The Natural Bloomington Blog

If I controlled the stars, the Visit Bloomington staff would not have been my first group of English-speaking strangers to lead on an ecotour. But I don't. And never mind that thus far all my official ecotour guests spoke Mandarin Chinese as their native language. When the head of the agency in charge of promoting area tourism asks to book an ecotour, you're not going to say, "Let me polish my act first."

So, on Sept. 20, Visit Bloomington Executive Director Mike McAfee and seven members of his team joined me for a 3½-hour journey alongside Leonard Spring waterfalls and the Lake Monroe shoreline, through federally protected wilderness and urban, old-growth forest, for a real-deal Natural Bloomington ecotour.

Due to time constraints and the afternoon's ever-unfolding weather conditions, I cut one hike from the itinerary and shortened another. My first-draft monologues drifted into stream of consciousness at times and probably lasted too long at others. But I felt the trip served Mike's expressed purpose – to give his staff first-hand experience with a Natural Bloomington ecotour, so they can better promote them to future visitors.

Back in the early 1990s, the Waldrip cabin was still solid enough to explore. I remember climbing the stairs and finding newspapers from the '20s embedded in the two-story structure's upstairs walls. I had heard that early construction used newsprint for insulation but had never seen it before. My buddy Dave, a car nut, recalls an ad for a 1927 Model T.

In the early 2000s, the old homestead on a ridge top overlooking Lake Monroe – the Salt Creek Valley in 1927 – served as a paintball battleground. Bright, primary color paint splotches defaced the cabin's walls outside and in. Similarly bespattered plywood defense shields ringed the yard.

On October 18, when I led a friend, her friend and their sons on a hike to the former home of the Waldrip family, all paintball damage was gone. But the structure was so dilapidated that it could collapse at any minute. Teena Ligman from the U.S. Forest Service says people have pulled logs from the walls to use for firewood. She leads a wildflower hike there in the spring and says a black vulture nests in the attic and hisses at her blossom-loving wanderers.

The term ecotourism really wasn't part of my lexicon when I initially thought about leading environmental tours in and around Bloomington. It was 2004 when I asked a friend if he thought people would be interested in tours of natural areas and toxic waste sites. His answer was unambiguous. Natural areas, yes. Superfund sites, no.

It's not that I hadn't heard of the ecotourism movement. In its contemporary sense, it's been around, in name or spirit, since the dawn of my environmental awareness in the 1970s. Some trace its genesis to Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville's historic journey to America in 1831, when his desire to venture into the wilderness – just out of curiosity – stunned his Michigan Territory hosts.