Delaware 9

Posted on November 10, 2025 by admin

Coincidence or synchronicity? In September, as I was leaving Colorado Springs, I noticed an equestrian statue near a major street: William Jackson Palmer, railroad developer and Union Army officer. Stopped at a traffic light, I had a little time to look at the statue. Soon I forgot about it.

Palmer had one of those remarkable 19th-century careers, not only as a railroad man and military officer, but also a town planner, hotelier, publisher and philanthropist. He founded the towns of Colorado Springs Manitou Springs, and Durango, among others. Though he grew up near Philadelphia, he was born on a farm near Leipsic, Delaware. Barely a month after I’d spent time in some of the towns that Palmer founded, I found myself in Leipsic, Delaware.

I still wouldn’t have make the connection if I hadn’t looked up Leipsic on Wiki. I noted that the entire list of notable people from that town had exactly one name: William Jackson Palmer. Leipsic has never been a very big place, and certainly isn’t now. I looked him up, and when I saw the picture of the statue, I remembered seeing it.

I’m going with coincidence. I have a fairly high bar when it comes to synchronicity, especially since I don’t really understand the concept. Does anyone?

Before I left Delaware last month – and believe me, it doesn’t take long to leave Delaware – I drove a section of Delaware 9, a two-lane, north-south highway that parallels the coast of Delaware Bay, running east of places like Dover, Smyrna and Odessa. An intriguing squiggle on the map, made more intriguing by the fact that part of it is also known as the Delaware Bayshore Byway, which is a National Scenic Byway. Experience has taught me that those kinds of designations are usually accorded for good reasons.

After the traffic-jammed day before, I thoroughly enjoyed the nearly empty Delaware 9.

One of the few towns along Delaware 9 is Leipsic, pop. 178. I might not have stopped but for the cemetery, one so obscure that Google Maps doesn’t have a name for it, and I didn’t see evidence of a name on the ground either.

Leipsic Cemetery, perhaps. Whatever the name, it has clearly been a burial ground for a long time.

With the sort of heartbreakers you find in cemeteries of this vintage.

Three children, same family, buried in the same decade in the 19th century.

The road passes mostly through farmland, though woods and the western edge of Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge also mark its course. Delaware’s main crops are corn and soybeans, and I’m pretty sure I was in time to see the soybean leaves changing their color. Quite a sight.

You’d think I’d have seen that in Illinois or Indiana or any of the other states chock-a-block with soybeans, but I wasn’t sure I had. Driving on a two-lane road, you’re practically driving through the color, as opposed to the distance of a four-lane highway.

Corn and soy may be the main plant crops in Delaware, but the main livestock is chickens. Some 276,700,000 head of chickens were raised in Delaware in 2024, according to the USDA. That’s an impressive number, considering how small Delaware is: almost the same number as in much larger states such as Tennessee, Kentucky or Missouri. I’m not going to crunch the numbers (I have a life to live), but I’ll bet per square unit of territory, Delaware is the nation’s chicken champ.

Prospect Park Ramble ’25

Posted on November 4, 2025 by admin

Put this in the Those Were Different Times file: “In the early evening, I made it to the beginning of the National Association of Real Estate Editors convention. I mentioned to some colleagues of mine, who happened to be Manhattanites, that I’d spent part of the afternoon in Prospect Park — you know, in Brooklyn. Judging by their reaction, I might as well have said that I’d popped over to Outer Mongolia for a quick visit.”

I wrote that my June 2002 visit to New York included, as mentioned, time in Prospect Park. It is every bit a great park as Central Park, and I knew I wanted to return someday for a longer walk. After lunch in Chinatown in Manhattan on October 19, that’s what Yuriko and I decided to do. We took the subway to the Prospect Park station on the east side of the park, and began our wander.

Near that entrance was the Diwali Festival of Bites.

Despite the name, the food tents had a large international variety for sale, not just Indian food. Not important for us anyway, since we’d just eaten.

We headed deeper into the park. Maybe it was a matter of species choice, but there seemed to be more coloration than in Central Park the day before.

The handsome Prospect Park Boathouse.

A popular setting for weddings, and in fact one was taking place when we visited. Two women were exchanging vows.

The Prospect Park Waterfall.

Not a vast torrent, but a pleasant gurgling. It is a slice of the park’s interior waterways. Prospect Park’s watercourse is a beautiful collection of waterfalls, pools, streams and a 60-acre Lake, and is one of the shining achievements of Park designers Olmsted and Vaux’s design, says the Prospect Park Alliance.

