Some parts of the US have a variety of roads that, while technically maintained as public road by some combination of county, state, US forest service, bureau of land management, etc., have more of the character of offroad “trails” than what most people think of as a “road”. Many offroading videos available on youtube feature “trail riding” activities on what are actually just really lackadaisically maintained roads. (this is actually not a good thing, as explained below)
Illinois is emphatically not one of those states! Most of the roads, even backroads far from any city, are as level as a tabletop, straight as an arrow, and often paved. If not with regular blacktop asphalt, then at least with chipseal. Especially in the counties that have cities in them, even the very rural areas tend to have paved roads.
(I was not familiar with chipseal until I moved here. In the south, I think, any road that Illinois would chipseal is just left as plain gravel, aka what we called a “dirt road”.)
There are exceptions. The counties known collectively as Forgottonia, which are mainly the far western counties cut off from the rest of the state by the Illinois river, have lot more unpaved roads, and more central counties have some if they don’t contain one of the region’s cities.
As in most all states, commercially available maps are generally terrible at indicating which roads are paved and unpaved. Pretty much the only source of this information are state Department of Transportation maps published on a county-by-county basis, and available as PDFs.
These maps are your key to dirt roads in the state. There are, of course, private off-road trails in Illinois, but we are talking about public roads here.
Main index:
https://idot.illinois.gov/transportation-system/network-overview/highway-system/maps/highway.html
Individual counties of particular interest near Springfield:
- Menard – one county away from Springfield
- Christian – ditto
- Cass – borderline Forgottonia
- Pike – full-on Forgottonia
Mind you, most of these unpaved roads just look like this:
Some of the less-maintained ones look like this:
And a few have been allowed to deteriorate to this point:
But still, very flat, mostly straight, no sense of adventure in warm season weather. When it can get interesting is in winter, when counties like Cass seemingly don’t bother to snowplow these minor roads at all.
There is more variety in Pike Country, where the river bluffs provide changes of altitude, wooded locales, twistier roads. There is stuff like washouts, fallen trees on the roads, fording creeks, etc. Pike is one of the most active hunting areas in Illinois, and you see a lot of folks on ATVs on those roads.
I am not providing photographic evidence of these because one thing I learned from living in Georgia for many years is that once someone publicizes the exact location of an “interesting road” the first thing that happens is groups of people start riding convoys of 40 jeeps down it for youtube videos, and the next thing that happens is the state/county/etc paves or regrades it and takes all the fun out of it, or else closes it entirely.
