The snow forecast for Friday night didn’t show, though a little rain came the next day. Sunday turned out warmish, around 50 F., and mostly clear.

We made our way in early afternoon to Beverly Lake, which is on forest preserve land almost as far west in Cook County as you can go.

The map’s misleading, or at least incomplete. It depicts the 22-acre Beverly Lake, but most of the trails are in open space to the west and northwest. The trails are marked for cross-country skiing, but on Sunday, they were merely soggy in a few places.

“We’ve been here before,” I said. Yuriko didn’t remember, since it was a while ago: a warm day in April 2004, when we got a break from the kids for a few hours. I probably wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t written about it.

The lake.

Trails wide and narrow.

We came across a half-dozen volunteers removing invasive species and making a bonfire out of the debris. An older member of the party, maybe the leader, was keen to explain what they were doing. The enemy, he said, is buckthorn. Once he pointed it out, I started seeing it in a lot of places, including along some of the trails.

The buckthorn is the vine-like branches hanging and clinging every which way on the forest trees.

“… buckthorn species were first brought here from Europe as a popular hedging material,” explains the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “They became a nuisance plant, forming dense thickets in forests, yards, parks and roadsides. They crowd out native plants and displace the native shrubs and small trees in the mid-layer of the forest where many species of birds nest.”

Even more menacing in black and white, I think.