The deeper in, the fewer people.

So few, sometimes, to almost make you forget you’re in a metro surrounded by about 20 million people.

But not for long.

Dog walkers and their tethered dogs roamed the park in numbers. Some come to the Prospect Park Dog Beach.

I wasn’t exactly sure where I’d been in 2002, but near the northern edge of the park, we came across what was probably the field, the sort of mildly rolling terrain, open short grassland ringed by wooded areas, that exists throughout the park. A summer Saturday in these fields draws a crowd, but a generally cheerful one, playing volleyball, attending to grills, picnicking, throwing frisbees or just lying around. An autumn Sunday is a little less active.

Fall has a more scattered vibe, but no less congenial than summer to the thinned our crowd.

Fort Greene Park

Posted on November 2, 2025 by admin

On the morning of October 19, Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn was still pretty green.

Of course, the 30-acre park was named for the talented Revolutionary War general, not for the hues of its 50-plus species of trees, very many of which seemed to be ginkgoes. Whatever the coloration, the park proved to be a nice place for a stroll that day, offering a more manageable size than either Central Park the day before, or Prospect Park would later that day (as great as those two are).

My idea for attending Open House New York was Manhattan on Saturday, Brooklyn on Sunday, planning that took us – by this time, just the two of us – to Atlantic Terminal by way of the LIRR on Sunday morning. From there, Fort Greene Park is a short walk, though once you get there, it’s something of a hustle to climb the park’s central hill. A fort had been on the site, active during the Revolution and again for the War of 1812, for a reason.

As a park, Fort Greene came of age at roughly the same time as the idea of municipal parks themselves, that is during the mid-19th century, with some agitation on the part of Walt Whitman – editor of the Brooklyn Eagle in the late 1840s – helping facilitate its creation.

In 1857, Whitman wrote about the place, known at the time as Washington Park: This beautiful ground is now covered with rich verdure, and is one of the pleasantest resorts anywhere around. On its lofty tops you feel the breeze, and from them behold one of the finest views in the world. Most of the trees are yet too young to cast much shade, but they are growing finely.

We recollect there was a very obstinate and indignant opposition to the securing of these noble grounds, some twelve years since, when the project was mooted before the Common Council and the public. It was argued that Brooklyn was not rich enough to stand the expense of purchase; and that it would be better to let the “old fort” be dug away, and blocked up with buildings.

Fortunately these counsels did not prevail. A more far-sighted policy… carried the day.

Is there any one left of those who so furiously opposed Washington Park, who is not now glad that his opposition did not succeed?

I’m also glad there’s a park, though leaving the ruins of the fort might have been an interesting approach to creating one. As Whitman would surely have appreciated, 21st-century Brooklynites were out in numbers (but not crowds) to enjoy the park on a warmish fall day, walking their dogs and turning their kids loose to play. A scattering of other people had come for Open House.

The green space and trees were only the first layer. Come 1867, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux applied their considerable talents into making Fort Greene into their vision of an urban park, a small-scale version of Central Park or Prospect Park. That’s reason enough to visit.

One of their additions: grand outdoor stairs.

It wasn’t until 1908 that those stairs led to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, memorializing the more than 11,500 POWs who died in wretched conditions aboard British prison ships during the Revolution.

The column isn’t usually open, but Fort Greene Park was an Open House site, so we were able to go inside after waiting in line a short time. I was expecting stairs inside. But there was just a rusty iron ladder, which the park ranger who led us into the column called “scary.” I agree.

There had been a spiral staircase in the memorial’s early days, but it is long gone. I wasn’t in a stair-climbing mood at that moment anyway, so for me it was just as well. If the city ever comes up with the scratch, there might be stairs again, the ranger said.

She also told us about the formation of the park, the long delay in setting up the memorial, and the tomb on the grounds that holds bones of some of the prisoners. The tomb isn’t open to the public.

A newer memorial, plaque-on-rock style and in place almost 50 years now, was dedicated by a young King Juan Carlos in memory of the Spaniards who fought for American independence.

French assistance to the nascent United States was mentioned prominently in school but not, that I remember, Spanish efforts, which were nothing to sneeze at. Maybe by 1898, Spaniards who gave the matter any thought considered the U.S. a pack of ingrates, but such is geopolitics. By 1976 and later, it was high time to acknowledge the likes of Bernardo de Gálvez and his men, and I was glad to find out that Pensacola still celebrates Gálvez Day (May 8).

