The Natural Bloomington Blog

So, barreling through rush hour and construction on Interstate 80/94 between Gary and Hobart, via Hammond, isn’t the way I envisioned the last leg of my Natural Indiana guidebook journey. Neither was photographing a Queen Anne’s lace with an egret calling overhead, while the PA of an industrial packaging plant reverberated from across a chain-link fence.

But ending it in Indiana dune country always was the plan. Aside from the hill country I’ve lived in for 45 years, of the 12 Indiana natural regions explored in the past four years, the dunes were most familiar. And in every relevant way – history, nature, geography, demography – the Hoosier sand hills are one of the nation’s most spectacular natural environments and conservation stories.

"To the Midwest," Carl Sandburg wrote in 1958, the Lake Michigan dunes are what "the Grand Canyon is to Arizona and the Yosemite to California. They constitute a signature of time and eternity."

When French explorers first set foot in contemporary Indiana in the late 1670s, the state was almost 90 percent forest, from the southernmost shore of the Lake Michigan to the Ohio River. Tallgrass prairie comprised the bulk of what wasn’t deep green.

The iconic Great Plains that – along with magnificent bison herds – blanketed the nation’s midsection from the Rocky Mountains east reached its easternmost point in a narrow swath of land that today borders Indiana's northwestern border with Illinois. The tallgrass – one of three basic prairie types, along with mixed-grass and shortgrass – dominated a hundred miles of landscape from the Kankakee River basin near Rensselaer to the Wabash River Valley north of Terre Haute.

But after two centuries of agricultural drainage and urbanization, Indiana’s Grand Prairie today is the most altered natural region in the state. Only miniscule remnants of the original exist, mostly along railroad tracks and around pioneer cemeteries. But there are places, like The Nature Conservancy’s Kankakee Sands, where prairie retains a hold on the land – and where bison roam free for the first time in nearly 200 years.

I anticipated our arrival at the Dustin Nature Preserve as much as any of the 200-plus Indiana natural areas I’ve explored in the past four years. The Huntertown couple were pioneers in the environmental movement that swept Indiana and the nation in the 1960s and 70s. I profiled Tom in my 1996 book Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana and spent a weekend at their home north of Fort Wayne, photographing Tom and the Cedar Creek in the valley below.

The Dustins were founding members of ACRES Land Trust, the second-oldest nonprofit land conservation organization in Indiana. Their home is now the group’s headquarters and is surrounded by the Dustin and two other preserves. So parking outside the rustic, cedar-and-stone structure with its low, sloping roof brought back a torrent of memories. Jane died in 2003, Tom in 2004.

And, of the countless impressions I have from exploring nearly four dozen natural areas in Northeast Indiana during the month of June, the most vivid involve ACRES properties, which number 30 – to date.

In many ways, the Black Rock Barrens Nature Preserve was the most disappointing of the nine natural areas we explored during a three-day, two-night camping trip in the Wabash River Valley last week. The history-rich site of a 100-foot bluff of black rock bluff overlooking the Indiana state river southeast of Lafayette was easily the most anticipated of the journey, which began on the Lower Sugar Creek in Parke County and ended on the Tippecanoe River in Pulaski County.

My disillusion, however, was based on selfish expectations and not nature. In fact, the promontory used as a lookout by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet in the early 1800s, was as magnificent as billed. Trees did obscure what in winter and early spring is a view unlike any other a hundred miles or more up or downriver – the primary source of my frustration. Multiple technology fumbles also contributed to my mood at Black Rock, learning experiences I’ve resolved for future trips.

Indeed, that brief stop did produce the first Wabash siting of the year, not to mention several of my favorite images from the week. And that’s saying something, considering we had near perfect weather, and I posted Photo Albums with more than 125 images, culled from three to four times that many originals.