Rolling Knolls

Posted on December 20, 2020 by admin

The weekend turned out to be fairly mild, with temps over 40 during the days and no rain or snow. Time to find a new forest preserve and take a walk. We went to one to the west of us, but still in Cook County: Rolling Knolls.
That sounds like the name of an upscale housing development out toward the exurbs, with nary a hint of land contour. But actually the 55-acre forest preserve rolls along pretty well, with a variety of modest hills.

It used to be a standard golf course, but in 2017 the grounds were modified to accommodate frisbee golf. Or rather, disc golf. Just looking at a few sites devoted to the sport, it’s pretty clear that the disc golf writers anyway eschew any talk of frisbees, maybe regarding them as those Pluto platters that hippies used to toss around to amuse themselves.

Disc golf then. I don’t actually have an opinion on its nomenclature, so I’ll go along with writers such as this.

So we wandered into the course, passing by a couple of the holes.
There was a scattering of people playing, usually clusters of three or four young men, though two of the groups included a young woman. We managed to stay out of the way of play, but that wasn’t hard considering how few people were around. Before too long we found a dirt road.
It led south to a trail that winds around the edge of the preserve. Looks a little remote, but the sound of traffic in the distance was a constant.
Past the browns of the season.
Rolling Knolls Glad to see a flowing crick. Wasn’t sure its name.

Later, I found out: Poplar Creek. I’ve walked its banks before.

East Branch

Posted on December 8, 2020 by admin

We haven’t been in any restaurants or theaters or concert venues since March, and our membership at the municipal indoor pool long ago lapsed. On the other hand, we’ve been to a lot of green spaces this year, now brown as fall has vanished into winter, including city parks, state parks, and one national forest, monument and park each. But especially that kind of undeveloped land specific to Illinois: the forest preserve, a localized legacy of Progressive Era activism.

I wondered how many we’ve been to this year, so I made a count. Five visits to forest preserves we’ve been to before, and 10 new ones, variously in Cook, DuPage, Kane and Lake counties. I doubt that we visited more than one or two new ones a year before 2020. Fifteen is only a small fraction of however many hundreds of preserves there might be statewide, but I’m glad we’ve taken the walks, and plan to continue doing so next year.

On Saturday afternoon, we took a walk at East Branch, a 521-acre unit of the DuPage County Forest Preserve District in Glendale Heights. Temps were in the 40s. That’s warm enough for a forest preserve walk.
“East Branch was previously used as farmland prior to the Forest Preserve District acquiring it in the early 1970s,” the district web site says. “During the 1980s, wetlands were created along the East Branch DuPage River as mitigation for the construction of Interstate 355.”

A trail from a small parking lot off Glen Ellyn Road leads to a small lake.
It’s called Rush Lake. The district asserts that it’s a good place to see waterfowl, and so it was. Ducks, at least.
The main trail circles around the lake, though sometimes a little ways from the shore. Hoofprints in the mud along the way meant horse riding is an activity there, but we didn’t see any riders. We saw two men with fishing poles, a woman walking a dog and a man simply walking around. That was all.
It was about an hour until sunset. The view to the west.
The view to the north.
The dome off in the distance is St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral.

Grassy Lake Forest Preserve

Posted on November 30, 2020 by admin

Up among the various Barrington-named towns in northern Illinois — Barrington itself, but also North Barrington, South Barrington, Barrington Hills, Lake Barrington — is the Grassy Lake Forest Preserve, a unit of the Lake County Forest Preserve District. Its 689 acres are tucked away along the banks of the Fox River, a tributary of the Illinois River.

“Silver maples, cottonwoods and willows line the banks of the Fox River and its floodwater-storing floodplain,” says the Lake County FP web site. “Burly old-growth oaks occupy slightly higher ground above the river, and former agriculture fields now being restored to prairie can be viewed.

“Prominent geological landforms such as kettles and kames tell of Lake County’s not too distant glacial shaping, while providing sweeping views of the river valley and the surrounding area. Centuries-old landscape plantings of catalpa trees, Douglas firs, and a hedgerow of osage orange remind of us those who lived here before us.

I’m not sure exactly what a kettle or kames might look like, but I assume they’re some of the undulations we saw in the landscape. We arrived soon after noon on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, we participated in Buy Nothing Day by taking a hike.

The trail winds into the forest preserve. Soon you come to a memorial to an unfortunate lad named Derek Austin Harms that includes trees and benches and a boulder with a plaque.

It isn’t hard to find out more about the young Mr. Harms, 1997-2018.

Side trails wander down to the edge of the Fox. The river widens quite a lot at this point, perhaps forming the feature called Grassy Lake, though I haven’t found anything to confirm that.

