Bemis Woods

Posted on January 25, 2021 by admin

This is the funniest thing I saw over the weekend.
A recycling container belonging to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. As soon as I saw it, I had the urge to peek inside. You’d expect three separate spaces, right? No. Everything goes into the same large space.

We were at Bemis Woods, a forest preserve in Westchester, Illinois, a western suburb just to the east of the DuPage County line and I-294.
We walked from the parking lot to the green trail, then the red trail, then the purple trail, then on the road back to the parking lot. About a mile and a half in all. The trails were a little treacherous.
The snow cover was thin, and where previous walkers had been, some of the snow had been scuffed enough to re-freeze as ice. Some parts of the trail were well covered with slippery zones, others less so.

Evidence of many other walkers, people and dogs, was easy to spot.
Still, it was a good walk through the woods at just below freezing.

We crossed Salt Creek twice. Once at a footbridge. The view from there.
Once along Wolf Road.
A good walk, but summer’s better on the whole. As it is for most things. The last time I was near Bemis — a little to the west, that time — was in August more than two years ago.

Poplar Creek, Winter ’21

Posted on January 24, 2021 by admin

So far winter hasn’t been all that harsh. No blizzards, no subzero stretches. We’ve gotten snow a few inches at a time, which has thinned out during days just above freezing. Still, I suspect an Arctic blast is coming soon. Probably after the heavy snow due tomorrow night.

In the meantime, temps around freezing mean we can take walks in forest preserves. Not long ago we took the dog out to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve (formally the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve). It’s close by here in the northwest suburbs, but we hadn’t been in a good while.

Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake.
Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.

Voyageur Landing

Posted on January 4, 2021 by admin

Two days after Christmas, it was warm enough to visit yet another forest preserve. This time of the year, any day above freezing without patches of ice counts as good enough for a walk. Snow and ice would fall a few days later.

We went to a relatively small patch of land in Kane County, hugging the west bank of the Fox River: Voyageur Landing.

Did roving Frenchmen pass this way in centuries past? Could be. In late December 2020, not many people at all were there, just us and a dogwalker and a jogger or two.
The preserve stretches to the north of the bridge that takes I-90 across the Fox.
From there you follow the river.
Through the wintertime forest.
She found a large number of places to sniff. Not so surprising even for an old dog.

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.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Forest Preserves