Trails in Forest Preserve District of Cook County

🥾 Every Trail, Not Just One Park's

This is the whole trail catalog in one place — useful for the question a park page can't answer, like a waterfall hike under five miles in Utah. If you already know the park, its own page lists its trails.

Trails here are curated and added by us, so the catalog grows in batches rather than all at once. If the page tells you there are none yet, that's what it means — nothing is broken and no filter is hiding them.

🔎 Filters Are The URL

Five dropdowns — state, park, difficulty, sort and length — apply the moment you change one, and so do the checkbox rows: Open to, What you'll see, 🐕 Dogs allowed, the four shape boxes and Top-rated only. The search box waits for Enter or the Apply button, because you're still typing.

The checkbox rows combine differently, and it matters. Tick several under What you'll see and you get trails with any of them; an Open to choice then narrows that further, so Bikes plus Lake means a lakeside trail that allows bikes. Leaving an Open to box unticked is not "no" — ticking it asks for trails that positively say yes, which is why 🐕 Dogs allowed narrows the list a long way: only a small fraction of trails have told us either way.

Sort offers Top rated first (the default), Alphabetical and Nearest first. Nearest needs somewhere to measure from, so give it one — 📍 Check My Location, or type a city. Without one it falls back to top-rated and the line above the list says so rather than pretending.

Search looks at the trail's name, the names it also goes by, the trailhead and the park — so narrows and chains both find something even though neither is a trail's name.

Most trails have no shape recorded, and those always show whatever you tick — unticking Loop means "no loops please", not "hide everything nobody has classified".

Whatever you pick goes into the page's web address, so a filtered list is a link you can bookmark or send to someone, and your browser's Back button steps back through the filters one at a time. Reset clears the lot.

Length is round-trip — the distance you actually walk, so an out-and-back counts both directions. Filter on what you're willing to cover, not on how far out the turnaround is.

📋 Reading A Row

Each row carries the five facts that decide whether a trail suits today — length, shape, difficulty, climb and rough time — then the park it's in, as a link. A ★ marks one we rate as a pick of that park.

Signed in, ✓ done appears on any trail you've logged a hike on, so you can tell new ground from old at a glance.

The line above the list always names the total, and the page you're on when there's more than one — so you know what you're looking at a slice of. Tap a trail's name for the full page: trailhead, parking, permits, and the buttons to log a hike or add it to a trip.

On the map, picking a trip in Your route draws the whole drive in purple, and your trip's own plans are pinned in blue with their names beside them — so you can see which trails sit near the nights you have already booked. The line under the map says what is being shown and what is being left out.

Tick Only trails on my route and the list narrows to trails within the distance you pick of that drive — 50 miles to start — with the count line above the list saying so, and Nearest first then measures from the route.

A pin marked ≈ sits at the center of its town, not at a street address — stops, destinations and plans are placed from their city and state. Link a plan to a park or a campsite to pin it exactly.

Open 🔑 Map key under the map for what every pin, number and color means. When a trip has both route stops and itinerary plans, only one of them is numbered — pick which under Numbers on the map, and the choice follows you to the other trip maps.

Trails

🥾 Every Trail, Not Just One Park's

🔎 Filters Are The URL

📋 Reading A Row

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