Into the Wild

Paddock Woods

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Cook County

City dwellers used to instant gratification will delight in Paddock Woods Forest Preserve in southwestern Cook County. Springtime flowers sweep down a hill visible from the parking lot, and a larger encore of blooms is located just a few hundred yards down the preserve’s looping pathway. What the two-mile trail through the 250-acre Paddock Woods lacks in length it makes up for by the instant disappearance of roads and buildings, replaced by sweeping oak trees and rich wildflower displays. “It’s a nice secluded woods,” says site steward Ken Stoffel. “You can get out here and feel like you’re in a non-urbanized area.”

Paddock Woods sits in the southeast corner of the enormous Palos and Sag Valley Preserves, which contain some of the first green spaces purchased by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. These preserves once seemed quite remote from the city. Now they’re surrounded by homes and businesses.

Although controlled burns haven’t been done in Paddock Woods for more than a decade, the initially high-quality preserve has retained much of its character as an open woodland. Vegetation under the preserve’s red and white oaks is relatively free of the usual invasive plants, such as buckthorn, honeysuckle, and garlic mustard. Look instead for native woodland wildflowers living among “glacial erratics,” small boulders deposited here by the Wisconsin glaciation thousands of years ago. (Most of the western edge of the preserve is located on the Tinley Moraine, a long, snaking hill created by the glacier. The southwest corner is on the Valparaiso Moraine.)

Paddock Woods is especially a sight to see in the springtime, when so-called “Trillium Hill” offers a magnificent display of its namesake flower a short ways north along the trail from the eastern parking lot. The three-petalled trillium cover the trail’s left side with a blanket of white, mingling with yellow-green Solomon’s seal, purple Joe Pye-weed, and creamy-yellow Dutchman’s breeches. Throughout the year, red and white oaks watch from overhead, although many of the preserve’s red oaks have died off from oak wilt disease. They remain standing, though — woodpeckers call them home, and so do the insects those woodpeckers call dinner. Without leaves, these deceased oaks let in more light to the understory below. Along Kean Avenue on the western side of the preserve, look for ephemeral ponds that appear during rainy periods.

Habitat monitors conducting a “woodland audit” at Paddock Woods in recent years have noted that wildflower abundance and diversity on the inside of the main loop trail is markedly greater than that on the outside. They attribute this to several controlled burns conducted on the inner section years ago.

Since its trails connect to adjacent preserves, hikers, cross-country skiers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders can connect a visit to Paddock Woods with a longer trip through the Palos Preserve system. Given these mixed uses, please observe posted markers indicating appropriate trail traffic.

— Allison Knab