Great Headwaters Trails
Building family-friendly biking and walking trails near the source of a Great River
River Trail - Our high-value, priority project!
THE RIVER TRAIL will connect Eagle River into the 55-mile Heart of Vilas System and extend the system by 10 miles. St. Germain will become a system hub and the new River Trail will, we predict, become one of the most popular parts of the whole system!
At the place shown in the photo to the right, the 10-foot wide asphalt trail will pass between the pines and the river. That would be the Wisconsin River, This spot is only about 20 miles from the river's headwaters at Lac Vieux Desert. It's one of our county's 1,300 lakes!
The "River Trail team" includes the River Trail Commission (St Germain, Cloverland and Eagle River) and Great Headwaters Trails. Momentum and support are the keys to helping the team get this complex trail built. How complex? Click HERE to see the detailed design information the Commission considered when it did a site tour of the route in October of 2021. Will donations help? Yep!! Click HERE! For a one-page overview of the project click HERE!
We thank all of you who wrote letters in early June to the Eagle River City Council and all 284 of you who signed the recent online petition supporting the project and applauding Eagle River and its two partner municipalities for pursuing the trail. You may have heard of the puzzling, route-truncating motion passed by the Eagle River City Council on June 13. It confuses things a bit. You can checkout coverage of the meeting in the Vilas County News-Review HERE. (The story is a solid summary of the meeting. But it overlooks the safety that River Trail will provide to walkers and bike riders by modeling itself on the existing Heart of Vilas System which has a great safety record. Some factual errors include that the River Trail will have two, not three, crossings of STH 70. Both are, like other Heart of Vilas crossings of STH 70, along the two-lane in locations with good sight lines where cautious walkers and cyclists can cross safely.)
You can write to the Eagle River mayor and council members asking them to revisit that decision. Send letters to Mayor Jeff Hyslop and members of the Eagle River Common Council, 525 E. Maple Street, PO Box 1269, Eagle River, WI 54521, or email.
Trail info to share, people to meet, raffle tickets to sell!
HELP US GET OUT THE WORD about GHT's work. Watch for our booths at various events in Eagle River, Conover, Phelps and Land O' Lakes. Sign up to help us staff our booths. - CLICK HERE.
Since its founding in 2010, the Great Headwaters Trails Foundation has been closing in on its goal to build 40 miles of biking and walking trails in eastern Vilas County. The system we envision will expand the Heart of Vilas Trail System and connect the towns of Eagle River, Conover, Phelps and Land O’ Lakes, resulting in a connected, family-friendly, hard surface trail system over 110 miles long.
The first leg of the system, the Conover-Phelps Trail, was completed in 2021. The next leg, the River Trail, will connect St. Germain to Eagle River. There are a lot of people that need to be clued in to this important project! Want to know more? Contact us at ghtrails@gmail.org.
Help us develop more biking and walking trails in eastern Vilas County!
Make a virtual visit to the Conover-Phelps Trail or join Ride with Leinie on July 30!
The Conover-Phelps Trail connects the park in Conover to Lakefront Pines Park in downtown Phelps. This video lets you take a virtual ride from end to end of trail. On a rainy May 28, a hardy crowd of Conover and Phelps supporters turned out for the trail’s official ribbon cutting.…
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Ride with Leinie continues in 2022
Registration is now open for Ride with Leinie with Dick Leinenkugel, happening this summer on and around the newly completed Conover-Phelps Trail! Ride with Leinie has been a popular summer event for the past ten years hosted by the Wilderness Lakes Trails (WLT) group in Land O’Lakes. When WLT decided…
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Experience the New Trail!
GHT and the Friends of the Conover-Phelps Trail are happy to be collaborating with the Phelps Chamber of Commerce and Eric Eismueller at Old World Charm Bed and Breakfast to be hosting an open house for the newly completed trail on Saturday, Sept. 4. We invite everyone to come out…
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