Word got around the way it usually does on this trail: not from a press release, but from riders. Members of the Cycle Brookfield group started reporting on July 11 that the Salt Creek Greenway Trail underneath the Tri-State Tollway had reopened. The forest preserve district hadn't updated its own trail status page yet. Cyclists found the path passable a day earlier, on July 10, before any agency had said a word.
That lag between "open" and "officially open" tells you something about how long this closure had dragged on. The underpass connecting Oak Brook Park District land on the west to Cook County's Bemis Woods on the east had been shut, on and off, since 2023, caught up in the Illinois Tollway's reconstruction of the I-294 bridge overhead. By the time it reopened, most regular users had stopped checking for updates and started checking the pavement themselves.
An Underpass Built On A Handshake
What makes this particular crossing worth knowing about isn't just that it reopened. It's that the underpass was never a standard piece of trail infrastructure to begin with.
The Dorothy and Sam Dean Nature Sanctuary, the 40-acre property at 115 Canterberry Lane that anchors the Oak Brook end of the trail, sits on land the Dean family owned when the Tri-State Tollway was built through the area in the 1950s. According to the Oak Brook Park District's own history of the property, the Tollway Authority got permission to remove clay from the Deans' land for construction. In exchange, the construction crew dug the pond that still sits north of the sanctuary's main house. The Deans also asked for something else: a separate path built under the tollway's bridge over Salt Creek, connecting directly to the Bemis Woods Forest Preserve and its bike trails.
That path is the same underpass that just spent three years closed for reconstruction. It wasn't engineered as a modern trail crossing from the start. It was a favor, negotiated by a family whose name still marks the auditorium in Oak Brook's village hall, where Sam Dean served as village president. The Tollway's current project, widening the trail, resurfacing it, adding new railing and rehabilitating the underpass itself, is the first real engineering upgrade this crossing has had since it was carved out as a courtesy nearly seventy years ago.
Two Closures, Confused As One
If you have felt like this trail has been broken for longer than three years, you're not wrong to be confused. Two separate closures overlapped on the same stretch, and most riders never distinguished between them.
| Closure | Location | Cause | Reopened |
|---|---|---|---|
| I-294 underpass and bridge | Under the Tri-State Tollway, between Ogden Avenue and 31st Street | Tollway reconstruction of the I-294 bridge over the trail and Salt Creek | Passable by July 10, 2026; confirmed by the Oak Brook Park District shortly after |
| York Road bridge detour | Salt Creek Trail crossing at York Road | Bridge construction requiring a temporary side-path detour | Detour began October 7, 2025, and the trail reopened by mid-May 2026 |
The York Road detour ran its course months before the I-294 underpass did, which means the trail had a brief window this spring where one closure had lifted while the other hadn't. Anyone who rode it in June still hit the same wall east of the Dean Nature Sanctuary that had been there since 2023.
What's Actually Rideable Again
With both closures behind it, the trail now connects continuously in both directions from the Dean Nature Sanctuary, which functions as the natural staging point for the whole stretch.
Heading east, the reopened underpass carries riders and walkers from the sanctuary's eastern edge directly into Bemis Woods, a 480-acre preserve split by Salt Creek into north and south sections. From there the trail continues through Salt Creek Woods and Possum Hollow Woods on its way toward Brookfield Zoo. The bridge itself now carries new signage marking the handoff, welcoming westbound riders to Oak Brook Park District land and eastbound riders to the Forest Preserves of Cook County.
Heading the other direction from the sanctuary:
- North along York Road, the trail continues toward Elk Grove Village and Busse Woods, though this stretch is less consistently marked than the Bemis Woods side.
- A short detour at York Road leads to Fullersburg Woods, a 220-acre preserve with its own 3.2-mile loop along Salt Creek, past the historic Graue Mill, the only operating waterwheel gristmill still in its original spot in Illinois.
- The sanctuary's own crushed-limestone loop trails, which were never part of the closure, remain open year-round and pass a small fishing pond and a canoe launch on Salt Creek.
None of the Fullersburg Woods or York Road segments were affected by the I-294 closure. If you assumed the entire western half of the trail was shut down for three years, that wasn't the case. Only the underpass itself, and later the separate York Road bridge crossing, were out.
The trail's reach extends well past what any single ride will cover. Openlands, the regional conservation group that has tracked the corridor for years, notes that the Salt Creek Greenway is designated a priority greenway in the Northeastern Illinois Regional Greenways Plan and runs through nine communities with a combined population of more than 300,000, tying into over 178 miles of connected trail across the region. The Oak Brook segment isn't an isolated loop. It's the local entry point to a network most riders never fully explore.
The Finish Work Nobody's Rushing
One detail worth holding onto before you plan a fall ride through here: the Tollway's own project notice put full completion of the bridge work by the end of 2026, which is still months out from where things stand today. The underpass is passable and the trail surface has been rebuilt, but items like bridge aesthetics and some railing installation may still be wrapping up through the rest of the year.
That's a normal pattern for infrastructure projects that stretch across construction seasons. The functional reopening, the part that matters for anyone walking a dog or riding to Brookfield Zoo, happened in July. The cosmetic finish work is a separate, lower-stakes tail end that shouldn't affect anyone's ability to use the trail this fall.
Why It's Worth Learning The Route Now
The value of knowing this history isn't nostalgia. It's practical. A trail crossing that started as a private arrangement between a family and a tollway authority is going to behave differently, structurally and administratively, than one built to modern regional trail standards from day one. When the next round of Tollway work comes through this corridor (and given the scale of the I-294 project, more will), knowing that this specific underpass has always been the pinch point in the system means you'll know exactly which closure notices to take seriously and which detours are likely to be brief.
For now, the corridor is whole again for the first time since 2023. If you've been driving to Fullersburg Woods for a walk because the direct route through Bemis Woods felt like more trouble than it was worth, that calculation has changed. The loop from the Dean Nature Sanctuary east to Bemis Woods and back, or further out toward Brookfield Zoo, is a straight shot again, no detour required.
Oak Brook's appeal has always rested partly on access like this, the kind of daily infrastructure that doesn't show up in a listing description but shapes how a neighborhood actually feels to live in. If you're curious how the rest of the village's outdoor and lifestyle amenities stack up, our Oak Brook neighborhood guide covers more of what makes this corner of DuPage County distinct.
If you're weighing a move to Oak Brook, or wondering what a home near this trail corridor might be worth, Brandon Loncar and the team at Loncar Realty know this market from the ground up. Request Your Instant Home Valuation today and see what your Oak Brook property could bring in the current market.
