Kettle Moraine State Forest
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The Kettle Moraine State Forest is not one park but a set of units strung across southeastern Wisconsin along the kettle moraine, a long belt of hills that formed where two lobes of the last ice sheet met. The hills are sand and gravel the ice left behind, and the kettles are the hollows where buried blocks of ice melted away. The state forest dates to 1936. My photos here are all from 2020, the year the pandemic put international travel on hold and I started hiking Wisconsin instead. On March 1, just before the shutdowns, Pike Lake was still frozen, and we walked out onto the ice. On August 2, a deer was browsing in the brush at the Lapham Peak Unit, near Delafield. I was back at the Pike Lake Unit on August 22, when black-eyed Susans and goldenrod were blooming along the trails, and on December 19, a light snow lay between the rows of evergreens in the Northern Unit, near New Fane.
Photos from Kettle Moraine State Forest
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Pike Lake, still frozen, on March 1, 2020.
A deer in the brush at the Lapham Peak Unit.
Black-eyed Susans and goldenrod at the Pike Lake Unit, in August 2020.