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!
Virus hasn’t slowed up GHT’s progress
Great Headwaters Trails ends this challenging summer without being slowed down by COVID-19. Fundraising to complete the Conover-Phelps Trail is close to being a total success, great progress has been made on routing the River Trail between Eagle River and St. Germain, and the annual SepTimber Ride biking event drew…
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Coming down to the wire – 66% of the way to our goal, donate now and double your impact
This is crunch time! We’re about $70,000 away from our goal with about $35,000 of the Flanagan Challenge Fund remaining to be matched. The math works to gets us to success, but you only have until Sept. 30 to make sure we get there. Double the impact of your donation…
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40% of the way to the Goal! An $80,000 Challenge Fund still doubling the impact of all donations! Let’s get this trail completed!
This virus is not going to keep Phelps and Conover from having a completed biking and walking trail! Over 50 people and organizations have contributed to the Homestretch Campaign so far. Donations are matched dollar for dollar, and the campaign has brought in over $80,000 so far, almost halfway to…
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