The Tunnel Hill State Trail : Surface question

darylm

darylm

White Jersey
Charter Member
Greetings all,

I'm currently working on a (volunteer) project for Ride Illinois to curate and enhance their various "Route Guide" routes into a set of RideWithGPS collections. I've ridden the southern part from the wetlands center north and my (faulty?) memory is there is limestone surface along the route once outside Karnak. (love that town name, thank you Johnny Carson, spelling not withstanding....)

Both RideWithGPS and OpenStreetMap show the entire length of the trail from Eldorado to the Wetlands Center to be 92% paved which seems to me to be unlikely. I'm looking for some local feedback or references on what to expect before I come down to ride the entire thing to embellish the route description in RideWithGPS. I obviously know about the official trail information like the ILDNR.

Thanks,
Daryl
 
@Rom And I found his excellent TH trail web page with the very nice Google Map. I'm currently in discussion with RWGPS on how they map OSM over. The OSM data for TH is largely marked as "crushed_limestone" which is technically correct but a rarely used tag and doesn't map well to to "paved" vs. "unpaved" in various services. I guess I'll have to physically ride the trail to have perfect data but I'd like to at least get it roughly right beforehand.
 
darylm said:
@Rom And I found his excellent TH trail web page with the very nice Google Map. I'm currently in discussion with RWGPS on how they map OSM over. The OSM data for TH is largely marked as "crushed_limestone" which is technically correct but a rarely used tag and doesn't map well to to "paved" vs. "unpaved" in various services. I guess I'll have to physically ride the trail to have perfect data but I'd like to at least get it roughly right beforehand.
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The bulk of the trail is crushed limestone. However, there are some areas, depending on time of year and washout, that have more freshly laid larger chunk gravel. Last time I rode it this was a short 200m section north of Tunnel Hill, IL. Everything else was able to be done safely on an older road bike with 23-25's, with road bikes now going to 30+mm width it could be the bike if you "want to go fast". Casual riders will have a pretty good time riding it regardless of bike, especially the areas that are heavily trafficked, i.e. vienna to tunnel hill.
 
North of Tunnel Hill and south of Vienna has recently been re-rocked (crushed fine limestone). When it's wet out, it gets soft. The rest is hard packed crushed fine limestone with some gravel spots where patching has occurred. Harrisburg is concrete up until north of town, then it is almost a single track and isn't very well maintained. There are some deep washouts north of Harrisburg so be careful if you go that way. The state only manages to Feazel Road in Harrisburg, and then it belongs to Harrisburg.
 
I have submitted a pretty large set of changes to OpenStreetMap to add "compacted" or "unpaved" to everything not listed as paved (like Harrisburg). This should make it so that mapping apps like RideWithGPS properly list the trail as "unpaved". Hopefully I'll remember to post when I'm down for riding it ;) as part of my project to improved documentation on the Ride Illinois guides.
 
darylm said:
I have submitted a pretty large set of changes to OpenStreetMap to add "compacted" or "unpaved" to everything not listed as paved (like Harrisburg). This should make it so that mapping apps like RideWithGPS properly list the trail as "unpaved". Hopefully I'll remember to post when I'm down for riding it ;) as part of my project to improved documentation on the Ride Illinois guides.
Click to expand...
Unpaved is definitely a good status. There was plans to pave a big chunk of it. I'm hoping they don't personally. I'd rather it be the fine rock.
 
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