Last year we had a very dry spring, and that had a noticeable impact on the park. Water levels were quite low. This year, wow. It has beed a very rainy spring. Water levels are as high as I’ve seen them across the park. It is a wonderful thing to see all the Pannes which were were dry last year, full of water this year. The impact on the spring growth has been phenomenal. The whole park is exploding with wild flowers, lush and vibrant greens are everywhere. The photographs in this post were are taken on Mother’s Day on the Miller Woods trail in the IDNP.
If you happen to live anywhere near the Indiana Dunes I highly recommend that you visit the park sometime soon. You won’t be dissapointed.
(Click on any image to view it full size)
It was a beautiful day to be out on the trail. Temperatures in the upper 70’s, lots of sun, not too much wind. The Lupine pretty much stole the show, as they tend to do each year at this time. They grow in dense clumps which amplifies the impact of their intense purple/blue flowers. The other striking feature of the trail was how intense and vibrant the greens were. Brilliant yellow-greens and rich blue-greens.Of course I collected plenty of my more typical close up photographs of plants and insects. Not surprisingly the bees were out in abundance, and were heavily laden with pollen. And where you have pollenators, you have predators hunting them, like jumping spiders. This was one of the rare times when I took more landscape photographs than closeups of plants and insects. Partly because my prior two hikes had resulted in plenty of closeups of Lupine. But to be honest I was totally captivated by the beauty of the landscape, so I just kept trying and trying to capture the impact of it all.
