Belmont Mound State Park
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Belmont Mound State Park, in Lafayette County, is really just Belmont Mound itself, a wooded hill that stands up out of the farm fields of southwestern Wisconsin, an outlier of the same Niagara Escarpment that runs along the eastern side of the state. The Belmont Lions Club runs it, and it has been a state park since 1961; part of its woods became the Belmont Mound Woods State Natural Area in 1981. Just down the road from the entrance is the First Capitol Historic Site, where the first legislature of the Wisconsin Territory met in 1836, and the club’s welcome sign calls the park the home of the first capitol. I spent the early afternoon of November 4, 2021, there, a sunny fall day, after a morning at Nelson Dewey State Park. I walked the road up the hill through the bare woods, on a carpet of fallen leaves, past long ledges of rock among the trees.
Photos from Belmont Mound State Park
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The entrance, above the farm fields.
The road up the hill.
Ledges of rock in the woods.