Kicking off the New Year in nature…
Yesterday I took the day off to spend New Year’s Day hiking through the Illinois Beach State Park. A beautiful lakefront park just north of Waukegan, A “treasure: that I found during my Covid quarantine a couple years ago. I had never heard of it before… and apparently very few other people have either! It’s always so unpopulated with people. You can hike for hours and barely run across more than a handful of people out there. Wonderful!

Yesterday was a bit cloudy & overcast, but still a beautiful day to hike around the park. As the name implies, Illinois Beach State Park has a lot of beachfront area. A lot of sand dunes & driftwood. A lot of open prairie grass areas away from the lake. And a lot of swales… yes, I learned what a “swale” was yesterday!!!

New this year, there was no snow & ice formations! Prior years I was up there during Winter marveling over the frozen spectacle, icicles & glaciers all over the lake. So this time, it seemed a lot more like a Fall day that Winter!

Quite a few “tee-pee” structures have also popped-up along the lakefront. This was the largest of them… kind of a structure built out of driftwood logs. Very cool, all uninhabited… but from the looks of some of them, there have been people inside them… some even had brick fire rings inside!

This was a cool stick I found on the beach… literally covered with shells. Like barnacles on a ship!

And a couple more “tee-pee” structures along the beach. Kinda wonder how long they’ve been here?!

Cattails look like they’ve weathered the storm!

Always fun to see some stacked rocks along the beach. I found this grouping in the South Unit. Already stacked by a cute young family… the kids were so excited about their creations as they posed for photos!

Loving the lichens!