You are three miles into a ride on the Goshen Trail, past the spot where the path bends near Route 143, and there is a boulder that was not there in July. On top of it sits a steel creature, oddly formal for a bike path, with a small brass plaque and a few lines of verse bolted next to it. No sign explains what it is. No arrow points to the next one. If you have ridden this stretch of Madison County Transit's trail system more than once this month, you have probably already met one of the six new residents Madison County Transit installed along its 138-mile network. The six spots also mark places where an old road used to be.
What's Actually Bolted to the Boulders
The sculptures are part of something MCT is calling the Creature Quest, timed to the 100th anniversary of Route 66's founding in 1926. Each of the six pieces depicts a different woodland creature, mounted on a stone boulder, paired with an original poem about the Mother Road and a raised puzzle piece that riders can press into a paper field guide called the Creature Quest Atlas. Find all six to discover what the puzzle pieces form. As of the early-September announcement from Madison County Transit, all six creatures are already in place, and the West End Service Station at 620 St. Louis Street, Edwardsville's official Route 66 visitor center, is where riders can pick up the Atlas that turns a normal loop into a hunt.
MCT's managing director, SJ Morrison, has explained why the locations were not announced in advance. Riders are meant to stumble onto them the way you stumble onto anything on a trail you already use for exercise or a commute: by accident, mid-ride, without a map telling you where to look. In a Times Tribune News report, Morrison called the sculptures the "Mother Roadents," a nod to Route 66's old nickname, the Mother Road.
The Spots Weren't Random
Here is the detail that changes how you should think about your next ride. MCT built its trail system over three decades by buying up abandoned railroad corridors, not by tracing the old highway. Route 66 itself did not sit still for a century either. Between 1926 and its decommissioning, the alignment through Madison County shifted more than once as the state rerouted the highway around towns, added lanes, or moved the road to straighten a curve. The result is that most of the county has more than one "Route 66" buried under it, depending on which decade you mean.
The six Creature Quest locations were deliberately placed at points where the rail-trail and one of those old highway alignments cross, run alongside each other, or intersect. That means the hunt is not decoration scattered along a trail for its own sake. It is a set of coordinates marking where a transit corridor built in the 1990s happens to physically overlap a road that has not existed in its original form for decades. Ride the full loop hunting all six creatures and you are, without meaning to, tracing a rough outline of where Route 66 actually ran through this county before it moved.
That is a different kind of local knowledge than most people carry around while biking to work. You can ride the Nature Trail near SIUE or the Goshen Trail through downtown a hundred times and never once register that you are crossing a highway alignment that predates the interstate system. The Creature Quest brings that history onto the ground.
The Weekend Wrapped Around It
The sculpture hunt is not standing alone this fall. It is one piece of a longer Route 66 centennial push the City of Edwardsville has been building out all year, and the next big date on that calendar is the weekend of October 9 through 11, when Edwardsville hosts "A Weekend of Songs and Stories: Celebrating 100 Years of Route 66 in Illinois." The city is one of more than a dozen communities along the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau's Last 100 Miles Festival, a regional celebration of the final stretch of Route 66 before it crosses into Missouri.
The Edwardsville lineup so far includes:
- Friday, October 9, 7:30 p.m., City Park (101 S. Buchanan Street): a free outdoor set from local favorite Mike Sonderegger, no ticket required.
- Friday, October 9, 8 p.m., Wildey Theatre (252 N. Main Street): The Buckinghams, the Chicago group behind the number-one hit "Kind of a Drag," ticketed at $66 a seat, a small wink at the highway's name.
- Saturday, October 10, 7 p.m., Wildey Theatre: a free evening with Illinois Poet Laureate Mark Turcotte, a Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe author and DePaul University writer in residence.
- Saturday, October 10, 7:30 p.m., City Park: the Blooze Brothers, a free outdoor tribute act, also no ticket required.
- Sunday, October 11, 7 p.m., Wildey Theatre: The Ides of March, the Chicago band behind "Vehicle," fronted by Grammy winner and Survivor co-founder Jim Peterik, also priced at $66 a ticket.
That weekend followed an earlier milestone in the centennial calendar. On September 10, the Wildey hosted the Illinois premiere of filmmaker John Paget's documentary "Route 66: The Main Street of America," an official U.S. Route 66 Centennial Commission film making stops across all eight Route 66 states. Edwardsville was one of the Illinois cities chosen to host it, which says something about how seriously the city has leaned into its stretch of the highway this year.
Where to Start If You Want to Chase All Six
If you want to try the Creature Quest before the weather turns, start at the West End Service Station on St. Louis Street to grab a paper Atlas. From there, the exact locations are part of the hunt. That is the point. The locations connect the hunt with the history of Route 66. The next time your ride crosses a stretch of pavement that looks a little too straight and a little too old to be part of the rail-trail grid, take a second look. That might be the Mother Road, still there under your tires, a hundred years in.
Madison County has always had more layers than the map shows, and this fall is a good excuse to ride slowly enough to notice a few of them.
If a move, a PCS transfer, or a fresh start ever brings you or someone in your circle back to this stretch of Illinois, Veterans PCS Group connects military families and veterans with agents who already know these trails, these towns, and the roads that used to run through them.
