Why Your Dog Needs a Parking Decal on Lake Forest's Best Trails

"When I brought up the idea, the board thought I was crazy but decided to give it a try." That's how longtime Lake Forest Open Lands board member John Dick once described pitching a fall bonfire with bagpipers to a room of skeptical volunteers. The idea traced back further than that meeting, to 1928, when Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon hosted neighbors for a bonfire on her property behind Ragdale, ground now known as Shaw Prairie. Dick's version became official in 1988, and Bagpipes & Bonfire has run almost every fall since, historically landing on the last Sunday of September at Middlefork Farm Nature Preserve.

It's a good origin story. It's also a clue to something most residents never piece together: the 900-plus acres of prairie, ravine, and shoreline that make up Lake Forest's preserve system aren't run by the city and aren't funded by property taxes. They belong to a private, independently funded conservation nonprofit, and that ownership structure is the reason the rules change depending on which trailhead you walk into.

A Land Trust, Not a Park District

Lake Forest Open Lands Association has operated since 1967, and today it preserves and maintains more than 900 acres across ten preserves, laced together by more than 20 miles of public trail. The land stretches from the Lake Forest shoreline north to the bluffs of Lake Bluff, south to the Fort Sheridan Nature Preserve, and west into the savannas of Lincolnshire. That's a bigger footprint than most residents assume when they think of "the preserves" as whichever trailhead sits closest to their subdivision.

The organization has said plainly that it receives no funding from local taxes or the City of Lake Forest. Every acre, boardwalk, and restoration project is paid for through membership dues, donations, and grants it applies for on its own. That funding model is worth sitting with, because it explains a rule that surprises a lot of dog owners the first time they hear it.

The Decal Nobody Explains

Walk into most of these preserves and the land feels public in the way a forest preserve district feels public. It isn't quite. LFOLA requires that anyone walking a dog on its properties be a registered member with dog-walking privileges, a benefit that starts at the $125 "Maple Mob" membership tier and up, and that they display a current dog-walking parking decal at the trailhead. Waste bagging and removal is the walker's responsibility on every property.

None of this is hidden. It's posted on the organization's recreational activities page. But because the preserves read as open land rather than a gated amenity, plenty of residents learn the rule only after a staff member or fellow walker mentions it. The land trust model means access here works more like a club with public trail privileges than a park system with universal ones, and dog-walking is the one benefit gated firmly behind membership.

Ten Preserves, Four Different Personalities

Not every preserve does the same job, and picking the right one changes the walk.

Skokie River's bird-banding history and Carruthers's fishing pier aren't details you'd find on a generic neighborhood guide. They're the reason a resident who wants to watch migrating songbirds should skip the newest preserve entirely and head to the oldest one instead.

The Preserve That Took Twenty Years

Carruthers deserves its own paragraph because it's the newest thing on the map and most residents have never set foot on it. The 17-acre site was originally the Dickinson Estate, preserved by LFOLA back in 2008. It sat in restoration for nearly two decades before opening to the public during fiscal year 2025, with the Illinois Audubon Society and its Lake-Cook chapter partnering on the habitat work. Today it offers 0.65 miles of accessible trail and boardwalk, built by Wright Landscaping and York Bridge Concepts to a design from Hey and Associates, and it's become the newest link in a 7.5-mile corridor of protected land running from Half Day Road north to Rockland Road. Parking is at the West Skokie Nature Preserve lot, a five-minute walk from the Carruthers trailhead.

LFOLA president and CEO Ryan London called it "one more step in our mission to preserve and steward the region's open spaces." Board member Court Carruthers, whose family funded much of the trail and pier construction along with an endowment for its upkeep, put the goal more simply:

"We wanted the opportunity to preserve and tie more of these lands together, so that more people could enjoy and have access to their quiet beauty."

That's not a line from a brochure. It's a description of what actually happened on the ground once the restoration was finally finished, and it's why a preserve most residents have never heard of now has its own fishing pier.

The Grant That's About to Change the Shoreline

The bigger story this year is federal money, not a new trail. LFOLA has secured a $5.75 million federal grant to restore a remnant ravine-bluff ecosystem along the Lake Michigan shoreline, calling it one of the rarest and most fragile ecosystems left in the state. The award came through NOAA's Office for Coastal Management, funded under the Federal Coastal Zone Management Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources' Coastal Management Program partnering with LFOLA to develop the proposal.

Scale that against the grants LFOLA has typically worked with. The Illinois Natural Areas Stewardship Grant Program awarded the organization $70,660 in 2022 and $67,609 in 2023, money that covered prescribed burns, herbicide work, and a utility vehicle for trail crews. The new NOAA award is roughly eighty times either of those figures, and it lands right on top of restoration already underway. LFOLA's most recent annual report describes ongoing Phase II work at Greene Nature Preserve, engineering and permitting a resilient bluff and near-shore area alongside additional ravine restoration, done in partnership with the organization's Indigenous partners. It's the same category of ravine-bluff work the new federal grant exists to fund, which suggests the shoreline stretch residents walk today at Greene will look meaningfully different within a few years.

What This Means Before Your Next Walk

If you've been meaning to bring the dog along on a preserve walk, the fastest path is a Maple Mob membership and the decal that comes with it, not a guess about which trailhead looks unfenced enough. If you're after a specific kind of morning, Skokie River rewards birders, Middlefork Farm rewards skiers and festivalgoers each September, and Carruthers now rewards anyone who wants a flat, accessible walk that ends at a fishing pier. Greene is worth watching over the next few years rather than judging by this year's shoreline, since the bluff work in progress there is funded by the same kind of grant money that just arrived.

You don't need a membership to attend Bagpipes & Bonfire itself. The fundraiser is open to the public each fall and remains the easiest way to experience the preserve system without committing to a membership tier first. It's also, ninety-some years after that first backyard bonfire behind Ragdale, still the clearest reminder that this land has always been kept up by people who decided to, not by a tax line on anyone's bill.

Setting matters as much as square footage when a home backs up to land like this, and that's exactly the kind of detail we walk clients through before a Lake Forest listing ever goes to market. If you're weighing how a property's proximity to the preserve system, a ravine lot, or lakefront access should factor into its presentation and price, the Kim & Carleigh Team would welcome the conversation. Schedule a design-forward consultation and let's talk through what your setting is actually worth.