Monday, August 30, 2010

Milwaukee: Oak Leaf Trail


The map may be kind of hard to read. I made it as big as I could but you probably still can't read it. The Oak Leaf Trail more or less goes around Milwaukee County with a few loops and connections along the way. It is made up of five main parts which run through county parks and along municipal streets. There is also 5-10 miles of mountain bike trails. 
The Oak Leaf Trail is the main portion. It is marked in red on the map. This is the trail that circumnavigates Milwaukee County. The Oak Leaf comes in at 71 miles. There is is an east-west connection, marked in yellow, that starts near where I live on the far west side of Milwaukee, or Wauwatosa, and ends up around the Bay View area on the southeast side. That connector is 15.5 miles long. There is the Lake Loop marked in blue on the East Side right on the lakefront. I've run this route about 600 times but will be more that happy to do it again and snap a few photos. This is one of my favorite runs in the city. There's always lots of activity along the lake which provides some fun scenery. It is officially listed at 5.9 miles. but I usually extend it a little to just over 6 miles. Sometimes I'll keep going up the lake to Capitol Dr. or head around the UWM campus and get 8-10 miles out of it. Finally there is the Lincoln Creek Spur marked in green. This is a tiny 1.7 mile thing off of Hampton Ave. I don't know much about this one.
This could take a while to complete. There isn't really an opportunity to hit a big chunk at a time since there aren't really any loops, it'll have to be mostly out and backs. The good thing is I can do parts of this at any time during the week. No matter where I've run in Milwaukee I've usually ended up on one part of this trail or another for at least a little bit. I was on the east-west connector for a time today, but I won't count it yet. Here it is though:
I might try to start on some of this monster trail tomorrow. Until then here's a song I like.



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