Thursday, February 1, 2024

Well January has slipped right by. And I haven’t written a blog in January because there hasn’t been enough going on in our lives to warrant a blog post. No inspiration. Writing without inspiration is like fat-free bacon. What’s the point?

Lack of inspiration comes from lack of getting out. January started with some illness taking up residence in my chest. For a week I felt like someone was standing on my chest. It wasn’t COVID, the easy ailment to blame right now. I did get tested and I was negative. Something else decided it needed to live in my lungs. Don’t know where it came from. I wasn’t hanging out in any Chinese fish markets or anything. After about ten days it must have gotten bored with me and moved on to some other hapless victim.

My little ailment was followed by some truly nasty weather. We had planned an Eastern Upper Peninsula birding trip. An annual get together with some friends. The plan was to spend a night visiting fiends in the Lansing area and then continue up to St. Ignace for two nights. That would give us time to drive around looking for snowy owls and other winter birds. We got as far as the Lansing area. Then snow, ice, and extremely high winds blew in. Highway closing weather. So we spent a couple nights in Lansing and then headed back to West Lafayette, totally uninspired.

Our aborted U.P. trip was followed by dangerously cold temperatures. Like below zero degrees Fahrenheit temperatures. For a couple mornings the digital thermometer in my shop displayed a blinking LL until I could get the temperature up to a blistering plus ten degrees. That effort took both a kerosene and a propane heater. Getting the shop temperature up to a tolerable 50 degrees took a couple hours with both heaters running. Needless to say, we didn’t get in a lot of outdoor activities. I had no desire to become Indiana’s version of Shackleton, stranded in some icy corn field hoping for rescue.

After about a week the temperatures rose into the tolerable thirty degree range, bringing rain and fog. But at least we were out of frostbite range. So after a couple weeks of cabin fever we decided to go to Turkey Run State park.

In 1916 some forward thinking Hoosiers wanted to make Turkey Run Indiana’s first state park. The owner had recently died and his estate was being settled. They raised money to buy the land, but were outbid by a timber company. The group then went back and did more fundraising, eventually raising enough to buy it from the timber company. Because of this delay McCormick’s Creek became Indiana’s first state park and Turkey Run the second. The original acreage cost a bit over $30,000. Less than what a buildable city lot in West Lafayette costs.

Turkey Run is a beautiful place. In the middle of corn country is a narrow gorge carved out of sandstone by glacial meltwaters. The cool and moist canyon has remnant hemlock trees, ferns, mosses and liverworts typically found in more northern climates. In some places the walls are colored by traces of iron and coal deposits. The light was overcast and dull while we were there, making photography challenging. Regardless, the canyon is an inspiring place. Worth a visit if you get the chance.