Nor’East Drive ’25

Posted on October 26, 2025 by admin

I didn’t realize until last night that I’d driven through some geographic oddities over the last two weeks, on my way to the Northeast and back. Actually state border oddities, such as the Erie Triangle in Pennsylvania, the curious division of the Chesapeake Peninsula, and the panhandle of Maryland.

Except they aren’t really oddities. They just look that way when you’re a kid (or an adult) poring over U.S. maps or putting your state puzzle map together for the nth time. How is it that Pennsylvania has that small chimney? Why didn’t Delaware get more of the Chesapeake Peninsula? What’s the deal with the western extension of Maryland, which narrows to only a few miles at one point?

There are historic reasons for all the shapes, both rational and arbitrary, which are the subject of books and at least one TV show. Lands were granted and claimed, borders were surveyed and quarreled over, and deals and court cases and Congress eventually settled the shapes.

The border oddities may have local and legal significance, but they’re also there to enjoy. Regular borders aren’t nearly as much fun. Sure, it’s interesting that Colorado and Wyoming look about the same, but I always liked the fact that New Mexico has a stub and Idaho tapers to meet Canada, just to name two Western examples, because not all the fun shapes are in the East. Just most of them.

To reach these border areas, I drove 2,853 miles, starting October 14, from northern Illinois to the East Coast and back, through (in order) Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York state (and city), New Jersey, New York (city and state) again, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut again, New York state (and city) again, New Jersey again, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania again, West Virginia again, Ohio again and Indiana again, arriving home today. I got tired just typing all that out.

The original impetus for the trip was to visit New York City during its Open House event. Unlike a rational person, who would have flown there and back, I decided to drive, and let Yuriko fly there and back. NYC is achievable from metro Chicago in two driving days. I decided not to do that, either, and stretch things out to fill in some travel lacunae of mine.

For instance, I wanted to visit Eire, Pa., because I’ve always bypassed it, and many Americans can say the same. I wanted to look around Long Island, or at least part of it, for the same reason. I wanted to spend the night in both Rhode Island and Delaware: the last two states in which I’d never done so. I wanted to see the capitols of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, toying with the idea of Pennsylvania too, though I decided it was out of the way. I wanted to see historic sites associated with a number of presidents along the way, and maybe a battlefield or two.

I really wanted to visit a friend in New York, and my nephew Robert, and friends in the Boston area. I’m glad to report that I did so. This has been a year of visiting old friends and relations. I’d like every year to be that way.

I had a much longer list of places to visit, and added to it every time I looked at a map, paper or electronic, since I now use both, and when I was driving — so many possibilities. But there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy in my aging body. Still, I did much of what I set out to do, with one major exception due to forces beyond my control. National Park Service sites were off the table, for reasons all too obvious and not worth rehashing here. So the homes of FDR and TR, along with Antietam and Harper’s Ferry, went unvisited. Some other time, I hope.

No matter. I visited a good number of cities and towns, drove roads large and small, empty and insanely crowded, and enjoyed a few exceptional meals and many very good ones. I saw churches and cemeteries, some historic places not managed by the federal government, and encountered the largest of the many No Kings events. I read plaques. I chatted with strangers and clerks in stores. I took a swim in Massachusetts and long walks in New York. I hadn’t planned to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge again, but Yuriko had that idea, and across we went. I listened to a lot of terrestrial radio, good, bad and indifferent. I burned gas priced between about $2.70 and $3.30 a gallon. I paid entirely too many tolls, because the Northeast is lousy with toll roads and bridges — but driving across some of those bridges, especially the Bay Bridge in Maryland, was a grand experience, and surely worth the toll.

Something I didn’t anticipate, but which improved the trip immensely, was fall color. I should have anticipated it, but I suppose I had other things on my mind. When I got to New York state, driving west to east, it became clear that I’d accidentally designed myself a fall foliage excursion. The trees were gorgeous there, and in NYC (especially Prospect Park), Long Island, and parts of New England, and in Delaware and Maryland all the way across its panhandle. Even Ohio and Indiana had some nice color when I got there, and here at home too.

One more thing: unexpected oddities along the way. It’s important to watch out for those.

