The Natural Bloomington Blog

I had forgotten about Anne LaBastille, a.k.a. the wilderness woman. I discovered this pioneering, earth-hippie-era teacher, writer, and photographer in the mid-1970s in a magazine article about her life and work in the Adirondack Mountains.

Five years before receiving her doctorate in wildlife ecology from Cornell University in 1969, LaBastille built a cabin on Lake Twitchell deep in the Adirondacks, where she lived, led guided tours, advocated for wildness, and wrote sixteen books over four-plus decades before her death at 75 in 2011. Her signature work is the Woodswoman series: a four-volume set of memoirs of her life in the forest.

During a visit with daughter Jessica in Brooklyn last week, we spent three days driving and hiking to, through, and deep into the Adirondacks, landing some 20 miles east of LaBastille’s homesite. Our itinerary included a stop at the Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain, where an installation honoring the wilderness woman’s contributions features her cabin, which was painstakingly moved and reconstructed.

Spring semester grades: submitted. Vegetable garden: planted. Hiking sweat: already flowed on a backcountry Hoosier National Forest path. College town summer has begun at Natural Bloomington, with the first photo foray to the Lost River in Martin County, three crow miles upstream from the White River, eight fish miles maybe.

On May Day, landscape photographer Gary Morrison and I explored two Lost riverbanks that flow through and past small, isolated tracts of the Hoosier National Forest between Bedford and Shoals, captured in a small photo album called Lost River, Paw Paw Marsh. The day trip was the latest map-driven excursion through the White River Valley sections of the Hoosier National’s far western reaches.

Paw Paw Marsh Restoration is a shallow wetland that skirts a muddy edge of the Lost River at a 90-degree northerly turn, featuring eroded stone outcrops, sort of liquid rockshelters. A small dam controls the marsh depth, which is maintained for wildlife and was significantly lower than it was during a photo hike in late April 2015 for the Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana book project.

I was planning an afternoon jaunt to the Beaver Creek’s South Fork when Crystal asked last Saturday if I’d hang with my grandson Vale that night. The afternoon transformed into our first grandpa-grandson photo hike, with some fun photos to commemorate the occasion.

Beaver Creek is a White River East Fork tributary at the tri-county junction of Lawrence, Orange, and Martin Counties. The stretch we explored lies at the dead end of a backcountry road, in far northwest Orange County, in an isolated part of the Hoosier National Forest.

Vale is 5 and has enjoyed taking pictures around the house with a largely unused Lumix point-and-shoot and then seeing them on the computer. His questions about the tripod on the hourlong drive to Beaver Creek presaged a memorable bonding experience, not to mention which camera would sit atop the three-legged support the rest of the day – the Lumix.

Spring Break is a time for travel in university towns like Bloomington, which at Natural Bloomington this past week meant a few drives down State Road 37 to diverse locales for the Hoosier National Forest book project.

The first, a scouting trip to three campgrounds near Tell City, produced what must be the last winter scenes of the year at the Indian Celina Recreation Area. The second, a return visit to Hemlock Cliffs, revealed the 75-foot Messmore Cliffs waterfall that rivals the 150-foot overflow for which the Special Place, in Forest Service parlance, is named. The third, an hour-long meeting with officials at the U.S. Forest Service office in Bedford, was helpful and insightful.

Along the way, I got a first peak at the Guide to Natural Areas of Northern Indiana book cover.