Follow the main path far enough and it rises to the highest point in the forest preserve, where it dead ends.

Not the highest view I’ve seen recently, but on a clear warm-for-November day, a good one.

Crabtree Nature Center

Posted on November 16, 2020 by admin

Unlike the most recent weekend, the weekend before that was unseasonably warm and pleasant. Naturally that meant we wanted to visit a forest preserve, so I took to Google Maps and picked one I thought we’d never been to before: Crabtree Nature Center.

That sounds like a building you’d visit for the edification of small fry, and there is such a facility on the property (closed for now). But mostly it’s green space — woodlands and prairie and wetlands — on about 112 acres that are part of the Cook County Forest Preserve system.

Not far from the parking lot, which is half blocked off now to prevent crowding, a trail loops around two small lakes. I suspect crowding isn’t usually an issue, but never mind.

A pleasant walk on a warm day. Most of the leaves had already transitioned to the ground, making for a lush underfoot crunch as you walked on. Or the swish of knocking leaves out of the way with your feet. Distinct fall sounds.

Toward the end of the loop, you pass by some large iron-mesh enclosures, about two stories tall, home to a number of large birds that I suspect had been rescued for one reason or another, and who couldn’t survive in the wild.

Then it occurred to me: we had been here before. I remembered these enclosures. How long ago? I couldn’t recall exactly, but I did have a fleeting memory of pushing someone in a stroller. Probably Ann, since she would have been the right age for that right after we moved to the northwest suburbs, and I doubt we would have been up this way before that.

Half Day Forest Preserve & Captain Daniel Wright Woods Forest Preserve

Posted on November 9, 2020 by admin

The weather over the weekend was brilliant, a cluster of warm, mostly clear days, an echo of this year’s golden summer. Today too, but it will end tomorrow evening with storms and cold air behind them.

Here in northern Illinois, summer 2020 offered mostly warm, mostly clear days that stretched into months, with just enough rain to keep the intense green of a wet spring still green as the summer wore on.

Such a fine summer, if you were lucky enough to enjoy it, came as if to soothe over the nervous energy and dread the near future emanating from the wider world, though I’m fairly sure the weather takes no interest in our concerns. Birds don’t either, but somehow they were singing just a little more cheerfully over the weekend. What’s up with that, eh?

This is how to give a presidential concession speech.

Two weekends ago, temps were cooler but not bad. Certainly high enough for a walk in a new forest preserve. New to us, and actually two adjoining forest preserves: Half Day FP and Captain Daniel Wright Woods FP.
The preserves are in Lake County. We started at the Half Day parking lot near a small lake, walked to the small lake in Captain Daniel Wright Woods, and came back the way we came.

Except for seeing a sign along the trail, we wouldn’t have known where one forest preserve began and the other ended, which was more-or-less at the Des Plaines River. First we had to cross that river.

I can’t see a name like that and not look it up later. Captain Daniel Wright, a veteran of the War of 1812, later became noted as the first white settler in Lake County.

Find-A-Gave has more. “Capt. Wright was active as a farmer and a cooper,” the site says. “He built his cabin when he was in his mid-fifties and in spite of the hardships associated with pioneer life, he lived to be ninety-five years old and is buried in the Vernon Cemetery in Half Day. A stone memorial was erected in his memory on his old farm on the east side of Milwaukee Avenue.”

Something else to look for next time I come this way.

Aurora West Forest Preserve

Posted on August 25, 2020 by admin

Sometimes forest preserves include more prairie than forest here in the Prairie State, but not so for the Aurora West Forest Preserve in Kane County.
Forest means forest, once you walk a short way along a wide path.
Supposedly it’s a path for unleashed dogs, but we didn’t have our dog, and we didn’t see anyone else’s either. Or anyone else at all.

A good place to imagine you’re far from the works of man.
Aurora West Forest Preserve Mostly.

Canada Day 2020 &c

Posted on July 1, 2020 by admin

Back on July 6. Canada Day is here, after all, and Independence Day isn’t long from now (and also the 40th anniversary of the wide release of Airplane!). In honor of both holidays, I created a temporary display on my deck.

That calls for a U.S.-Canada holiday week: North America Independence Week. Better yet, we kick off the celebration with Juneteenth and end it with Nunavut Day (July 9) — a mid-summer mashup of independence and freedom celebrations.

Not much work gets done from ca. December 21 to January 3. No reason we can’t do the same at the polar opposite point in the calendar.

Early in the evening on the last day of June, we took a walk around Spring Creek Reservoir Forest Preserve in Bloomingdale, a small part (90 acres) of the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. Access is from E. Lake St., which is a stretch of U.S. 20, which goes all the way from Massachusetts to Oregon or vice versa.