In Orange, Connecticut, I noticed a sign for the Pez Visitor Center. I had to see that.

Earlier today, at the border between Ohio and Indiana, I noticed Uranus. I had to stop.

Turns out there’s more than one; I’d only ever seen the one in Missouri (the original) in passing, never stopping. But I did this time. Now I can say I’ve been to Uranus.

Denver Botanic Gardens

Posted on October 5, 2025 by admin

Our only full day in Denver, September 10, was forecast to be a hot one, so we schemed to arrive at the Denver Botanic Gardens when it opened in the morning and stay there until the heat became uncomfortable. We liked the place so much that we stayed well after the heat locked into high.

The place includes a few whimsical installations, but mostly it’s straightforward flora.

The flowers alone were worth the price of admission. Singly.

And in profusion.

At 23 acres in the middle of a major metropolitan area, the gardens are enormous, with paths leading off in various directions to a sizable pond garden, a Japanese garden, and a giant tropical conservatory, among other features, such as an alpine garden and a steppe garden and a xeriscape demonstration garden (“Dryland Mesa”). Not to forget cacti.

There was no way to see everything, so we focused on various parts, such as the pond.

I’d never see lily pads like this.

Built for squadrons of dragonflies to land on.

We also spent time in the Japanese garden, known as Shofu-en, the Garden of Wind and Pines, designed by Koichi Kawana (d. 1990). He did the Japanese garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden and a lot of other places, curiously including Suiho-En, the Garden of Water and Fragrance at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles.

Then there was the conservatory.

To listen to the three-minute audio on this page, the place sounds as high-maintenance as you’d expect, especially the watering and pruning that’s done by hand. To keep a slice of the tropics alive in a mile-high temperate location, I’d say it’s worth the effort.

Mesa Verde National Park

Posted on October 1, 2025 by admin

In 800 years or so, will people come from significant distances to look at the ruins of my mid-century neighborhood? That doesn’t seem likely for any number of reasons. I’d be surprised if my own house survives until the next century, considering how good people are now at razing and rebuilding. But considering such a long span of time, there’s no way to know.

That’s the kind of thing I wonder about when facing structures of that age, especially those whose inhabitants are known mainly by the structures and other items they long ago cast off.

On September 17, we’d come to the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde National Park. To get close, you sign up and pay for a ranger-guided tour, which goes down stone stairs, along the edge of the cliff near the dwellings, and then back up some stone stairs (built by the CCC; does that even need to be said?). The elevation is 7,500 feet or so, but that didn’t cool things down that day. It was hot and sweaty.

A shot like that took some effort. We were hardly alone at Cliff Palace.

The ruins, which are most certainly near a cliff, are probably not a palace in the grand sense of a royal residence. More of a neighborhood, one of many in the vicinity, though the largest. Also, not quite as much of a ruin as it used to be. This is an image of the Cliff Palace from 1891, taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld.

Not as long ago as all that, considering the age of the structures, but before TR inked the bill creating the national park, and back when you could help yourself to whatever was lying around, as the explorer (and photographer) Nordenskiöld apparently did, taking many items back home to Sweden. Eventually, the items made their way to Finland. A few were returned recently.

The ruins aren’t quite as ruined these days. The 20th century was a period of stabilization. Not as many artifacts got nicked either.

A kiva. The largest one at the Cliff Palace, I think. A religious site similar to others in the Southwest, such as at Bandelier National Monument (and now I know that was a kiva).

The canyon below the Cliff Palace. Imagine having to scramble up and down the walls regularly, to tend to fields or fetch water or escape from marauders.

Mesa Verde is of course much more than the Cliff Palace, since the park protects an estimated 5,000 archaeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. The main road through the park (built by the CCC, naturally) takes visitors to other overlooks. The dwellings of Spruce Tree House are sizable and also off limits these days, until the overhead rocks are stabilized.

More cliff dwellings. They are a little hard to see, but they are there.

On top of the main mesa, the road also goes through areas burned by wildfire at one time or another.

Flora always bounces back.

I had the vague idea that the inhabitants of the cliff dwellings disappeared mysteriously after about 1300, but visiting the park schooled me on more current thinking. They left, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Drought hit them, and hit them hard, so they migrated to find water and other sustenance. Persistent violence was probably a factor, too, as tends to happen in periods of strained resources. So it’s pretty clear that Ancestral Puebloans’ descendants even now live among the tribes along the Rio Grande, not too far away.

