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, find it on Parks — its own page lists its trails.

The trails come from public mapping data — the USGS National Map, OpenStreetMap, the Forest Service, the Park Service and others, all credited under the list. That's why the depth varies: some trails carry length, shape, climb and difficulty, and others are barely more than a name and a place.

So an empty list means your filters ruled everything out, not that the catalog is bare — widen the length, clear the state, or press Reset. The page tells you which it is: "No trails match those filters" is your filters talking.

🔎 Filters Are The URL

Six dropdowns — state, park, difficulty, sort, length and feature — apply the moment you change one, and so do the four shape checkboxes and Top-rated only. The search box waits for Enter or the Apply button, because you're still typing.

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 needs every word you type, in any order, across the trail's name, the names it also goes by, its keywords, where it is and the park — so falls yosemite finds Vernal Falls, and narrows and chains both find something even though neither is a trail's name. Exact-phrase matches list first.

Most trails have no shape recorded, and those always show whatever you check — unchecking 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.

Logged 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 button to log a hike.

The map above the list plots your whole filtered set, not just the page beneath it, and its own line says how many of the matches it managed to plot. Nearly every pin sits on the real trailhead; the handful we have no trailhead for are pinned at their park instead, and that line says how many of those there are too.

Trails

🥾 Every Trail, Not Just One Park's

🔎 Filters Are The URL

📋 Reading A Row

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