Orion's Photos: places - Illinois - uiuc - 2004 - forest_glen_2004_07
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Terry Wilmarth, Eric Bohm, Sayantan Chakravorty and I
made the long hike through Forest Glen trail (part of
the Kennekuk county parks) in eastern Illinois south
of Danville this pleasant Sunday, July 24, 2004.
A storm had passed through a few weeks before, and
there were a huge number of downed trees at the trailhead
[0050-0051]. A few downed trees actually makes for a more
interesting hike. The trail is highly improved, with nice
stairs [0052] and bridges [0056-0057] in most places.
Like many river bottoms in this area, coal seams can
be found at river banks [0061-0062,0074]. We found a
very interesting rock, likely some sort of hardened clay,
that resembled a turtle shell [0078].
The insect life was also interesting. We found a beautiful
vivid turqouise and black dragonfly [0064-0067]. A huge
number of strangely-shaped spiders populated the woods--they
have a very small forebody and a huge hind end shaped like
a large inverted pyramid. Their pyramidal hindquarters are
ringed with spikes on top, and have a small dot at the
downward-facing point of the pyramid, which I speculate is
their silk spinner. They came in yellow [0072-0073]
as well as iridescent silver [0082-0089]. There was also a
huge hornet's nest near the end of the trail [0091].
An unknown critter made these large, 4-pronged tracks in
quite hard mud on the river bottom [0080-0081]. They're about
the size of deer tracks, but they don't look like anything I've
seen.
All images taken by Orion Lawlor
and placed completely in the public domain.
Converted to HTML on Thu Jul 29 13:40:41 CDT 2004.
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