If you have ever attempted to put together a puzzle, you know the feeling: the pieces are spread out on your table sorted by color, but that’s as far as you have gotten. You alternately stare at the image on the box and back at the mess in front of you, when suddenly you snap in one more piece and a picture starts to emerge. A picture, perhaps, of a recreational trail with national significance, winding through Minnesota farmland and state parks, around lakes and over rivers. A scenic route connecting communities hundreds of miles apart, stretching from Fergus Falls to Cass Lake or St. Cloud to Bemidji. And all you have to do is put in that one puzzle piece.

Soo Line South Trail - Onamia, MN
Adjacent Paved/Gravel Trails

Designing the Camp Ripley/Veterans State Trail such that it is open to as many users as possible, which includes ATV and horseback, is a stated goal of the CRV Trail group. Being aware of existing trail designs, how they work, don't work, and impact the various user types and residents is going to be an important part of the ongoing discussion during the CRVST's development process.

Brian Peterson of the Brainerd Dispatch has written a nice article evaluating a nearby section of the Soo Line South Trail that has both motorized (ATV) and non-motorized uses. As a trail that has adjacent paved and unpaved treadways, it will be an important design to consider for the CRVST.

So how is it that, in the middle of the countryside, you would find bicyclists together with ATV enthusiasts?

The Soo Line Trail zig-zags across central and northern Minnesota. But here, for an 11-mile stretch from Onamia to Isle, it offers separate access for ATVers and bicyclists, joggers, walkers and rollerbladers and the like. A paved, five-foot-wide trail for the latter group of trail users runs parallel to a gravel ATV trail - slightly wider as it has spread out with use - with a small "median" of weeds, gravel and dirt between the two.