For ten dollars, a student at Northern Illinois University can spend a Friday in October standing at the bottom of a sandstone canyon, listening to water drop off a ledge of St. Peter Sandstone, roughly ninety miles from the flat cornfields of DeKalb. That is the pitch behind NIU Adventures: Hike Starved Rock, a guided day trip scheduled for Friday, October 23, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Starved Rock State Park in Oglesby, Illinois. The registration fee is the same for NIU students and non-students alike, and it covers transportation, leadership, and lunch. The registration deadline is Thursday, October 15, at 6:25 p.m.
The trip is run by NIU Outdoor Adventures, a program within the university that organizes outings for students and the wider community. Its itinerary is a two-park sampler. The group will hike through Starved Rock, which the event listing describes as one of Illinois' best-known state parks, exploring canyons, waterfalls, and miles of scenic trails along the Illinois River, with some attention to the history of the region. The group will also visit Matthiessen State Park, which the listing calls "the lesser known and less crowded and just as scenic" of the two. All ages are welcome, though anyone under 16 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian over 18.
What the hikers will be walking through is, geologically speaking, an anomaly in the middle of the central plains. Starved Rock State Park covers about 2,630 acres on the south bank of the Illinois River, just southeast of the village of Utica in LaSalle County, and it is characterized by the many canyons cut into its bluffs. Those canyons owe their existence to a catastrophic flood known as the Kankakee Torrent, a glacial lake outburst that took place somewhere between roughly 14,000 and 19,000 years ago. The torrent helped carve the park's signature features. The rock itself is St. Peter Sandstone, typically buried deep underground but exposed here because of an anticline, a convex fold in the underlying rock layers. The result is a landscape of overhangs, slot canyons, and seasonal waterfalls that looks more like the desert Southwest than the Midwest.
Starved Rock is also the most popular state park in Illinois, drawing more than two million visitors a year, according to Wikipedia's accounting of park visitation. It was established as a state park in 1911. The bluff that gives the park its name rises about 125 feet above the Illinois River, and the story attached to it is one of the more durable legends in the state. As a historical marker near Oglesby recounts it, the Ottawa war chief Pontiac was said to have been murdered by a member of an Illinois tribe during a council meeting in what is now Joliet. Seeking revenge, the Ottawa and Potawatomi attacked an Illinois village near the rock. The Illinois fled to the top of the bluff, where, surrounded by their enemies and cut off from food and water, the entire village was said to have starved to death. Hence the name.
The marker is careful to separate the legend from the record. Period documents show that Pontiac was killed at a trading post at Cahokia, Illinois, by a Peoria Indian, and that the Illinois, believing they would soon be attacked by Pontiac's allies, took refuge among the British at Fort de Chartres, some 275 miles away in southern Illinois. Since 1673, when European explorers first set eyes on the rock, two sieges have occurred on the bluff, one in 1684 and one in 1722. The famous legend, the marker notes, is to the best of our knowledge a loosely based reinterpretation of the 1722 siege. Descendants of the Illinois Indian Alliance are now part of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.
The French were here too. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, built the first French settlement in northern Illinois in the area, and Fort St. Louis du Rocher stood on the rock itself. That layered history, Indigenous, French, and later American, is part of what the NIU listing means when it promises hikers will "learn about the rich history of this part of our state."
Matthiessen, the second stop, has its own story. The park sits a few miles south of Starved Rock, with the main entrances to both parks on Illinois State Route 178, and it was established in 1943. It is named for Frederick William Matthiessen, who originally owned the 176 acres at the core of the current park. Matthiessen was a zinc industrialist; he and a friend, Edward Hegeler, immigrated to the United States together in 1856 and set up a zinc smelter on the banks of the Little Vermilion River in LaSalle, according to the hiking site Third Coast Hikes. The park today covers about 1,700 acres and is built around a system of dells, the local term for the narrow, stream-cut ravines that open into the sandstone. Its trail network caters to hikers of all skill levels, with access to views of Cascade Falls and the formation known as Giant's Bathtub, and the trails along the bluffs offer gentler gradients suited to novice hikers and families, according to Enjoy LaSalle County. For a group trip with a mixed crowd, that matters: Matthiessen offers the same scenery as its famous neighbor with a fraction of the foot traffic.
A few practical notes are worth flagging for anyone planning to register. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources lists Starved Rock trails as open from 7 a.m. until sunset, and the park's visitor center as open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. The department also warns that a trail improvement project could close some Starved Rock trails at points during 2026, so hikers should check conditions before setting out. And the department's hunting-season schedule closes Matthiessen State Park to the public on certain dates, though none of the listed closures fall on October 23.
The trip's timing is a consideration of its own. October is peak color season in the Illinois River valley, when the oaks and maples above the canyons turn, and the waterfalls in the canyons are at their most reliable after fall rains. It is also, predictably, the park's busiest stretch of the year, which is part of why the itinerary pairs the marquee park with the quieter one next door.
For NIU, the outing fits a familiar model: a low fee, a bus, a packed lunch, and a leader who knows the trails, aimed at students who may not have a car or the wherewithal to plan a state park visit on their own. The $10 price is the same for students and non-students, and the listing urges interested hikers to register as soon as possible to guarantee a spot. Registration runs through the university's recreation portal, linked from the NIU events calendar.
What a participant gets for that ten dollars is a compressed tour of some of the strangest terrain in Illinois: a 125-foot bluff with a legend on top of it, canyons carved by a flood that ended before anyone was around to see it, and a set of dells named for a zinc magnate who came over from Germany in the 1850s. The bus leaves and returns the same day. The registration deadline is October 15.