I’d like to respond to the posts about the riding in the strip mines in Morris, IL. I grew up in Morris. I live in Joliet now, but my folks still live in Morris and I get down there regularly, a couple of times a month.
I learned how to ride in the old Morris strip mines, and my dad rode there all the time with his buddies in the late 60s and 70s. The riding in the Morris strip mines WAS great, back in the day, but there’s no riding there now. In the 60s and 70s, the riding there was fantastic, and even in the early 80s it was pretty good. By the late 80s, the cops started to crack down on trespassing out there. An old construction tycoon by the name of McElvene owns the Morris strip mine land, and a couple of guys got hurt bad and killed out there and their families tried to sue the landowner and that’s when the fun ended.
Another thing that killed the riding in the Morris strip mines was the federal land reclamation project. Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, the government dumped a bunch of money into the “reclamation” of old strip-mining areas, and the land in Morris was targeted for that. They came in with bulldozers and earth-moving equipment and flattened a lot of the hills and tried to clean up the area. A lot of it is still there, but portions of it has been subdivided and built up with homes. The land that remains is basically a private hunting and fishing sanctuary for the landowner, McElvene, and his buddies. The government spent money to reclaim the land and fix it up, but the public doesn’t get to enjoy it, which never made any sense to me.
Bottom-line, there is no more dirt biking riding in the old Morris strip mines. The last time I tried to ride out there was about 1993, maybe ’92, and I got thrown in jail for it. Times have changed a lot since you lived in Morris, Dante.
When I grew up, it was much like Dante described. There was a lot of riding in Morris and it was all free and unrestricted. Occasionally, the local cops would crack down on trespassing and kick people out of the strip mine areas, but not very often. But those days ended about 20 years ago. Morris has grown a lot in the last 20 years, and it’s turning into a yuppie town like any other Chicago suburb. Believe me, if a kid tried to do a donut in a cornfield outside of Morris now, he’d be herded off to jail just like anywhere else. Those maverick days are long gone, and sadly, so are all the free riding areas around Morris.
For trail riding in northern Illinois, as most of the other posts described, Buffalo Range in Ottawa is probably the best around, in terms of acreage and terrain. Fox Valley Off-Road Park in Wedron is also fun and available, but is smaller. Those two places are about it in this area for woods riding. There’s a chance we’ll make it out to Buffalo Range this weekend and if we do, look us up. I drive a green Ford cargo van and ride a YZ250 and my wife rides a Gas Gas 200. We usually have two dogs with us, a gigantic Malamute and a collie, and so we’re always easy to spot.