It’s a simple circle around the reservoir. The FP District says: “In presettlement times, the forest preserve was almost entirely woodland with a small slough. It was a gravel pit from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, when it became a reservoir. The Forest Preserve District acquired the reservoir in 1987 and additional parcels in 1999 and 2000.”

Not just a reservoir, but a place for runoff from Spring Creek — flood control for Bloomingdale, as evidenced by a small dam with a spillway at the north end of the reservoir. Further downstream, Spring Creek is called Spring Brook (according to Google Maps, anyway), which eventually merges with Salt Creek, a tributary of the Des Plaines River.

Lush summer vegetation all along the way.

Spotted a monarch in the weeds.

According to the info board, the path measures a shade more than a mile around. My gizmo, which measures steps, agrees.

Cuba Marsh Forest Preserve

Posted on June 29, 2020 by admin

Late last week I spotted fireflies, which are harbingers of high summer, for the first time this year. This might be a Summer of Nowhere, but at least we have fireflies. Lilly calls them lightning bugs. Who taught her that? I didn’t.

After a short but heavy rainstorm Friday evening, we had a warm and steamy weekend. That made our Sunday afternoon walk at the 781-acre Cuba Marsh Forest Preserve in Lake County a little sticky, but not bad. Always good to visit somewhere new.

We took the path south from the parking lot off Cuba Road, marked on the above map image by a star, through the wooded northern section of the preserve, and eventually along both trail loops, through woods and grassland. I was a little surprised, since going by the name, you’d expect wetland.

Turns out the wetlands are a little beyond the path, especially toward the south end of the preserve. The woods are a mix of deciduous and pine trees.

Cornflowers are beginning to bloom. Another sign of high summer.

Walked about a mile and a half. After we got home, I started to wonder: Cuba Marsh? Anything to do with the Caribbean nation of that name?

Indirectly. Cuba Marsh is in Cuba Township, the southwestern-most township in the county. Wiki, citing a 1912 history of Lake County, says: “Cuba Township was originally named Troy Township, but was renamed to Cuba in support of the López Expedition of 1851, when it was discovered the township name of Troy was already taken.”

López Expedition, eh? That would be a filibustering expedition to liberate Cuba, led by Venezuelan Narciso López (1791-1851). Note that the year of the filibuster and his death year are the same. The expedition did not go well for him.

Deer Grove Forest Preserve

Posted on May 31, 2020 by admin

Another weekend, another forest preserve path where the problems of a wounded nation seem remote. The last day of May was clear and a little cool this year, good for a walk in the woods. Unlike last week, the path we took through Deer Grove Forest Preserve in Palatine, Ill., headed into a forest.Deer Grove includes about 2,000 acres just south of the border between Cook and Lake counties — note Lake-Cook Road running along its northeastern edge.
We parked near the Camp Alphonse entrance, which I’ve marked with a small red dot. We walked roughly to the blue dot and came back the same way — a mile and a half, more or less.

The origin of the name Camp Alphonse isn’t readily available, but there’s also a nearby entrance called Camp Reinberg. This site at least lists Camp Reinberg as a temporary WWI camp, of which there many nationwide that left little trace. My guess would be that Camp Alphonse was one as well.

The woods were alive with spring greenery and lots of wildflowers.
An elegant spider web.
A few dead trees still lording over the living ones.
The dog had a good time too.
Snacking on leafy greens the entire way.

Paul Douglas Forest Preserve

Posted on May 26, 2020 by admin

Paul Douglas was a U.S. Senator from Illinois, in that office from 1949 to 1967. I’m fairly sure that the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve in northwest Cook County is named after him, not the radio man and movie actor in Panic in the Streets, a picture I hear is getting renewed attention these days.

On Sunday, as the heat of the day wore off, we went to the 1,800-acre Paul Douglas Forest Preserve. Forest is actually a misnomer in this case, and for some of the other forest preserves, since it includes not only conventional forestland, but also grasslands, wetland and (so I’ve read) a heron rookery.
Pleasant and now lush green.
The seven-mile trail loops the edge of the more-or-less square preserve, which is fine except where it parallels the tollway (I-90).
We walked from the parking lot westward near I-90 and then followed the trail as it bent northward, along the much quieter S. Freeman Road. We followed that for a bit and then doubled back, covering about a mile and a half all together.

Much more pleasant away from I-90; less noise and lots of visible grassland.
Along with wetland flowers.
Even late in the afternoon, it was still a little hot. The day was the first summer-like one of the year.
Soon after I took that picture, the dog found a muddy puddle. She not only drank from it — in preference to the clean but probably bland water we brought — but also cooled herself off by plopping down in the mud.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Forest Preserves