Duck Creek Trail Has Four Owners, and That's Why It Never Quite Connects

If you've tried to ride or walk the Duck Creek Trail from the Hobart side, you already know the pattern. The limestone is solid for a stretch, then it fades into grass, then a downed tree blocks the path and you're not sure if you missed a marker or there was never one to begin with. Riders on TrailLink have described trying to find the Hobart trailhead and ending up on narrow paths that dead-end at private driveways. One reviewer called the whole corridor "in total disrepair" near the Hobart-Oneida line. Another found the opposite a season later: grass mowed, no debris, conditions clearly improved.

Both of those reviews can be true at the same time, and that's the point. This isn't one trail with inconsistent upkeep. It's four separate pieces of trail, each maintained or ignored by a different government, stitched together on a map that makes it look like a single continuous path. Understanding who owns what is the difference between planning a frustrating afternoon and knowing exactly which mile you're about to ride.

Four Governments, One Creek

The Duck Creek Trail, as it's officially mapped, runs seven miles from the eastern end of the Newton Blackmour State Trail near Seymour, through reservation land of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, into the Village of Oneida. That's the core segment most riders mean when they say "Duck Creek Trail." The extension toward Pamperin Park in Howard, the piece everyone's been waiting on, is still in the planning stage on some maps and already assumed complete on others. Trail guides genuinely disagree on this point, which tells you something about how patchwork the ownership situation really is.

That fragmentation isn't an accident of neglect. It's the direct result of a decade of stalled negotiations over who's responsible for land that crosses tribal, village, and county lines. A 2023 report from NBC26 quoted Village of Hobart Board Trustee Vanya Koepke laying out exactly why progress had been so slow: ownership challenges along the corridor, with Brown County eventually brought in to serve as a neutral party that could oversee and maintain the finished trail. Koepke described three goals driving the project. Connecting the municipalities. Building out recreation. And protecting the property owners whose land borders the trail.

Oneida Nation Chairman Tehassi Hill, in the same story, put it more plainly.

"We hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel."

That was more than three years ago. The tunnel is still there, but this year one government finally put a number next to its portion of the work.

The Year Somebody Finally Wrote a Check

The piece that moved in 2026 isn't the wooded, unmarked stretch near the Oneida line that shows up in most of the frustrated trail reviews. It's in Howard. A Village of Howard board staff report details a bridge project connecting Riverview Drive to Hidden Creek Trail, running through the Hidden Creek 2nd Addition subdivision. The village budgeted $1,160,000 for the project in 2026, against an expected total cost of roughly $1,250,000, with a grant intended to reimburse 80 percent of construction costs. According to the report, the village planned to submit that grant application by the end of March 2026, with construction penciled in for 2026 or 2027 depending on how the funding lands.

That's a specific dollar figure attached to a specific bridge, which is a different kind of commitment than a village trustee saying a project is moving forward. Budgets get revised and grants get denied, so 2026 or 2027 is a window, not a promise. But it's the first time in this trail's decade of delays that a piece of it shows up as a line item with a construction timeline instead of a talking point in a news segment.

The same Howard report notes that this bridge, once built, becomes part of a larger connection. It's designed to eventually link the Mountain Bay Trail to the Fox River Trail, tying Duck Creek into Howard's broader recreational trail network rather than leaving it as an isolated spur. For Hobart residents, this doesn't mean your local stretch gets fixed next spring. It means the piece of the puzzle closest to Pamperin Park now has money attached to it, which is usually the piece that has to move before the harder, cross-jurisdictional middle sections get any real attention.

What You'll Actually Find on the Ground

If you're deciding whether to load up the bikes this weekend, here's what the trail actually offers right now, not what it's supposed to offer once everything connects.

• Brown County Dog Park, at 1000 Pleasant Lane in Hobart, sits directly along Duck Creek with two fenced areas, one for all dogs and a smaller one for small breeds, plus agility equipment and wheelchair-accessible parking and entrances. This is a finished, functioning amenity today, not a future promise.
• The Oneida access point at Jason Drive off County Highway J has no marked trailhead and no parking. If you're starting from that end, park in town near the convenience store and walk in from there.
• Pamperin Park, the eventual eastern terminus, is already Brown County's largest developed park, with a suspension bridge over Duck Creek, an 18-hole disc golf course, and wooded picnic areas. It's worth visiting on its own even before the trail connection is finished.
• The Newton Blackmour link toward Seymour is the most reliable stretch for actual mileage, wider and better maintained than the Hobart-Oneida middle section, and it passes an old railroad depot that now houses a small museum.
• Combined mileage, once the Duck Creek and Newton Blackmour trails are ridden together, runs close to 30 miles from Oneida out to New London, which is a genuinely long ride if you're comfortable with a mix of surfaces.

None of that changes the fact that the middle section, the part that actually runs through Hobart, is still the roughest stretch on the map. What's changed is the reason to check back periodically instead of writing the whole project off. When one village attaches a real construction budget to its piece, the pressure on the neighboring jurisdictions to do the same tends to build.

For now, the honest answer to "is the trail behind my house getting fixed" is that one specific bridge, several miles away in Howard, has a number next to it for the first time. That's real progress on a project that's been stalled since well before this year. It's just not the whole answer either, and anyone telling you otherwise hasn't read the actual budget documents.

If you're weighing what a stretch of land near this corridor is actually worth, or thinking through how proximity to a park like Pamperin factors into a property's long-term value in Hobart, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these local details closely. Becky Buckland Real Estate Collaborative works this market every day and can walk you through what's changing here and what it means for you. Request a personalized consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.