Thanksgiving dinner this year wasn’t quite as conventional as other years: lamb shank with homemade macaroni and cheese (a complex mix of cheeses by Ann) and barbecue-flavored beans. The bread was traditional: the cheapest brown-and-serve rolls I could find. I didn’t forget the olives.

Last summer, on the way back from New Buffalo, Michigan, we bought some grape juice at St. Julian Winery, and had one of those bottles to drink with our Thanksgiving food. All in all, a pleasant meal, not a vast feast.

On Friday, we drove down to Matthiessen State Park, just south of the Illinois River in La Salle County and not far from the better-known Starved Rock State Park. The 1,938-acre Matthessen is a more modest park, but has a good set of trails along, and down in, a winding ravine formed by a creek.

To get to the ravine, you need to go down.

Those stairs lead to a bridge over one part of the ravine. Nice view from the bridge. For perspective, note that there are people at the bottom.

The bottom is accessible by another set of wooden stairs.

Though a few degrees above freezing, there were patches of thin ice here and there on the surface of the creek, which I poked with my walking stick, watching it break into fragments.

On to the other part of the ravine, which we reached by taking this path, then a different set of stairs. 

A short section of ravine wall is marked by generations of carvings in the sandstone.

The trail sometimes meant crossing on stones over the shallow creek. A misstep into the creek would have meant uncomfortably wet shoes, at least.

Before long, there’s another bridge and a waterfall formed by a dam that creates Matthiessen Lake. Another set of stairs, not visible in the picture, leads up to the bridge. We did a fair amount of stairclimbing at the park.

Still, a good walk, even on a chilly day, especially since there was little wind down in the ravine.

The park is named for Frederick William Matthiessen (d. 1918), whose land it used to be, with later additions by the state. He was the other zinc baron of 19th-century La Salle County, along with Edward Carl Hegeler, whose house we toured a few years ago.