Sycamore has a beautiful rural landscape, filled with farmer’s fields and wooded trails.
Adee’s Woods provides an area for a picnic and a walk through the woods. If biking or snowmobiling is your interest , try the Great Western Nature Trail, which starts in DeKalb County and extends through Kane County to the Fox River Trail. The DeKalb/Sycamore Trail links the DeKalb Park District Trail from Lions Park on DeKalb’s south side to Sycamore and the Great Western Trail. County Farm Woods links the DeKalb Sycamore Trail as a great rest stop along your way. Merritt Prairie offers 56 acres of rolling terrain with native prairie and wetland restorations as the outstanding features of this park. Wilkinson/Renwick Marsh preserves wetland habitat and is an excellent area to listen to and view wildlife.
The Great Western Trail is in North Central Illinois and runs 18 miles from St. Charles to Sycamore. It is a Rails to Trails trail originally part of the Great Western Rail Line and built by the Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad in 1886. The trail is flat and you roll through the countryside past numerous small streams and wetlands. Continuous wild shrubs include Dogwood, Blackberry, and Hazelnut and merge with a few remaining patches of native prairie.
The trail parallels route 64 (North Ave) almost the whole way. This was an enjoyable trail if not the most exciting I’d ever been on. Monarch butterflies flutter around your head as your tires crunch over berries. You get a good sense of Illinois prairie and flat farmland. I was surprised that the 1st half of the trail was mostly shade covered, however the last half was mostly open farmland
