Pitching my first tent in more than three decades will probably emerge over time as the most memorable experience from Summer 2017’s first overnight excursion last week. But there will be stiff competition from close encounters with two-, four-, and six-legged creatures; an old-growth forest too dense to penetrate; and a razor-wired prison.

The two-day journey featured three permanently protected natural areas – Ritchey Woods Nature Preserve in Fishers, Mounds State Park just outside Anderson, the Davis-Purdue Agricultural Center Forest just outside of nowhere – and the Wilbur Wright Fish & Wildlife Area just outside the New Castle Correctional Facility.

At Ritchey I was photobombed by a pair of pink shoes. At the rest, I did the photobombing. 

A reliable tip about a patch of yellow lady slippers displaying their state watch-listed colors in the wooded shadows just off Tower Ridge Road stirred a quick, unexpected Tuesday afternoon excursion to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness. The timing and logistics couldn’t have been better.

Tuesday clearly had the week’s best weather potential. But there wasn’t anywhere I had the time and inspiration to explore – until Monroe County Naturalist Cathy Meyer messaged there were “nearly 100” of these radiant yellow beauties blooming just off this remote, backcountry road. Serious nature photographers don’t ignore a Cathy message that ends with “incredible!”

Besides, her message arrived at 2:02 p.m., two minutes after a planned meeting that kept me in town for the day had fallen off the log. And roadside meant a leisurely drive through the woods, not a strenuous trek through hills and hollers. Sunshine at 2:30 sealed the deal.

In a way, I feel a little like the Sycamore Land Trust’s distant-but-still-loving, journalistic godfather. I wasn’t in the room when Scott Russell Sanders, Tom Zeller and other Sassarfas Audubon Society activists conceived Southern Indiana’s premier land trust some 27 years ago. But I was the first person they called; I wrote the Herald-Times article in February 1991 that announced the birth to the world.

Sixteen years later, I penned a front-page story in The Bloomington Alternative about its adolescence titled “Preserving quality of place.” A decade after that, at adulthood, I profiled 16 Sycamore properties in my Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana. In between, before my first knee surgery, I served as a land steward on Sycamore’s Campbell Preserve in eastern Monroe County.

So, it seems natural that the largest public presentation I’ve made since I don’t know when – at this Wednesday’s monthly meeting of Green Drinks Bloomington – will be called “Intimate Sycamore Landscapes.” The public event runs from 5:30-7:30 at the Upland Brewery Banquet Facility in Bloomington.

Approaching the Burgoon Church Road sign last week for the several-hundred-and-fifteenth time, I vowed to follow through on the same number of historic commitments to see what lies at the end, besides the church. It’s the first road east after the 446 causeway, so I knew it led to the Charles C. Deam Wilderness and Monroe Lake shoreline. But I’d never made the turn. Until last Sunday.
 
A too-brief glance at the map gave rise to the notion that the road turned into a path beneath a wooded canopy into Hayes Hollow and the Saddle Creek, which I canoed and camped on with a buddy back in the 70s. Patton Cave, with its geode-laden walls, is located on the creek. I figured the paved road that disappeared on Google Maps into a mass of forest green was an old road bed.
 
A few steps into the forest confirmed most of my preconceptions. But the afternoon’s focus immediately shifted from the re-exploration of an old stomping ground to wildflowers. Near the crest of the steepest hill I can recall traversing without switchbacks, much of the old roadway was impossible to walk on without stepping on spring beauties or cutleaf toothworts.