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Joe Steinbring

High Cliff State Park

A wooded ridge running along the shore of a wide lake, seen from the air, above a lawn and a beach.
The escarpment along Lake Winnebago, from the drone, in August 2021.2021 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring
Static offline map showing High Cliff State Park in Wisconsin with a location pin.

High Cliff State Park is on the northeast shore of Lake Winnebago, the largest lake inside Wisconsin, where the Niagara Escarpment rises in a wooded limestone cliff above the water. In the 1800s, a village called High Cliff grew up here around the quarries and the kilns that burned the stone into lime. Its brick General Store and Post Office, built about 1855, still stands, but the kilns shut down in 1956, the state bought the land that same year, and the park opened in 1957. I spent the afternoon of August 22, 2021, there, a sunny Sunday. I walked the Forest Management Trail through prairie yellow with late-summer wildflowers, climbed the observation tower for the view over the treetops to the lake, and followed the Red Bird Trail along the top of the cliff to the statue of Red Bird, the Ho-Chunk leader of the Winnebago War of 1827, put up in 1961. Farther along, the trail wound down past stacked ledges of limestone. Late in the day, I sent my drone up over the marina and the shore, and I finished at the General Store.

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  • A bronze statue of a Native American man holding a pipe, on a granite boulder on a stone terrace.

    Red Bird, the Ho-Chunk leader, in bronze since 1961.

    2021 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • A stack of layered limestone blocks among tree trunks on a wooded slope covered in roots.

    Layers of limestone along the trail.

    2021 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

  • A small, cream-colored brick building signed “High Cliff Post Office, General Store.”

    The General Store and Post Office, built about 1855.

    2021 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

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