The Unofficial
Cook County Forest Preserve District Page

For official information, go to http://www.fpdcc.com.

This page includes:
General Information | Picnic Maps | Nature Centers | Mini Trail Maps | Special Destinations | Other People's Pages | About this page

General Information

• Get The Big Picture, including a full version of the county map above, showing the Recreational Facilities in Cook County, and links to detailed information about the most popular facilities. You can also take a look at the full-size Cook County Recreation Map (619KB), or the hypertext version of the Key to Numbered Facilities found on the map.

  The Forest Preserve District's official web site also has an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) of the Recreation Map. The official PDF version is divided up into pages for easier printing, but is a much larger download than the one found here.

• Learn about the Origins of the Forest Preserve District, detailing the history of the district between 1869 and 1922.
• Information on Butterfly Gardening in the Cook County.
• Information on Natural Areas Restoration in the Cook County forest preserves.
• A description of the Swallow Cliff Woods restoration project, including an interpretive trail map.
• Official, current information on Picnic Permits can be found on the district's official web site. The official site also contains detailed picnic grove maps not found here. The previous obsolete picnic permit information is still available here for reference.
• The Chicago Portage National Historic Site, at the head of the I & M Canal National Heritage Corridor.

Picnic Maps

These are the colorful "Picnic Areas and Trail Map" brochure issued for most of the divisions of the Cook County Forest Preserve District. Fun to look at, and useful, too, but not the state of the art in map making.

The Forest Preserve District's official web site also has its own versions of the division maps plus detailed picnic grove maps not found here. The "official PDF version" links below go the FPD's web site.

Read about "Your Forest Preserve District", from the description common to each picnic map.

Busse Lake/Ned Brown Preserve [skip to map (179KB)] [official PDF version]	Calumet Division [skip to map (116KB)] [official PDF version]	Des Plaines Division [skip to map (141KB) [official PDF version]
Indian Boundary Division [skip to map (138KB)] [official PDF version]	North Branch Division [skip to map (110KB)] [official PDF version]	Palos and Sag Valley Divisions [skip to map (279KB)] [official PDF version]
Salt Creek Division [skip to map (133KB)] [official PDF version]	Skokie Division [skip to map (137KB)] [official PDF version]	Thorn Creek Division [skip to map (215KB)] [official PDF version]
Tinley Creek Division [skip to map (167KB)] [official PDF version]

Nature Centers

The Forest Preserve District operates six Nature Centers which offer a variety of programs.

• General information and locations of all six "Nature Interpretive Facilities" (a.k.a. "Nature Centers").
• Nature Centers page from the official FPD site.
• Crabtree Nature Center with full text, or skip to the map (66KB)
  (See official page.)
• Little Red Schoolhouse Nature Center with full text, or skip to the map (119KB)
  (See the official page.)
• River Trail Nature Center with full text, or skip to the map (67KB)
  (See the official page.)
• Sand Ridge Nature Center with full text, or skip to the map (68KB)
  (See the official page.)
• The Hal Tyrrell Trailside Museum with full text, or skip to the map (26KB)
  (See the official page.)
• Camp Sagawau
  (See the official page.)

Mini Trail Maps

These black-and-white trail maps usually have just a paragraph or two of descriptive text, plus some rules and guidelines for the activity in question. CLONK has not spent a lot of time polishing up these maps, but they should give a reasonable quality 8.5" by 11" print-out.

The "official PDF version" links go to the Forest Preserve District's official web site. The PDF versions may be easier to print.

Check out the Mini Map index, or take a shortcut from the table below.

