Oak Leaf Trail Photos
Grant Park

(click on any photo to enlarge)

A little further south on the Oak Leaf Trail, between the Cudahy shooting range and Grant Park, you go through some wooded areas as you can see in the photo above.

The South Milwaukee sign in the photo above is just before the OLT goes through Grant Park. The trail was brand new and in great condition when we took this ride as you can see by the thick new blacktop and new white gravel to the sides of the trail.

OK, I could not resist getting a photo of an OAK LEAF on the OAK LEAF TRAIL! There were plenty of Oak Leaves on the trail when we took this ride and I probably could have gotten a better shot but I did not have the time to get all artsy and find the perfect leaf so this one will have to do for the OLT "theme picture".

The Grant Park sign in the photo above was after we had already gotten a little way into the park and I mostly took this photo to keep track of where we were. If you are familiar with the trail (and this sign) then you can tell exactly where we are in the photo tour also.

As we rode through the woods I noticed how this particular part of the trail is brand new and must have just been completed. As you can see the sides of the trail are muddy and look like they just plowed through the woods here to make (or maybe widen) the trail.

When we came out to the road that goes through the park the trail had a steep drop off at the road that we had to walk around. As you can see by the barrels and fence this part of the trail was still under construction.

There is a little section of the trail south of here that goes out to the beach on Lake Michigan. We explored that branch of the trail but it had an incredibly STEEP HILL going down to the beach that we had to walk up to get back to the main trail again.

There is a very narrow trail that runs alongside the park roadway ~ shown above ~ and heads out of the park to the waterfall below and Oak Leaf Parkway in South Milwaukee that wraps around (north then south) and back out to the actual OLT again.

The photo above shows the waterfall at the southern entrances to Grant Park and the Oak Leaf Parkway. This is close to where the Oak Creek and Lake Michigan meet.

There was a plaque here, from the South Milwaukee Historical Society, that said that this was the site of Fowle's Mill in 1840 and the WPA spillway in the 1930s so there is some history at this location.