Rib Mountain’s Yellow Trail is spectacularly … yellow

6-redAfter teasing us for too long, autumn and its gorgeous colors finally blew into town last week, as conspicuous as your crazy cousins, the ones who cause the demise of your creaky old end table when teaching your youngest kid to do some ‘80s-era dance on top of it.

They always buy the family dinner and bring crazy gifts for the children and you laugh a lot and reminisce.  Then they skedaddle just as suddenly, writing a check for the table and promising to come back soon.

You miss them before they’re out the door.

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Three words for 1,200: Let’s work together

trailsParks, bike paths, sidewalks and other things that encourage us to interact more with our neighbors and the natural world are, simply put, some of the best things communities can do.

Here are a few pictures from a couple of great little neighborhood nature preserves over in Marshfield, a community where good health is a way of life.  As the home of the renowned Marshfield Clinic, the community also knows how good health is good for the economy and business.

I headed out to these parks early last week primarily just to get away from our toxic political environement for a few hours.  Being in these neighborhood jewels — one next to a retirement home, the other in a sleeply suburban neighborhood — gave me plenty of impetus to think over who uses parks and why they’re irreplaceable in community life.

I discuss some of these issues in last week’s Portage County Gazette column (available in full-text form).

(Note: It seems I mistakenly put 7 p.m. instead of 6:30 as the start time for the Nov. 3 Revisioning Point meeting in my original column.  Please pardon my error, which I regret.)

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A few pictures of a Wisconsin jewel

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The Ice Age Trail is one of our state’s finest assets, and to support it, I took part in the annual Hike-a-Thon presented by the Portage and Waupaca County chapters the Ice Age Trail Association.

I also wrote about it for the Portage County Gazette, an article that the paper chose to put behind a paywall as it moves toward its internet pay model.  Because of what may have been a boneheaded error on my part, my original version got corrupted and I had to reconstruct the entire piece from memory — and in a hurry.   I think it still came out well, but before too long I may publish the text of the two pieces side by side as a means of analyzing, for my students, the writing process a little more.

In any event, I’ve posted some extra pictures of my Saturday walk right here.  I hope they inspire you to visit and support the trail either in Central Wisconsin or in some other part of our great state.

 

Rain may fall, but Mead keeps rising above

I recently made my second trip over to the George Mead Wildlife Area, choosing to visit parts of this place I already know a little bit over exploring a new outdoor site.  It worked out well.  Here’s my Portage County Gazette column about my walk, with a few extra pictures thrown in below.

Honestly, it’s a pretty good place

Sometimes ideas go well together when only one of them might stand on its own.

I had a column idea about a line I wrote that wasn’t quite truthful, but not really inaccurate, either.  The idea was probably a little too abstract to stand on its own, but after visiting with Jim Buchholz and Megan Espe at the Schmeeckle Reserve about the Ron Zimmerman Prairie dedication, I realized there was a common thread between my column idea and the prairie: the value of mindfulness in nature, something Ron’s career was all about.

So here’s a link to the column, along with a couple of extra pictures of the prairie added below.