July was a good month to get out and do some hiking and nature photography in the dunes. After a very dry spring (technically a drought) the summer has seen a lot of rain and everything has really perked up. Among other things I spent 3 days camping in the Indiana Dunes National Park campground, in part so I could spend three days immersed in the beauty of the park. Here are a few images from those hikes.
Cowles Bog
I went out to Cowles Bog on the first day of my camping trip. It was a Sunday and the weather was nice, so I was surprised I was able to snag a parking spot at one of the two trail heads as this is a very popular trail with very limited parking. I only did the short loop around the marsh itself because I had to get back and finish setting up camp.
In this view across the width of the marsh you can see the forested dune ridge which marks the end of a series of such ridges starting at the lake front and moving inland. What is now technically more of a marsh was once a bog. For a time this area was used for residential and industrial purposes which changed the nature of the land. Since being acquired by the NPS the area has been undergoing a long term restoration in order to return it to its natural state.
I always enjoy looking at the delicate details of these. I often find photo-bombers in my photos when I get home. If you zoom in you should be able to spot a snail in the scene.
These Tiger Lilies were popping up all over the marsh. Cannot miss those intense reds and oranges.
State Park Trail #2/10 Loop
The Indiana Dunes State Park sits in the middle of the footprint of the National Park. It has one of my favorite trails in the area, a loop that starts at the Nature center and encompasses parts of trails #2 and #10. I spent the afternoon of my second day camping on this trail. There is always a ton of great stuff to see out here.
One of my favorite photographic subjects is water on the foliage from rain or morning dew. This however is something entirely different. To put it bluntly, it is slug snot. Just out of the field of view was a fairly large slug munching away on a mushroom. The trail of mucus he left behind was glistening and frankly quite beautiful. The rainbow colored hues that you see are the result of a phenomena called thin film interference, which is the same effect that produces the colors you see in soap bubbles.
By far my favorite feature of this trail is a half-mile long boardwalk across the marsh. Most of the length of the boardwalk runs parallel to a beaver dam. This view is looking back into a stand of dead ash trees (emerald ash borer) on the stagnant side of the dam. All the green on the water is duckweed, the smallest flowering plant in the world. If I could I would setup a tent on the boardwalk and camp right here in the middle of the marsh, that would be awesome.
One of the fun things about mushrooms is seeing how they pop up just about everywhere when conditions are right. I think this fella has grown about as tall as he is going to be able.
This wee tiny shroom has an even smaller sibling just to its right. If you look close you can tell that they are growing out of a very decayed piece of wood which is almost completely covered at this point.
Great Marsh
On my final day camping I hit the Great Marsh trail which just happens to be within walking distance from the camp site. It was a short and very flat trail, quite easy which was good after two night sleeping on the ground, which means getting very little sleep.
This part of the park was also residential at one point, and is in the process of being restored. This image looks across an open portion of the marsh, the trees in the background are in a swampy area that has not yet been cleared out. The haze you see is the moisture in the air, it was a really humid day. The kind of day where stopping to take a photograph was to risk being overwhelmed by mosquitos.
I came across this big old snapping turtle at a fork in the trail. It is hard to judge just how big it was from the photo, but the shell had to be at least two feet across which is really large for an American Snapping Turtle. He must have been crossing the trail to get to a new mud hole when I came across him. Apparently they can be rather aggressive when encountered out of the water. So I took the other path which eventually looped back around, but he was gone by the time I had returned to this spot.
A couple months earlier during the spring drought, this part of the trail was so dry you could see the landscape for a mile all around from this spot. But now they were lush from the summer rains. This is what I call a tick passage. There is no way to make it through a stretch like this without walking through and brushing up against tall grasses and such. I make a habit of doing a quick tick check after passing through an area like this one, sure enough I had a hitchhiker on my sock.
