White Mound County Park

Today after Mass and brunch (with Rich, the other bass from our currently on-hiatus choir, one of the regular readers at Mass, and our Lutheran organist), Travalon and I were planning to go to the Nature Conservancy land where the prickly pear cacti grow, because this time of year they are blooming. We went to the antiques store in Monona on our way out of town, and they did have lots of rosaries, and then we went to the antique store in Sauk, where they also had lots of rosaries. There are still plenty left at both stores, in case any of my readers also collect antique rosaries. (I can't afford to buy them all!) Then we were going to drive from Sauk to Spring Green on Highway 60, a scenic route we often take, but I was distracted by a really cool hill, so we ended up taking Highway PF. If you have never been on this highway, it has a lot of amazing hills and bluffs and rock formations along it. I took a bunch of pictures.

Highway PF ended at Highway 23, so we took that toward Spring Green. We passed a sign for White Mound County Park, and I said let's check it out. Were we ever glad that we did! It has a beautiful lake (called White Mound Lake) with a lovely beach, and bluffs in the background.

We found a trail around the lake and began hiking on it. Deep in the woods we saw this wintergreen.

We kept seeing this hill, which might be White Mound.

Here is another view of the lake from the opposite side.

And here is Travalon on a fishing pier out in the lake.

We saw lots of flowers in the fields between the woods. This is vetch, and I forgot to look up the yellow flower on my plant ID app, but it's really common.

And these are wild grapes!

On one side there was a berm with a dam, and on the other side of the berm was a creek.

I just loved this stand of sumac with pines behind them.

Sorry, out of order photo - here is the creek on the other side of the berm.

Is this White Mound behind me? It's somewhere to the south of the lake.

At the very end of the trail was a scary little bridge that wasn't too sturdy.

Then we continued with our original plan, to see the blooming prickly pears.

There are cool rock formations on the hill behind the cacti.

I was like a kid in a candy store with my plant ID app, because there were so many species of plants in the prairie, like this goat's rue.

purple lovegrass

 hoary verbena

 St. John's wort

black-eyed Susans

 large beardtongue

 leadplant

 candle anemone

 woolly plantain

racemed milkwort

 clasping Venus's looking glass

 stiff ticksweed

And, of course, milkweed. I saw a lot of monarchs flying around it. That brought back memories of when I used to raise monarchs from egg to butterfly. This isn't nearly all the plants I identified with the app, but they are the photos that turned out well.

Famous Hat