A Warm Friday at High Cliff, Fawns at Heckrodt, and a Sunset on the Trestle Trail
Friday afternoon was warm and wide open, so I did what I do with an afternoon like that. I got in the car and drove up to High Cliff. What started as a short walk turned into a slow loop around the east side of the valley, from the top of the escarpment down to a sunset on the water, and I came home with a camera full of the kind of thing you only see if you go looking.
High Cliff State Park sits up on the Niagara Escarpment on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, and the walking up there in late July is about as good as Wisconsin gets. I had not gone far along the edge of the woods when something in a roadside shrub stopped me.
A big silk web spun right over the ends of the branches, and inside it, dozens of caterpillars working their way through the leaves. This is a fall webworm nest. If you have ever noticed those ghostly gray tents show up on the tips of tree branches in late summer, this is what is inside them. The caterpillars spin the web out over the leaves they are eating and keep stretching it as they go, which is the opposite of the tent caterpillars you see in spring. Those ones nest down in the crook of a branch and leave the nest to feed. These little guys never get up from the table.
It looks alarming, and a colony like this can strip a branch bare, but the fall webworm is a native insect and mostly a cosmetic thing. A healthy tree shrugs it off. And unlike the punk-rock tussock caterpillar I found up here a couple of weeks ago, these ones are not much of a hazard to you either. I did what I always do, which is get the lens in close and leave the rest of it alone.
After the walk I did the only correct thing to do at High Cliff on a hot afternoon, which is stop at Frogg’s for ice cream. I got a Tropical Hopper sundae and ate it in the shade. If you have kids, or a sweet tooth, or both, Frogg’s is worth the drive on its own.
Then I wandered down toward the marina to look at the lake.
Lake Winnebago is the largest inland lake in the state, and from down at the shore it runs all the way to the horizon like a small ocean. The sun was still up but starting to drop, laying a long band of light across the chop, one lone boat way out on the right. I stood there a while. There was no reason to hurry.
On the way back toward home I pulled in at the Heckrodt Wetland Reserve in Menasha. If you have never been, it is around ninety acres of marsh and woods and boardwalk tucked right into town, free to walk, and the deer there have long since decided people are nothing to worry about.
I came around a corner and there they were, two spotted fawns out grazing by the feeders, close enough that I could have held a whole conversation with them and they would barely have looked up. You can see the two of them behind me here, doing their thing while I grinned at the phone. Fawns still carrying their spots in late July are only a couple of months old, and there is something about how delicate and unbothered they are that gets me every time. The one standing at attention with its ears out like a pair of satellite dishes is the shot of the day, and the reason it is up top on the cover.
By then the light was going gold, so I made one last stop: the Trestle Trail, out over Little Lake Butte des Morts near the Y. The trestle is a long lighted footbridge, sixteen hundred feet of it, the longest trail bridge in the state, and it puts you right out over the middle of the water with a wide open view. I got there just in time.
The sun dropped down behind the old mill on the far shore and turned into a red coin, throwing a straight line of red all the way across the water to my feet, geese paddling right through the middle of it. A minute later the whole sky opened up.
That is the thing about a summer evening in the Fox Valley. You can start the day not planning to do much of anything, and end it standing on a bridge over the water while the sky does that. High Cliff, a couple of fawns at Heckrodt, and a sunset on the Trestle Trail, all in one warm Friday. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
That sunset is now a round in my photo guessing game, Where in the Fox Cities? Guess where around the Fox Valley each of my photos was taken.
