The Natural Bloomington Blog

Sunshine was a rare commodity the week before Thanksgiving. The gloom sliced deep into plans for a multi-day excursion through Southwest Indiana's White, Patoka and Ohio River Valleys. The intent was to save gas money and spend time with friends I don't see near often enough. But as I told them all week, everything hinged on the sun.

The Weather Channel, Weather Underground, Intellicast and other sunray predictors agreed on one thing for almost a week. The sun would make an extended appearance down in the bottomlands on Tuesday only. So, inspired by low gas prices, cabin fever and holiday time for leisurely visitation, I set course for just the White and Patoka on a sunny Nov. 25 morning, with an invitation to stay with friends that night just north of Patoka Lake.

The first of two potential catastrophes – one personal, one technological, both my fault – passed me a minute, no more than two, after I dropped my 13-year-old border collie Zoe off at my family's place. A personable young Monroe County Sheriff's Deputy turned around to stop me for doing 57 in a 45 (a window I've peered ticket-free through for many decades). He sent me off with a warning and a request to slow down.

Had anyone told me that Patoka Lake would steal a 225-mile, daylong photo expedition that included adventures at Hemlock Cliffs, Indian and Celina Lakes, and Ferdinand State Forest – or that I would be closer to a bald eagle there than I've been in a quarter century – well, you know.

Perhaps my expectations were tempered, given that I've been to the state's second largest lake multiple times. Hell, I hiked the Tillery Hill area with Protect Our Woods's Bob Klawitter in the early 1990s. And as for bald eagles, I've been closer than most. In the mid-1980s, I dropped fish down a chute to a cage on a remote Lake Monroe bay to feed the first pair to fledge in the state in almost a century.

But I had never been to the Patoka Lake Hiking Area on the 8,800-acre lake's southern shore. I didn't even know there was a "park," as the DNR woman working the office called it. Although it was cloudy and threatening rain, I shot almost as many images there as the other three stops combined, all of which had been all or partly sunny.

The corner store manager at the State Road 3 Commiskey turnoff knew exactly where the Wells Woods Nature Preserve was – behind Mrs. Wells's house, she told her staff. The first road past the railroad tracks by the stop sign, per the directions I had, she nodded.

"Don't even act like you're going to pick up a stick," she advised before I headed back west on County Road 850S. When a tree from the woods fell on a house, they wouldn't let the owners have it removed. They had to do it themselves, she continued -- they being the Indiana Division of Nature Preserves, which owns the 20-acre, old-growth flatwoods in Jennings County.

The Wells preserve did indeed loom behind a handful of houses a quarter mile south of Main Street, just as she and the DNR said it would. It was one of three flatwoods preserves on the day's journey through the Southeast Indiana's Bluegrass Natural Region.The fourth was a canyon.

After 80-plus photo hikes through 69 natural areas over the past year and a half, I've pretty much figured out what to expect when I pack up the old Accord and set out for the Southern Indiana wilds. And as I've been reminded the past two, I dare not presume when the itinerary includes properties owned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), like the Harrison County Glades at Mosquito Creek.

While I suspect it's by design, given the TNC's lofty mission to "conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends," they can be well-hidden and unadorned. Let's just say I know from past experience to budget extra time for TNC properties. Even when you find them, it's not always clear that you have.

Mosquito Creek, for example, is as deep as protected property gets in the Highland Rim Natural Region that extends from McCormick's Creek State Park on the West Fork of the White River to the Harrison County Glades just north of the Ohio River. But, while it was obvious which was the Laconia Road the TNC mentions in its online directions to Mosquito Creek, the proprietor at the Laconia corner store gave me a dumb-city-boy stare when I asked if it was -- said she'd never heard of Laconia Road.