Starved Rock State Park served as "home base" for our few days in Illinois, as we visited both that park, and nearby Matthiessen State Park as well.
(Editor's note: don't forget to check out our two latest trailers Trailer 3 - "Eating Our Way Through Vermont [240818-22]" and Trailer 4 - Franconia Notch State Park [240827-29], if you haven't already!)
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Wednesday night was not a particularly restful night for Tom, since the college-aged (?) "kids" in the site next door decided that 10 p.m. (posted as the start of "quiet hours" all over the campground) was a good time to start their little party - with what appeared to be beer (despite the "no alcohol" signs posted all over the campground), a Bluetooth speaker, and . . . a hookah pipe (?). While the dual paned windows and insulated walls of the T42 are pretty good at blocking sound, they weren't that good and the noise pretty much kept Tom up. By 12:30 he couldn't stand it any longer, got up, slammed the van door loudly as he went over (still in his sleeping clothes) and asked them in his sternest "dad voice" to please keep the noise down. They sheepishly apologized and tootled off to bed. And there was peace and quiet in the campground at last...
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Thursday morning we slept in until 8:45. After doing our morning routine, we drove over to the Visitor Center (the campground being across the highway from the rest of the park) where we got hiking recommendations, watched a couple of orientation movies, and browsed the museum displays - including one of many throughout the park describing how "Starved Rock" probably got its name as a result of a fictional legend.
Then we embarked on the day's hikes, starting with the Ridge Trail first. The very small amount of water running in this stream was a harbinger of things to come.
The photos of French Canyon in the Visitor Center (and gift shop items) show a waterfall at the end of it. By the time we arrived, though, that back wall had a sheet of water flowing down it, but no actual waterfall any more.
Wildcat Canyon was more impressive. The creek fed some short waterfalls at the top by the Ridge Trail before cascading down 125 feet to the canyon floor below.
Near Lone Tree Canyon, we started hearing a new noise in the distance in addition to the birds chirping and occasional passage of an airplane overhead. Here's a conversation from the trail:
Christine: What does that noise sound like to you?
Tom: Phasers. Sustained phaser fire, like TOS phasers trying to drill through rock.
Christine: What does it really sound like to you?
Tom: Why do you ask questions when you don't want to hear the answer?
We took a short video, for later analysis.
Shortly thereafter, a lengthy staircase took us 100 feet down into the sandstone canyon to meet up with the River Trail, which runs along the Illinois River.
At one point a snake slithered across the trail and joined a friend off to the side. We're not "snake people" so we couldn't tell you what kind they were, but we didn't hear any rattling so we figured we were probably safe. They seemed pretty . . . distracted . . . by each other anyway.
LaSalle Canyon had the best waterfall in the park - not only from a "volume of water" perspective, but also because you could walk behind it!
As we hiked back toward the Visitor Center, we heard the odd phaser sound from before - only much louder this time. Could this be the sound of those cicadas that everyone is talking about?
The trail also provided views of the dam and lock on the river.
A spur off the trail provided access to the lower portion of Wildcat Canyon, whose 125 foot waterfall we had seen from above earlier in the day.
Beehive Overlook was something of a cruel trick. It required a climb up a rather steep stairway to get to, and the "view" once you got there was pretty much of trees and bushes. Maybe a few of these plants might lose a little foliage in the autumn making this "overlook" a bit more useful, but an awful lot of those trees looked like evergreens to us too, so we think they really should either prune the trees back or just close the overlook.
Eagle Cliff Overlook, on the other hand, was actually useful (the fact that you can actually see the overlook from the ground is always a good sign 😉).
The spillway of the dam appeared to be a very popular pelican hangout.
The Lover's Leap Overlook provided us our first glimpse of Starved Rock itself - looking decidedly more shaggy and overgrown than it does in any of the pictures in the Visitor Center.
Actually walking out onto Starved Rock ended up being fairly unexciting. Although there were a few interpretive signs to read, they mostly just repeated things we had already read in the Visitor Center. And there pretty much weren't many views to be had from Starved Rock, since it was about as overgrown as Beehive Overlook was.
We stopped by the Visitor Center on the way back to the car to ask about the sounds we had heard in the forest. They confirmed that the sounds in our video are, in fact, cicadas.
On our way back to camp, we stopped by the Starved Rock Lodge to see The Great Hall (and the rest of the lodge).
That evening back at camp, we spotted another Travato (a 2020G) and met Lorenzo and Tabitha, who were on their way back home to Chicago after 7 months of being on the road. For dinner, we tried grilling green beans (to make something similar to the ones we had at the Mitchell Depot the week before) as part of our dinner. Although we didn't slather ours in butter like the restaurant did, they still were quite tasty and will become part of our dinner repertoire.
Tomorrow we'd be popping over to Matthiessen State Park to hike the canyon there...
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