I also didn’t realize that the well-known cliff dwellings were only occupied for a relatively short time, in the grand scheme of native inhabitation: only about a century. Before that, most of the inhabitants lived atop the mesas. One such ruin is called Far View, which isn’t far from the road.

I heeded this signs and didn’t enter. But you can walk around the perimeter and imagine the passing centuries.

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Posted on September 30, 2025 by admin

It’s a safe bet that when most Americans think of scenic Colorado, they think of the sort of mountains you see at Rocky Mountain National Park, or many of the other ranges in the state. Less likely to come to mind is 1.5 cubic miles of sand. That much sand is hard to imagine at all.

That’s the amount of sand thought to be piled at Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado. Naturally, it isn’t a 1.5-mile cube, though the idea is amusing. The NPS notes that the sand is more spread out: “The 30 square mile (78 sq. km) active dunefield is where the tallest dunes reside. It is stabilized by opposing wind directions (southwestly [sic] and northeasterly), creeks that recycle sand back into it, and a 7% moisture content below the dry surface.”

We approached the park on September 14, heading eastward on Lane 6 North, an Alamosa County road through the flatlands of San Luis Valley, an enormous stretch of land between the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. At 8,000 square miles, San Luis is the world’s largest alpine valley, the Denver Gazette asserts, with an average elevation at more than 7,600 feet.

Great Sand Dunes was a national monument for longer than it has been a park, though park status represents an enlargement of the monument that President Hoover created. It is Colorado’s newest national park, raised to that status only a little more than 20 years ago.

At a distance of some miles from the park, you notice a pale rim at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo range. As the mountains come better into view, so does the rim, soon looking like a vast pile of sand – which it is – pushed up against the mountains by some enormous broom – which it was not (see above).

Also on offer: a nice view of the Sangre de Cristo, including flora that thrives in the sandy soil of its foothills.

The tourist side of GSDNP features a visitor center and a parking lot and, a short ways away, camp sites. Vegetation girds the parking lot. From there – dunes at the other end of a long sand flat.

No further signs, no trails. Visitors head toward the dunes and wander around wherever they want.

A major activity is sandboarding. Like snowboarding, I suppose, only without the freezing white stuff. Atop this dune, sandboarders are ready to slide.

It’s a young person’s and young families’ game. We happened to meet a pair of young men on one of the dune crests, boards in hand. One of them was wearing a Texas A&M cap, and I asked if he’d gone to school there. He had, finishing a few years ago. I wasn’t entirely certain that he believed me when I told him my grandfather was Class of ’16. That is, 1916.

Horseback riding is also allowed on the dunes, under certain conditions.

We merely took a walk, climbing a few of the smaller dunes. I’d learned my lesson back in 2007, when we clawed our way up a large sand dune in Michigan, at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: “It was a slog. One foot up, then it slides down a bit. After all, it’s warm sand. Make that pretty hot sand. Step, slide back, step, slide back, step, slide back. Rest. Heat. Sweat. Sand in shoes. Remove sand pointlessly, because it comes back. Step, slide back, step, slide back…”

The day at GSDNP wasn’t quite as hot as in Michigan, but the sand was just as sandy. So we admired North America’s largest pile of sand, but not from the top of any particularly large pile.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Posted on September 29, 2025 by admin

On September 15, KKTV in Colorado reported that Trail Ridge Road through Rocky Mountain National Park was “briefly closed Sunday [the 14th] due to the wintry weather. This was first time snow and ice shut down the road since it reopened in May.”

We drove that road two days before, on the 12th. As the article notes, the “48-mile highway through the park is North America’s highest continuous paved road and connects the east and west sides of the park… [it] reaches 12,180 feet at its highest point. Alpine Visitor Center, where snowfall was caught on webcam, is located at about 11,796 feet.”

We’d spent the night before in Granby, Colorado, from the looks of it a growing town – complete with large rows of spanking-new townhouses – and from there entered the park from the western, or less crowded side. The eastern entrance near Estes Park, Colorado, has a more direct connection to the mobs coming from greater Denver.

RMNP is a place of majestic vistas. We came for that, and were not disappointed. But I was just as impressed by something we saw near the western entrance at a place called Holzwarth Historic Site, in the Kawuneeche Valley. A picturesque place.

It was the first place we stopped in the park, walking on a path through part of the valley. A small bridge crossed what looked like a creek.

