Serena and I hiked a chunk of the “Bloomingdale Trail” this Saturday. It was pretty awesome. The best “on ramp” we found was just south of the Logan Square YMCA and we hopped off in Wicker Park right at Damen. Be warned if you want to take a shorter jaunt, most of the trail is about 12 feet or higher off the ground so you may have to make a pretty good jump. Don’t worry though, the train tracks are totally inactive so you won’t be re-enacting Stand By Me scenes or anything (except maybe the dead body.)

Highlights include:

-intravenous drug user
-20 foot “bum nest” made up of about 3000 pieces of clothing.
-some pieces of train junk.
-lots of firework scraps and broken eletronics.
-quite a few dirty soggy stuffed animals which gives the place a nice creepy ambiance.
-a few abandoned train cars.
-thousands and thousands of broken bottles.
-crack afficiondos

Looks like the trail even has a site.

We heard it goes all the way to to Blue Island but we didn’t get that far. Anybody make the full trek?

Also, I swear I saw some Flickr pics or a blog post of this trail somewhere but i can’t seem to find them.