Along the Des Plaines River Trail, as trucks trundle past on Grand Avenue and trains rumble across the bridge spanning the slow-moving waters, the ground is soggy and caked in mud. It’s clear the river has lapped across the land here, covering the forested path with a jumbled assortment of twigs and branches.

Soon, with spring approaching, the water likely will return. The river will rise, boosted by seasonal rains, snowmelt, and contributions from the region’s smaller creeks and streams. All of that water has to go somewhere.

Much of the precipitation that falls upon Chicago’s suburbs will make its way into the Des Plaines River watershed, one of the region’s largest. Runoff from business plazas, subdivisions and apartment complexes washes across the adjacent trail, taking soil and gravel along with it. During the past several springs, the river itself has overtopped its banks, and swamped the path and underpasses that provide safe passage below busy streets.

The trail, an attraction for tens of thousands of joggers, bicyclists and pedestrians each year, according to estimates, has become a barometer of sorts for the severity and frequency of flooding in the Chicago region. And now, the threat of high water and flooding is affecting potential future plans for the trail.

“The last three years, the rain that we have experienced has been unbelievable and a lot of the time the trail was wet and unusable, I’d say, 60 to 70% of the time,” said Mike Hart, trails manager for the Forest Preserves of Cook County.

The state is receiving heavy amounts of precipitation more frequently, which has ramifications for engineers who design the area’s roads, buildings, bridges and stormwater systems, according to a 2019 Illinois State Water Survey report.

“We’re just trying to keep up with a changing climate,” said Jim Angel, the retired Illinois state climatologist who was co-author of the report. “It’s a different ballgame, a different climate, a different world.”

The forest preserve in Cook County is considering options for trail upgrades and improvements for the section between Touhy Avenue and the trail’s terminus near North Avenue near River Grove, and the prospect of persistent flooding has been one reason engineers and planners have proposed eliminating several of the underpasses, shifting the trail eastward away from the river bank and perhaps, if funding allows, building overpasses to allow trail users to avoid surface streets.

On the section of the trail in central Cook County, a recent study shows about one quarter of the trail and five of the underpasses are flooded more than 40% of the year. In Lake County, where the trail winds its way from near the Wisconsin border to the Cook County line, one of the trail’s key underpasses, at Illinois Route 60/Townline Road near Vernon Hills, was flooded about 50% of the time during the past three years.

“Pretty much whenever there’s snowmelt or whenever there’s a big thunderstorm, or when we get a ton of rain, she’s going,” said Michael Harland, a 26-year-old from north suburban Lindenhurst who runs several miles on the Lake County section of the trail multiple times per week, no matter the season. “It floods fairly often, and it does seem to be flooding more.”

Harland, who often runs during the morning after finishing work on the third shift, has frequented the northern portion of the trail for years. There are times when he heads out for his daily run on a sunny day, only to find portions of the trail still underwater from storms that occurred several days ago.

“Then you just have to wait,” said Harland from the parking lot of Independence Grove in Libertyville, where a few other joggers and bicyclists hit the trail despite Tuesday’s sleet.

“I find roads boring (for running). And here, you just have all the space, and you can go with the flow and think and look at the river, look at the trees, the birds, watch the squirrels scamper off.”

Waterlogged and wet

In Illinois, flooding inundated communities along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for much of last year, delaying or wiping out the planting of corn and soybeans, swamping small towns and leading to disaster proclamations across many western and southern Illinois counties.

Last year was the second wettest on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only in 1973 did the country receive more precipitation. Last year also was the third wettest on record in Chicago, according to the National Weather Service.

A 2019 report by a team of Midwestern researchers suggests extreme bouts of precipitation and flooding could be the new normal in the Great Lakes region due to climate change. While the United States has seen annual precipitation climb 4% between 1901 and 2015, Great Lakes states have experienced a 10% rise over this same period.

As the warmer, wetter weeks approach, the National Weather Service office in the Quad Cities, in its spring flood outlook, says there is a “high confidence on widespread rises to near or above flood stage on all area rivers” in western and northwestern Illinois. One prediction graph shows that by mid-April, the Mississippi River at Dubuque, Iowa, has a 90% chance of moderate flooding and a 50-75% chance of major flooding. Moisture in soil across the area is high — in the 99th percentile in much of the upper Midwest, including northern Illinois — meaning snowmelt or rainfall will run directly into rivers instead of soaking into the ground.

On the Des Plaines River, the all-time record high crest recorded at the gauge in downtown Des Plaines occurred in April 2013, and the fourth highest happened in July 2017. Upstream at the Gurnee gauge, the record high occurred during that 2017 flooding. The Des Plaines River, which begins in southern Wisconsin, winds its way south through the Chicago suburbs — carving a route through protected forest, prairie and wetlands — before joining the Kankakee River and forming the Illinois River, southwest of Joliet.

“We’re seeing this happen in areas that we’ve never seen before,” Hart said. And it’s happening more and more each year, he said. “We’re getting so much rain, so fast, so often.”

