Heavy downpours lately. Chunk-floaters if you’re in a PG mood, but better known as turd-floaters. Rain late Thursday and into Friday morning, followed by two dry days, and then a very wet Sunday.

One of the dry days was Saturday. On that day we took a walk in the West Branch Forest Preserve, which is in Du Page County. We wanted do the circuit around Deep Quarry Lake.

The terrain is pretty much in the full flush of spring.
The rains had pushed the lake level up. Here’s a walkway, probably useful for fishing in drier times, that had been flooded.
A wide path (as seen above) leads around the west side of the lake about half way, then it narrows, with evidence — a lot of small tree and bush stumps — of fair recent path-clearing activity. We walked on.
To the west of the path is the West Branch of the Du Page River, which gives the forest preserve its name. It too was swollen. When we got to the southern edge of the lake, the path was impassible without a willingness to get your shoes, socks and pants soaking wet.
The river had spilled over into the flatlands near the lake. At least we had a view of the land south of the lake, which continues quite a distance, maybe looking something like pre-modern Illinois. We returned the way that we came. All together, about a mile and a half walk.

Last weekend had both warm sun and cold rain, but this time around the warmth came first, on Saturday, so that day we went to the Carl R. Hansen Woods, which seem to be part of the larger Shoe Factory Road Prairie Nature Preserve. If you can’t go far, go near.

The greening continues.

I checked on the map, but the body of water in the area doesn’t seem to have a name.

Seems to be an artificial pond, or at least a natural pond extensively modified by people, since it doesn’t connect to Poplar Creek, and manmade embankments run along part of it. We walked roughly from Picnic Grove 1, where there’s parking, to the west side of the pond and then back, maybe a mile and a half.

Elsewhere in the woods, we walked along a creeklet, little more than a damp ditch, but I was pretty sure it flows into Poplar after rain. A small bit of the Mississippi Watershed, one of countless minor waters that combine into something very large, was right under our feet.

We’ve just had three warm days in a row, sunny and springlike. That can’t last, of course. Beginning tomorrow, days too cool to eat outside are ahead. We had our dinner on the deck this evening.

Earlier in the afternoon we went to the Raceway Woods Forest Preserve, which is in Carpentersville, Illinois. It sports a structure unique in all metro Chicago forest preserves, I’m certain.
It’s the Meadowdale Silo, and a nearby sign told me that it’s been in place since the 1930s or earlier. After the Meadowdale International Raceway was developed in 1958, the silo acquired a paint job advertising the race course.

If Wiki is right, the race track never established itself as a moneymaking venture, finally petering out in 1969. For whatever reason, nothing else was ever developed there, and second-growth trees returned to the site. These days Raceway Woods is part of the Forest Preserve District of Kane County.The walking trails follow the original path of the raceway. We started at You Are Here (near the silo) and walked around the northernmost loop: up the Uphill Climb, and it was up a fair-sized hill, down Long Straight, around Little Monza and along Greg’s Corkscrew. About a mile.

The Uphill Climb.
I wondered how wide the original raceway was. The current path is fine for walkers and bicyclists and the single skateboarder we saw, but it doesn’t look wide enough to be a raceway. I’d think that anyway, but I don’t know much about raceways, European style or otherwise.

The Long Straight, which passes over a creek bound for the Fox River, not too far to the east.
Nice views from the bridge.
From the bridge I noticed concatenate unpaved trails winding their way through the woods. Auto racing hasn’t been a thing at Meadowdale for more than 50 years, but mountain biking at the forest preserve is alive and well.

On Sunday we took advantage of the warm conditions and went to Meacham Grove, which is part of the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County.

Been a while since we’d been there. Maybe this long ago. Ann said she didn’t remember the place. We walked around the Maple Lake, mostly following the gravel path.

The grass along side the lake is green. The trees just beginning to bud.
On the south end of Maple Lake is a small hill. You can walk on the path along the south side of that hill or the one on the north side of it. Or you can climb the hill. That’s what we did. A sizable hill for Illinois, but not really that steep.A scattering of people were on the hilltop, and on the trail around the lake for that matter. Easy to keep one’s distance anyway.

O’Hare is a few miles due east of Meacham Grove. In normal times, planes would fly over every minute or two. These days, it seemed to be every three or four or five minutes, though I didn’t keep an exact record.
Still, there’s no doubt that traffic in and out of O’Hare is way down.

Another Sunday, another longish walk with the dog. Yesterday, with all the snow melted and the sun overhead, we went to Mallard Lake, which is part of the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County.

Considering the time of the year, it didn’t look so much different from this visit. One difference was the number of people. With fewer out-of-house diversions now, people seem to be visiting parks and forest preserves more than before. A fair number of them came to fish, while others like us had their dogs along, or were just out taking a walk. Even so, there was plenty of room to keep at a good distance from everyone else.

The entrance is on Schick Road. I marked the entrance with a red diamond. 

From there we drove to the parking lot, circled in red. Then walked clockwise on the white path (gravel) around Mallard Lake, 1-2-3. A mile, maybe. Between 1 and 2 are two small islands connected by footbridges, and the rest of the path partly hugs the shore.

Nice walk, except for a while the wind kicked up and blew across the still-cold lake, dropping temps a good deal. Without much wind, it was an early spring day; with the wind, it was a late winter day.