Forestville State Park

It's been awhile since my last post. I was in Puerto Rico for 5 days - that's way outside the 6 hour drive time limit I imposed on myself, so I'm not going to write about it. Photos are here for your viewing pleasure.

Today I went to Forestville State Park in southeastern Minnesota. The fall color report from 3 days ago said colors were 75-100% of peak color at Forestville. I should know better than to believe that based on my experience at Wild River a few weeks ago, but I went anyway.

There are two parts to the park: the Forestville section and the Mystery Cave section (home to a cave, as if that wasn't obvious). Today was one of the last nice days left before winter hits so I opted to skip the cave and stay aboveground. Forestville gets its name from a restored 1800s village operated by the Minnesota Historical Society.  They offer living history tours of the village during the summer and weekends in the fall. I opted to skip that too - it sounded interesting but I didn't want to sit in the restored buildings for an hour watching people pretend it's still 1899.

Instead, I wandered around for 4 hours. I visited the cemetary and walked around the old townsite, and hiked a couple different trails looking for some decent color.The trees near the river were mostly bare already. There was still a bit of color on the trees up on the ridges, but it was faded and I'd guess most leaves will be on the ground within a week.

Forestville has a number of shared hiking/horseback riding trails, and has the highest horseback usage of any park in the state. Horses are nice and all, but I don't really want that much contact with them so I probably won't go back for more hiking. Possibly I'll go back next summer and do the historic tour and a cave tour, but that's not real high on my list.

All my photos are here.

Wild River State Park

Today was a beautiful fall day. There aren't many weekends left before the weather turns and all the leaves are gone, and I had to get out and go somewhere. Wild River's website said their fall colors were at 50-75% peak color a few days ago and were expected to be at or near peak by today, so that's where I went.

They lied. Or else their definition of peak is vastly different than mine. Or maybe today really was close to their peak and the Wild River trees just suck.

I don't know, but I saw a lot of green leaves with just a little bit of yellow in them, and a few that had totally changed over. I walked around a good part of the park (close to 7 miles) and didn't see a lot. Most of the color was in the lower level plants and not the trees. 

I wound up mostly just wandering, sometimes screwing around with my camera and doing some zoom exposure stuff. It can take a boring shot and make it look kind of cool and interesting. When done right it's great, but done too often it's just a gimmick to cover up boring and/or shoddy photography. Today was the first time I've tried it with my new dSLR and it turned out OK. I just hope it doesn't become a habit because that would mean I'm seeing a lot of really boring things out there. Here it is - hopefully I won't have to resort to this very often.

A few more photos are here. The park doesn't totally suck or anything and it would be fun to go back, rent a canoe and go down the river, but today just wasn't the right day.