Yesterday was Imbolc and today I had the day off, so I figured it behooved me to spend some time out enjoying nature. It has been an incredibly odd January this year and February isn’t shaping up to be any more normal, so it felt like late March outside, and I decided to go for a walk on a dike road and canoe access trail that I’d been to once before.

This area has been on my mind for a while as it proved to be a treasure trove the first time I went there. It had plants unlike those I’d seen in other areas, direct access to shallow areas of water where you could observe the river ecosystem, beautiful views, and—perhaps most interestingly—the hangout of enough birds of prey that bones of various animals were pretty easy to find.

Immediately upon arrival, there were a few things that told me this was not the ideal day to walk this road. The wind was still cold enough to cut through my clothing as I walked, which doesn’t bother me when I’m moving around, but I can’t wear gloves and take pictures or poke around in between the rocks, so the biting wind severely limited what I was able to do while I was there.

The second was that with this unusually warm weather, the ice on the river had been melting, and the water was high and running over the road in one spot. This wouldn’t have been a big problem (I have waterproof hiking boots), if not combined with issue number three, which came in the form of a group of men on the opposite side of the flooded area with a fire going.

I’m pretty anti-social at the best of times, but especially when I’m out alone in nature, I don’t like to come across another person, let alone a whole group of them. And, since I couldn’t tell how much of the flooded area was ice on the bottom, I didn’t feel up to trekking across and potentially having an audience to me falling on my ass.

I decided to hedge my bets and take some nice photos on the unflooded side and poke around on the water’s edge there.

I got some great photos and found some cool stuff (even a skull!), but I very quickly turned from my original intent of taking photos and looking for cool stuff to picking up other people’s garbage, as keeping my eyes on the ground made me acutely aware of just how much garbage there was in the area. Between the people who frequent the area to fish on the dike road and all of the garbage being floated downriver from the areas to the north, it was overwhelming.

I started picking up trash, sticking it in my foraging bag (which was not nearly big enough for the job), and quickly found myself with an overflowing bag and full hands, at which point I decided it was time to call it quits on this area. I’d seen a DNR road on my way to this location that looked like a nice, flat-ish walk back into the woods, so I figured I might go there instead.

On my walk back to the car, I ended up keeping my eyes tacked to the ground in front of my feet, because any time I looked around, I found more trash that I didn’t have the capacity to carry. Next time I go there, I guess I’ll be bringing some trash bags.

The road I’d noticed was only a couple of minutes north of my initial location, so I was back on my walk in no time. I grew up walking roads like this all the time with my parents and eldest brother, so it was nice from the get-go just to take a walk that was so comfortingly familiar. But the road very quickly proved to be much more than it appeared from the gate!

There was a small brook that flowed down through this area from the top of the bluffs, and the woods on one side of the road were more marsh than solid land. I found several patches of scouring reed horsetail—briefly considered if it might be used to make a St. Brigid’s cross in honor of the day, and a whole field of cattails that I desperately wanted to get some macro shots of but it was too swampy to get to with our weird late-March weather. A hawk of some sort screamed at me for a while until it’s calls lead me to my second skull of the day (presumably its dining area).

I found some gigantic puffball mushrooms that were just big piles of spores at this point and tons of cool, moss-covered trees.

Then, to my utter astonishment, I came upon the remains of an old farm. The foundations of three buildings were nearly blending in with the moss-covered trees around it, and I found a couple of old sheets of tin, though it was hard to say whether they might have been siding, a gate, or a water tank. Beyond that, I found what surely must have been a field at some point with how empty it was compared to the surrounding area.

Definitely a great place for an Imbolc hike and definitely somewhere I’ll go back to again, hopefully when the bloodroot starts to bloom. Thankfully for this part of the hike, garbage bags were unnecessary.