A sign on the bridge informed us, however, that this was the Colorado River. A flabbergasting moment. I’d known that the Colorado rises in one of the remote parts of the park, but I didn’t know we were going to encounter the river – whose downstream will carve epic canyons and be dammed to the hilt for the water and power needs of millions of people – by crossing it on foot in a few seconds.

The Holzwarths ran a dude ranch on the site for much of the 20th century, before selling it to the Nature Conservancy, which eventually resulted in the area being added to the national park. A number of the dude ranch buildings still exist not far from the baby Colorado River.

From the valley Trail Ridge Road, which is also US 34, heads upward. A look back at the valley.

Soon you reach Milner Pass on the Continental Divide, crossing back to the Atlantic side; we’d crossed to the Pacific side at Berthoud Pass the day before outside the park, on the way to Granby.

From there, the road takes you above the tree line. By that elevation, the warmth down in the valley is just a memory, as brisk chilly winds blow. The air was still above freezing that day, but not by much.

From one of the several pullouts on the road, a path through fields of alpine tundra.

Been a long time since I’d seen any. Back in the Canadian Rockies? No, Alaska. Still, a while ago. We’d reached autumn above the tree line, with the tundra turning.

The road goes on.

Who first built the road? There was none when Rocky Mountain NP became a national park, with President Wilson’s signature on the bill. Improvements came later, and of course they were by the CCC.

At the Alpine Visitor Center, parking was hard but not impossible to find. The views are good from there, but if you want the better vistas, you climb some outdoor stairs. Roughly 200 feet of them.

The air was cold and there wasn’t enough of it. Or so it seemed. I took my hiking pole, put on a sweater and cap and started up. I could have bought a small can of oxygen at the gift shop, had I known about it. I saw a woman, clearly older than me, coming up the stairs as I was headed down, pausing to inhale vigorously from such a can.

Yuriko and Emi made it to the top before I did, but by taking a number of breaks, I managed to get to there myself. Just another thing I should have done 30 (40) years ago. But even then, I’d have been tired at the top.

It’s that extra five feet that leaves you gasping, I think. No matter, the view was worth the gasps. Entirely. The images, as usual for this kind of vista, barely convey the scene in its glory. This is going to be a persistent reality over the next few days’ posts.

Enough to make you burst out with a rendition of “Rocky Mountain High.” If you had the oxygen. I have to say I was glad to repair soon to a lower altitude, one below the tree line. From the Alpine Visitor Center, the road heads toward the eastern entrance to the park, a good many miles away and several thousand feet closer to sea level.

Before we left the parking lot, we saw a fox — guess that would be an alpine fox, pointy snout, pointy ears, billowing with orange and white fur — trot onto the parking lot, as if it had a car parked there. A young ranger, presumably used to the elevation, took chase. Not to catch the fox, which would have been impossible, but probably to prevent the animal from getting run over. Roadkill is one thing, but parking lot kill would have put a small dint in the scenic wonder all around. Anyway, the fox headed for the slopes.

Not only was the air better below tree line, fall foliage was well under way, something we haven’t gotten much of even now here in northern Illinois, though it won’t be long.

One down, three to go. One of the marvels of Colorado’s four national parks is how different each of them are from the others, as we would soon see for ourselves.

Fox River, Waukesha

Posted on August 25, 2025 by admin

After being relatively wet, August in northern Illinois has turned relatively cool to end its days. A few days ago, we took a walk at the unusually green (for August) Spring Valley here in the northwest suburbs.

August flowers, Illinois edition.

Earlier this month, an enormous rainstorm blew through southern Wisconsin, doing damage in Milwaukee and elsewhere, including Waukesha County. Too much water too fast, and not nearly enough space in the Fox River channel that runs through the city and county of Waukesha. In the city, the river made a raging, dangerous rise not far from the picturesque downtown. If that area had flooded, that would have been in the news cycle for a little while anyway, but it looks like most of the damage was in more rural parts of the county. Regardless, it represents a lot of property damage.

“In Menomonee Falls, a crew was spotted pulling a car out of a massive sinkhole,” local TV News reported. “The once-raging waters this weekend washed away the road in an industrial area on Campbell Drive, leaving just a cliff. In the crater, the car had been trapped. The driver was fine. Inside the sinkhole, drainage pipes seemed to be tossed around like Lincoln Logs.”