Area/Activity	Maps	Notes
Arie Crown Forest Preserve Bicycle Trail	23KB, no mileage [official PDF version]	Between Willow Springs Rd. and Mannheim north of the Stevenson
Arie Crown Forest Preserve Ski Trail	85KB, with mileage [official PDF version]	Between Willow Springs Rd. and Mannheim north of the Stevenson
Bemis Woods Ski Trails	56KB with mileage [official PDF version]	north side of Ogden Avenue, west of Wolf Road
Beverly Lake Area Ski Trails	32KB with mileage [official PDF version]	north of Higgins, east of Healy Rd. in NW Cook County
Camp Sagawau Area Ski Trails	109KB with mileage and topo contours [official PDF version]	Route 83, east of Archer, in the Palos Preserves
Chicago Portage Canoe Trail	77KB with mileage [official PDF version]	canoe the Des Plaines river from Stony Ford to Lemont
Deer Grove Ski Trails	141KB with mileage [official PDF version]	Quentin Road just north of Dundee Road, NW Cook County
I & M Canal Bike Trail	100KB with mileage [official PDF version]	trail along the historic Illinois and Michigan Canal
North Branch Bike Trail	49KB with mileage [official PDF version]	trail along the North Branch of the Chicago River
Salt Creek Bike Trail	88KB with mileage [official PDF version]	trail along the Salt Creek from Brookfield Zoo west
Swallow Cliff Ski Trail	106KB, with mileage [official PDF version]	Route 83 and Hwy. 45, just west of Palos Park
Thorn Creek Trail	59KB with mileage [official PDF version]	trail along Thorn Creek in the far southern suburbs
Tinley Creek Bike Trail	92KB with mileage [official PDF version]	trail along Tinley Creek in the southwestern suburbs

Special Destinations

Brookfield Zoo and the Chicago Botanic Garden are on Forest Preserve land, but are operated by independent organizations. Both of these very popular destinations have their own web sites. Just for the sake of completeness, I've included the Lincoln Park Zoo which is one of the last (and undoubtedly the best) free zoo in America, but is not part of the Cook County Forest Preserve District.

• Chicago Botanic Garden
  (Directions to the Garden)
• Brookfield Zoo
  (General Information and directions to the Zoo)
• Lincoln Park Zoo
  (Directions to the Zoo)

All of these destinations are very busy on nice weekends. You can expect to pay for parking at all of them, and you'll often be lucky to find parking on a sunny Saturday, particularly in Lincoln Park. Fortunately, there are good alternatives -- public transportation or trails -- at each of these locations.

Other People's Pages

Here are some other sites that containing Cook County and Illinois information.

• Forty years of Nature Bulletins from the Cook County Forest Preserve District, available courtesy of the NEWTON BBS at Argonne National labs.
• The North Branch Restoration Project page has information on volunteer efforts to preserve and restore natural areas in the forest preserves.
• The excellent Trailmonkey site contains lots of information on exotic destinations the world over, including Illinois. Trailmonkey has scans of some of the same Forest Preserve maps, but ours are prettier, having been "pixel-tweaked", our patented process for accelerating the onset of near-sightedness.
• Chuck's Backpacking Bonanza has lots of information on backpacking and western destination, but also includes a Deer Grove Forest Preserve page. Chuck's site links to more Deer Grove information, hosted by a fellow Enteractor, including maps and voluteer info.
• The Chicago Area Paddling/Fishing Pages is the ulimate source for information on ponds, lakes, and streams in and around Chicago.
• Chicagoland Fishing has a web board for discussing fishing conditions in the forest preserves and other area lakes and ponds.

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About this page...

The Forest Preserve District of Cook County manages more than 10% of the land in the county, and has a great many facilities, some as small as one square block, and others in the hundreds of acres. The Forest Preserve District offers a correspondingly large number of publications, but finding the one you're interested in can be difficult. The Forest Preserve District now has its own official web site as of June, 2002, making the task much easier. Before that, you had to take pot luck with the literature rack at the District's golf courses and nature centers.

This unofficial site was created as an alternative to the paper chase, with web versions of selected Forest Preserve District publications, created by scanning the original documents. The goal was to help everyone appreciate what's out there, while perhaps saving the taxpayers of Cook County a few dollars on postage and printing.

Now that an official site is available, portions of this unofficial site may be retired or scaled back at some point.

Many of the publications listed on this page were originally issued by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, Illinois, and were prepared for the web as a public service by CLONK. This web site is unofficial, and not associated in any way with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. CLONK is not responsible for any errors, either in the original publications or in these web versions. The information presented here follows the original Forest Preserve District publications as closely as possible, with minor variations such as choice of typeface and added web links. CLONK cautions that items such as names of public servants and telephone numbers are subject to change!

Check the Forest Preserve District's official web site for the most accurate information.

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This page has been visited many times times since 4/26/00, but the counter has been busted since RCN decided to shut down the old Enteract servers. That's life on the information superhighway.

Last updated 9/22/03.