In Cook County, the proposals and possible plans for relocating sections of trail to the east, farther away from the river itself and onto slightly higher ground, have received mixed responses, Hart said. On one hand, repeat flooding that causes vast sections of the trail to be unusable for most of the year is far from ideal. But the trail’s popularity is its proximity to the water and the serene views of the river, waterfowl and the riverbank it affords.

“I love where the trail is, especially when it’s dry and you can walk down and not get mud up to your ankles,” Hart said.

The mud, though, has become a more frequent presence. And that’s if the trail isn’t completely underwater. On a recent weekday, with the spring rains still weeks away, the underpass at Lawrence Avenue was covered in a sheet of ice. The southern entrance was completely inaccessible, blocked by a pool of icy water.

Hart, who has worked 29 years at the forest preserve district, 17 years as trails manager, said the last few years have been particularly challenging. When it rains, he said, it is often a devastating downpour. Instead of steady rains over the course of a day or so, it has not been uncommon for sections of the Des Plaines trail to receive 2 inches of rain in 25 minutes. Other trails throughout the Cook County forest preserve system also have been affected by the uptick in precipitation, Hart said, with trails north and south experiencing washouts and damage from rain and flooding.

“You also have to consider, if you know more rain is going to come, do you put in the money to the trail if you know it’s going to wash away again?” Hart said.

There have been several times when Hart and trail crews have placed new stones and re-graded the trail, then watched as torrential rains pounded the trail and the surrounding neighborhoods, raising river levels and leading to water runoff that deluges the path.

“There are times when we do the stoning and the improvements, and then two weeks later, it’s raining again and it’s all underwater again and all that stone just washes away,” Hart said. “At what point do you stop throwing money after it?”

Underpasses underwater

For about three years, the Lake County Forest Preserves has logged daily data from each of the trail’s nine underpasses, seven of which are close to the river. Crews record whether the trail is dry and safe or covered in water, and thus closed to bicyclists, joggers and walkers, throughout the year. (People can check the site before heading out: https://www.lcfpd.org/check-status-of-trails-and-preserves/ or https://www.lcfpd.org/preserves/closures-controlled-burns/.)

Using those records, forest preserve staff were able to quantify how much each of the underpasses were covered with water, according to John Nelson, director of operations and infrastructure for the Lake County Forest Preserves. One heavily flooded underpass is at Grand Avenue/Illinois Route 132 in Gurnee that is closed 40% of the time.

Nelson said that, on average, 20% of the trail’s 31 miles in Lake County is flooded. The worst months typically are April and May, with the driest months during the summer.

The trail is, of course, in a vulnerable location, in most cases mere feet from the bank of the river itself. Still, many sections of it have been experiencing more frequent and longer closures. And the region’s water woes reach beyond the Des Plaines River valley, leaving many other trails in the Cook County system submerged or unusable in ways not seen in years.

In Lake County, the trail was built from the mid-1980s through 2008. And in 2015, the forest preserve district acquired the final piece of property, near Lincolnshire, that allowed the path to run from the Cook County line 31.4 miles north to Russell Road in Wadsworth. It winds through 12 different forest preserves along the way.

Nelson said flooding is a reality on the trail, considering its location in a natural floodway. But the forest preserve district is aiming to use the data to better determine which sections flood the most and whether any improvements, such as increasing the size of culverts or perhaps paving sections of trail that frequently wash away, may be options. Those choices, however, may not make economical sense, considering how frequently water covers sections of the trail.

Angel, the author of the heavy precipitation report, notes that when much of the trail was planned, it was a “much drier climate” with less frequent heavy downpours.

While trail flooding may be inconvenient to nature enthusiasts and the fitness-minded, flooding in the forest preserves, a natural greenway with wetlands and riparian forests designed to take on floodwaters, is preferable to flooding in basements or businesses, Nelson said.

“This greenway is a benefit just for being a place where flooding and the water can go,” Nelson said. “The river has to have a place to go, and we know that.”

The trends that have developed over the past few decades, and which have accelerated in recent years, mean the area is not only experiencing increased annual and seasonal precipitation, but also more extreme weather precipitation events. Such storms create “instant runoff,” Angel said, which eventually heads toward low areas and natural floodplains, such as the Des Plaines River.

In Cook County, Hart and his crew work to smooth and repair the trail once it has been underwater for days, but with the spring season coming, he said there’s not much he and the others can do to stop the forces of nature.

“That river just comes up so high, there’s nothing we can do in-house, we have no capability, the contractors have no capability, to do anything, considering the alignment of the trail and where it sits,” Hart said.

At the portion of the trail that hugs the east bank of the river through downtown Des Plaines, the trail and the rainbow-colored National Weather Service flood stage gauge affixed to the underpass beneath Miner Street is clearly visible and dry — for now. But the slowly rushing water is only a few feet away, and spring is on the way.