About two weeks earlier, on a nearly hot, clear day, we took a walk along the Fox, accessed a block or so away from downtown’s main streets. The river was flowing vigorously, but without a hint of the rampage to come (and why would there be?). This is the same Fox River that runs west of metro Chicago and to the Illinois River, and not the one that runs into Green Bay. Just to keep things interesting, there are apparently two other Fox Rivers in Illinois as well.

Across the way, a gazebo.

Every town over 5,000 has to have a gazebo, according to Wisconsin law. Wisconsin is almost alone in its gazebo mandates, with most other states having repealed theirs in the 1960s and ’70s – though some counties in other states still mandate the structures.

An artful pedestrian bridge.

More river, and also bears. Bronze bears.

Hope the river didn’t take them away, but I’d think the figures would be anchored pretty well.

Parke County Dash: Bridges

Posted on August 17, 2025 by admin

Even though you see enough corn driving through the Midwest, it’s still a little hard to imagine 5.1 million acres of corn (or anything else). Yet that’s how much corn – maize, Zea mays – was planted in Indiana alone in 2024, according to the Indiana Corn Marketing Council, with 5.05 million acres harvested. Even after being in the thick of a summer crop, the thought of that much boggles the mind.

We didn’t go to Parke County, Indiana, in late July to admire the corn, though I did take a moment to make a few higher-than-an-elephant’s-eye corn pictures. You don’t have to go nearly that far to find corn. We came for the covered bridges, spending a Saturday night in the county seat of Rockville, Indiana, and out looking for bridges on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. To get to them, you have to take to the small roads crisscrossing the area, some paved, some not, but all pretty high quality.

Roads lead to bridges, such as Sim Smith Bridge, vintage 1883, which crosses Leatherwood Creek. “Locally, this bridge has the reputation as haunted,” says a guide map I picked up. Uh-huh.

West-central Indiana is well-watered, a welter of creeks feeding the Wabash River. Covered wooden bridges cross many of them, each of more than a century old. Cedar is the main material. I’d guess being well-watered was good for the farmers here in the late 19th century, except for one thing: they complicated shipping one’s crop to buyers, either to animal feed processors or human-food makers. So, bridges.

Mecca Bridge, near Mecca, Indiana, across the Big Raccoon Creek. 1873.

Crooks Bridge, across Little Raccoon Creek. Competed in 1856.

Neet Bridge, 1904, also across Little Raccoon Creek.

Local organizations count 31 historic bridges in Parke County, each with a name and known origin. Local organizations promote historic bridge tourism, as well they should, including a give-away paper guide (Parke County Guide) that other guides should aspire to, so detailed and useful is it. But I can also report that even on a summer weekend, when it was hot but not dangerously so, or especially humid, overtourism hasn’t spoiled the place. Most of the time, at the half-dozen or so bridges we visited on a weekend, we were alone. Even the bridges that still carried auto traffic had little, so that walking across each on foot was never an issue.

An carpenter (and lawyer) named J.A. Britton (d. 1929) built many of the bridges in Parke County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presumably as the organizer of a small construction crew, but also with the sort of hands-on approach that had him laboring alongside the other men. I like to think so, anyway, but whatever the arrangement, bridge building was his business, and he built them to last. Some are still vehicle bridges. Others are pedestrian bridges. Most are in situ, with a few moved to parks or other places.

Parke County was enough of a market for a few decades that J.A. Britton had a competitor, J.J. Daniels, who left behind some structures as well, such as the Neet and Mecca bridges.

Most of the Parke County bridges are Burr Arch Truss bridges, following a design that combines a truss and an arch, invented by a bridge builder back east in the early 19th century, one Theodore Burr. Seems like the design works really well for this kind of bridge.

Not all the bridges are out in the corn-planted countryside. Bridgeton Bridge, crossing Big Raccoon Creek, is in the small town of Bridgeton, Indiana, which includes a former mill rising over the creek, now retail. Unlike the others we saw, it dates from 2006, a faithful replica of an earlier bridge destroyed by wanker arsonists.

Over a waterfall, for that extra picturesqueness.

The view from the bridge.

The creek below was deep enough to allow teenagers, some boys but also at least one girl, to jump off the modern vehicle bridge next to the wooden bridge as a matter of fun, not grievous injury, because while we were around, we saw and heard them doing so. Good to see kids out having fun that didn’t involve small electronic boxes, by gar.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Flora