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Print Friendly MapThe Syracuse-Wawasee Trail isn't a single path, rather it's a system of hiking and biking pathways, spreading across the Town of Syracuse, Syracuse Lake and Lake Wawasee. The trail system is 12 miles long, allowing residents to travel on foot or by bike to local destinations including schools, parks, the community center, wetlands, and downtown stores and restaurants. It also includes a loop around Syrause Lake.
The trail is maintained by the Syracuse-Wawasee Parks Foundation's Trails Committee, a non-profit group. The committee continues to develop new segments of the trail, the most recent being the Conklin Bay segment, which opened in summer of 2020. That concrete and boardwalk segment stretches 1.3 miles along SR 13 between Harkless Drive and Grandview Drive, providing access to the Wawasee Area Conservation Foundation and its own collection of wetlands trails. Eventually, the plan is to extend the trail around Lake Syracuse.
Parking is available at various points across the town, including the Syracuse Community Center (1013 N Long Dr, Syracuse, IN 46567). See the trail map for additional parking areas.
There's about 0.7 of a mile south of town that is great. The rest of the "trails" are just city surface streets declared to be "trails" with no signage to point you in the right direction. Nothing compared to the trail systems available in Goshen up the road.
This is not a trail but a random series of plain narrow sidewalks and roads. There are 3 nice bits: on the east side of syracuse lake there's a narrow paved section (not wide enough to pass) , a short flowery stretch north of lake Wawasee near the gulf course and the best bit a boardwalk called the Conklin Bay Trail on the sw side of Lake Wawasee. Unfortunately these bits are less then 10% of the trail.
I don't know what the criteria is for putting trails on TrailLink. There are no markers showing where the trail is. There is nothing natural telling you where to go. There is nothing traily about it. No clue why this is on trail link.
That being said, we ended up doing a figure eight around lake syracuse and lake wawasee which we really enjoyed. That ended up being about 21 miles. State Road 13 is really busy with fast traffic so we avoided that as much as possible. There's a full service bathroom at Lakeview Park across from the Syracuse Community Center.
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