Wisconsin has seven bowstring arch truss bridges standing anywhere in the state. Five of them cross the same stretch of the Black River, on a trail that starts less than two miles past the edge of Holmen's newest park. Most people who bike Halfway Creek Trail on a weekday evening turn around at the water treatment plant and never find out what's another mile and a half up the road.
Halfway Creek Trail is the piece of infrastructure most Holmen residents already know. It runs 3.4 miles of crushed rock from Halfway Creek Park, the village's largest park at roughly 14.5 acres and home to the summer concert series and Kornfest, out along the creek bed to the wastewater treatment facility. Five bridges cross the water along the way. From there, a paved shoulder on Highway XX carries the route south to Midway, where it becomes the Great River Trail. Head the other direction from the park and the trail turns into the Holland Hollow Bluffs Trail, climbing north toward Drugan's Castle Mound Golf Course. That's the trail most people use for a run before dinner or a bike ride with the kids. It's also, without much fanfare, one entry point into something older and stranger.
A $4 Million Park Built Next to a National Register Site
In the summer of 2023, the village opened three new parks at once: McGilvray Park, Pertzsch Park, and Seven Bridges Park, a $4 million investment with a ribbon-cutting held September 14 that year. Seven Bridges Park is the largest of the three at 14.96 acres, sitting along Old Highway 93 at its junction with McGilvray Road. It has the double zip lines that make it a magnet for kids, along with soccer fields and a shelter building, and it's designed, according to the engineering firm that planned it, to be a destination people stay and use rather than pass through.
The name isn't decorative. McGilvray Road, running north from the park, was once the settlement road of Alexander McGilvray, a Scottish immigrant who ran a ferry crossing the Black River there starting in 1861. The ferry eventually gave way to a proper road, built to connect La Crosse and Trempealeau counties across the river's marshy bottomland. Flooding got the better of it, and the county eventually routed traffic onto higher ground, which became today's US 53/WI 35. What's left of the old crossing sits inside Van Loon Wildlife Area, a roughly 4,000-acre Wisconsin DNR property that starts about 3.5 miles northwest of the village and runs five miles along the Black River's floodplain.
The Bridges the Road Left Behind
The road itself is gone as a driving route, but its six bridges remain, open only to foot traffic now, maintained by a volunteer group called Friends of McGilvray Road working with the DNR. One is a low truss bridge. The other five are bowstring arch truss bridges, an older style built with steel chords that loop overhead in a shallow arc, and construction methods, using hook clips and sleeves instead of rivets, meant to avoid weakening the metal with drilled holes.
Sources disagree on exactly when they went up. The Wisconsin DNR dates them to around 1892. A separate architectural survey published by the Society of Architectural Historians credits engineer Charles Horton with building them between 1905 and 1908. The gap in the paperwork runs more than a decade, and nobody seems to have reconciled it. What every source agrees on is the scarcity: seven bowstring arch truss bridges survive in the entire state, and five of them are strung along a mile and a half of the same trail, a detail confirmed by the state's own Rustic Road designation for the route, which cites the bridges as the reason the road made the National Register of Historic Places.
How the Pieces Connect
Walking the whole system means treating it as one continuous route rather than four separate destinations.
| Segment | Distance | Surface | Connects to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Halfway Creek Trail (park to treatment plant) | 3.4 miles | Crushed rock | Holland Hollow Bluffs Trail north, Great River Trail at Midway south |
| Treatment plant to Midway | Connecting stretch | Paved road shoulder | Great River Trail |
| Seven Bridges Park | Within a 14.96-acre park | Paved paths | McGilvray Road trailhead, just north |
| McGilvray Road / Van Loon Trail | 1.8 miles one way | Gravel and natural surface, flood-prone in spots | Dead-ends at the river bottomland; not a loop |
The Van Loon access point closest to Holmen sits off Amsterdam Prairie Road, and the DNR describes it as the property's most-used parking lot in every season, largely because it's the shortest walk to the first bridge.
Before You Go
A few things about the McGilvray Road stretch specifically, based on visitor accounts and the DNR's own notes:
- It's an out-and-back trail, not a loop. Plan for roughly 3.6 miles round trip if you walk the full 1.8 miles to the far end and back.
- The parking area is small, and the driveway down to it can ice over in winter.
- The trail starts with a short, steep descent, which is its own hazard in icy conditions.
- Sections along the river bottom can flood and become impassable after heavy rain, so a dry week is the safer bet.
- There are no restrooms at the trailhead. A few benches are placed along the route.
The area also carries status as a Wisconsin Important Bird Area, and it's known for yellow-crowned night herons, Acadian flycatchers, and prothonotary warblers among its breeding species, with waterbirds gathering in the marshy bottoms as summer turns to fall. Bring binoculars if that's your kind of walk.
A Trail That's Bigger Than Any One Park
Holmen's parks system, according to the engineering firm that has worked with the village since 2007, now includes 12 public parks with bike and pedestrian paths tying into more than 100 miles of regional trail network. Halfway Creek Trail and the McGilvray bridges are one thread in that system, not the whole of it, but they're the thread that runs from a 2023 zip line park straight into bridge engineering nobody's fully dated. That kind of layering, new recreation built right up against a 130-year-old river crossing, is easy to miss if you only ever turn around at the treatment plant.
If you want more of this kind of detail about the corner of the Driftless Region Holmen sits in, the neighborhood page has a broader look at the village, and an earlier piece on what day-to-day life looks like in Holmen covers more of the everyday rhythm here.
If you're weighing a move to this part of La Crosse County and want someone who can tell you which trailhead has the easier parking or where the bridges actually are before you go looking for them yourself, Julie Delap knows this ground well and is glad to talk it through.
