your mind’s eye tells you is beautiful, and ask why it doesn’t include this little bit of Midwestern paradise.
My route:
I parked on Pine Valley Drive, south of the Goofy Ridge blacktop. Pine Valley Drive is a gravel road, but there’s a little cutout for parking immediately south of the trail. I planned to stay at BC 1 the first night, BC3 the second night, and BC7 the last night. Before hitting the trail I’d stashed water at Bishop Road, and Sand Ridge Road. Water is available via a hand pump at Oak Camp, and I mean a big ol’ hand pump. Oak Camp is just a little ahead of BC1, so we topped up there before heading to camp.
BC1 is a lovely site. It’s narrow and long, which provides good privacy from the trail itself. It’s across from a game field, which was the site of a beautiful sunset and turkeys gobbling in the morning. Every site has a fire pit and tent pad, but no picnic tables and only a few overturned logs for seating.
The view from BC7 to the Yellow Trail.
Just after breaking camp the next morning, the skies opened up. The rain continued to fall for at least the next 24 hours straight. (That’s why I didn’t take many photos.) Once you’re rained on, there’s a point at which it stops mattering because you can’t get any wetter and I achieved that point just south of Sand Ridge Road on my way to BC3. I don’t mind hiking in the rain, because it tends to drive others away affording me more time alone in the woods. It also helps dampen sound, and changes animal behaviors. Nature is different in the rain.
BC3 was probably my favorite campsite. It was HUGE. I was camping with myself and my husband, but BC3 has space for at least two or three other tents without getting crowded. Honestly, the size of this camp was downright luxurious. That gave us a little space to hang things and hope to dry them out before moving on the next morning.
BC7 sits at the top of the steepest hill in the park. And its so, so long. This is the corner of the park where had I not spoken with park staff I would have done something supremely dumb. Initially, having never toted my own water to camp before, I thought I’d go counter clockwise, stay at BC7, and just double back carrying all that water. In my mind it made sense, because it looks like a smooth-ish trail, that can’t be too long, right? Wrong. I was wrong, don’t do that. The ascent from Sand Ridge Road to BC7 is steady, and consistently up. You want to do this stretch of the trail exactly once. If you stay at BC 7, do the trail clockwise and stash your water at Sand Ridge Road. If you want to do it counter-clockwise, stay at BC6, and stash your water at the same spot.
BC7 was near the prettiest dang view I saw the whole time I was there. Fairy tales and fantasy adventure movies wish their settings were as pretty as this. BC7 is a bit closer to the trail itself. But this part of the park is also more remote. Mosquitoes weren’t a huge problem while I was there in early September, but that may have been in part because of the rain. By the time we got to BC7, the rain had passed, and being so high on the ridge lessened the number of bugs.
This was my first experience stashing water ahead of myself, and I think I did okay. It’s an odd experience when you’re normally a Midwestern backpacker because what we don’t have in topography, we make up for in abundant water sources. Because there were two of us hiking, we bought those big jugs of bottled water, and went through about a gallon each per day. Again, this was in early September, and it did rain on us so heat wasn’t a major factor. I’m not going to advise anyone to carry less water, because that advice can go south quickly, but do consider the weight of the water when you’re carrying it, and factor that into your pack weight. I literally just wrote my name on the jug in a sharpie marker, and left them a few hundred feet away from the road, a few dozen feet off the trail, hidden behind a tree where I would find them when I got that far. Try not to stash your water so other hikers have to see it as they pass, that kind of mucks up the natural character of the spot.
Packing in your water also means packing out your water. There were no trash cans anywhere on the trail, so I secured the empty jugs to my pack when hiking. It got to the point where I started to feel like the trash lady from The Labyrinth. Thankfully, the trail was not busy at all. I think in the three full days I spent there, I saw exactly two other people. A couple of fresh-faced day hikers, just as I was rounding the top of the hill by BC7. I think I was startled by their clean, unsunburnt faces just as much as they were by me, in all my dirtbag glory.
