We continued our adventures in Indiana Dunes National Park, spending time on some actual dunes.
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After the previous evening's increasing number of mosquitoes, Tom decided to apply a layer of Repel Lemon Eucalyptus (which had proven itself to be quite effective against mosquitoes when we visited Maui in '22) before pulling out from the campsite Tuesday morning. The mosquitoes by the dump station pretty much left him alone when we stopped there to top off our water tanks, so he figured "all good".
For the day's first activity, we drove out to the Cowles Bog Trailhead. The driveway to get to the parking lot happens to be just outside the town of Dune Acres - a community that is so friendly that they have a manned guard gate to make sure that national park riffraff doesn't accidentally miss the driveway and try entering Dune Acres instead.
The trail was very pretty, meandering through pond, marsh, and swamp at times and containing a very wide variety of different flora.
The bog trail intersected another one that went over the hill to the beach, so we decided to walk that trail for some views of Lake Michigan. As we left the bog behind, the tree density got thicker and thicker - as did the number of insects buzzing around; we're not sure exactly why, but we suspect that it's because there are more birds out in the bog area eating the insects, but the birds don't bother flying into the wooded area to hunt. Tom also vaguely noticed that while the mosquitoes were still keeping their distance, the small flies that were becoming more frequent seem to be unperturbed by the Lemon Eucalyptus.
The beach eventually came into view, and with it some trees that we think were the source of the substance we had been seeing around the park that looked like someone had been shredding a foam mattress in the area.
As we headed down the dune to the actual beach, though, horror ensued. As we walked past a row of tufted beach grass, a swarm of black flies rose up and started swarming us. Christine was able to shoo most of them away from her, but they formed a CLOUD around Tom as he was trying to take photos of the shore and started BITING. Tom managed to snap a couple of quick photos as Christine took his hat and tried swatting the landing flies, but he quickly gave up and made a mad dash back up the sand dune (and no, running UP a sand dune is not easy at all) and back the way we had come, swatting at his arms and legs in a cyclic pattern with his hat to try to keep the biting to a minimum; we had travelled a half mile back down the path before the remaining flies finally left him alone. Apparently, lemon eucalyptus is more like a "people marinade" than repellent to these flies!
While eating lunch in the parking lot, we read the state park brochure to see if we wanted to visit there or not. We decided against it, since the only thing there that sounded vaguely interesting was the Tree Graveyard - which required a 5 mile hike to get to. We returned to the Visitor Center to ask if there was a tree graveyard anywhere in the national park, and we got a very vague answer: maybe one in Cowles Bog (but obviously unmarked, since we had just left there) and maybe one in West Beach, which we were planning on visiting the next day. While there we watched the orientation movie, and browsed the displays in their smallish museum.
The orientation movie had made the Dune Ridge Trail look potentially interesting, so we headed there next. Tom washed his face and arms and applied a layer of picaridin everywhere before starting the hike. Flies still hung around and bit his legs and sock area (an indication that lemon eucalyptus is a more compelling marinade than picaridin is a repellant?)
It rained that evening, leaving a warm muggy night in its wake. As it got darker, the fireflies started coming out. Christine lived in Ohio when she was a child so she had seen fireflies before, but Tom had never seen any in real life before; he found them quite delightful - "like Christmas lights in the bushes that move"! We tried videoing them, with mixed results. They didn't come out very well on the iPhone (we suspect that their blinks might have been filtered out as signal noise by some Apple algorithm), but were more visible on the Nikon. The video below shows both (iPhone in the first half, Nikon in the last).
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Wednesday morning, Tom put a fresh coat of picaridin on and we drove 9 miles (30 minutes) out to the West Beach region of the park, which has three short semi-interconnected trails that can be hiked as a large 3.4 mile loop. We started with the Dune Succession Trail, which starts on the beach - from which we could get a very hazy view of Chicago off in the distance.
"Succession" is the technical term for when one plant community replaces another, until finally a stable community develops and the trail shows how as you move inland from the beach more and larger plant species appear.
We found this sign about "Diana" - a local folk hero - somewhat humorously ironic. She was an early 20th century woman who decided to leave her city life in Chicago and live a more simple life out on the Indiana dunes instead, doing so for almost a decade. The irony, of course, is that if someone were to try something like this today our friends in Dune Acres (or any number of the other private communities) would sooner run her out of town than herald her as a folk hero!
The West Beach Trail goes through an area that was sand mined in the late 1920's, but has since been restored. The signs say "it is a great place to see prickly pear cactus" but the ones we saw were extremely small and low to the ground. These flowers were pretty, though.
The trail continues on by Long Lake, which is filled with water lilies - and even has a beaver lodge!
Long Lake Trail goes up a hill for an elevated view of the lake - and then actually meanders for quite a distance away from the lake over some heavily forested (and insected) hills that we probably wouldn't have minded skipping - particularly since the bugs in that area seemed to be less affected by the picaridin.
The highlight of this stretch was this rabbit that crossed our path.
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Having done everything we planned to do in Indiana Dunes - and the weather being quite hot and humid still - we returned to the Visitor Center and used the WiFi from the theater there for the rest of the afternoon. Tomorrow we'd be leaving Indiana for awhile, and heading into Michigan.
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