A Warm Afternoon Walk at Bubolz Nature Preserve

Some afternoons you just need to be outside and quiet for a while. This was one of those. It was warm and humid, right around 83 degrees, the kind of Wisconsin August afternoon where the air feels a little thick and everything is green and overgrown and loud with insects. I drove over to Bubolz Nature Preserve on the north side of Appleton and spent about forty-five minutes on the trails, and it was exactly the kind of walk I needed.

If you have never been, Bubolz is bigger than it looks from Lynndale Drive. The preserve got its start back in 1971, when the first 488 acres were bought from three farmers who had pretty much given up on the place. The land sat low and wet, and the story goes that rain drowned their crops four years out of five. What was a bad deal for a farmer turned out to be a great deal for the rest of us. Today it is a big stretch of white cedar forest, hardwood, restored prairie, wet meadow, ponds, and the old cedar swamp that people around here used to call Center Swamp, all laced together with more than eight miles of trail.

It sits right in what botanists call the Tension Zone, the seam that runs across Wisconsin where the northern woods and the southern prairies overlap. That means you get plants and animals from both, and you really do feel it on a walk. One minute you are standing in deep, dark, mossy cedar, and a few minutes later you step out into a sunny prairie full of wildflowers.

The place is named for Gordon Bubolz, who did a great deal for conservation in this part of the state. He had a hand in saving High Cliff and Mosquito Hill too, and in 2022 he was inducted into the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame. Places like this do not just happen on their own. Somebody always has to fight for them first.

The trails are wide and easy, packed dirt and wood chips, flat enough that just about anyone can walk them. I had the place nearly to myself. In forty-five minutes I passed exactly one other person. It was warm, and there were flies and gnats hanging around the whole time, but almost nothing biting, which in Wisconsin in the first week of August is a small miracle. Mostly it was just the birds and the sound of my own feet.

The meadow was showing off

The first thing that stopped me was the wildflowers. Late summer is when the wet meadow really gets going, and it was in full swing.

That tall dusty-pink one is Joe-Pye weed. Right next to it was gray-headed coneflower, the one with the droopy yellow petals and the tall gray-green center cone. Some people call it yellow coneflower.

And where the ground got really wet, cattails, the seed heads gone brown and fat like corn dogs on a stick. This whole preserve used to be swamp, and in the low spots it still is. The cattails do not let you forget it.

Into the woods

From the open meadow the trail ducks into the woods, and everything changes. It gets shady and cool and green, and the forest floor is where all the quiet little details are. This is the part of a walk I like best, honestly. Not the big view. The small stuff up close, the things you only notice if you slow down and actually look.

There was a whole downed log crusted over in this pale gray-green lichen, ruffled up like little heads of cabbage. Lichen is a slow, patient thing. That much of it in one place tells you the log has been down and undisturbed for years.

Moss on everything. An old stump turned into a soft green mound with tiny seedlings starting on top of it, a lacy fern unrolling out of the side. A whole slow world down there that most people walk right past.

Somewhere in this stretch is where I saw the groundhog. He saw me first, the way they always do, and was into the brush and gone before I could get anywhere near him. The birds I mostly heard rather than saw, working the trees the whole way through. And at one point a butterfly crossed the trail and did me the favor of landing long enough that I could actually stop and look at it before it moved on.

Back out into the sun

The trail loops back out into the open, and the prairie picks right up where it left off.

Goldenrod was just starting to open, those arching yellow plumes. When the goldenrod comes on, you know the season is on its way out. Nearby a thistle had already finished blooming and gone completely to seed, the whole head turned to silk, and the breeze was slowly carrying it off a tuft at a time.

Black-eyed Susans, which need no introduction. And then these tall purple spikes, blue vervain, standing up like little candelabras all along the edge of the path.

By the time I got back to the car I was warm and a little sweaty and completely settled down, which was the whole point. Forty-five minutes, one groundhog, a butterfly, a lot of birds I could hear but not see, and a meadow full of flowers I mostly know the names of. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Bubolz is free, open every day from dawn to dusk, and it is right here in the Fox Valley. If you have not made the trip, go. Bring some water, maybe a little bug spray if you are fussier about gnats than I am, and just walk slow. And if you like this sort of thing, I wrote up a similar afternoon over at High Cliff and Heckrodt not long ago.

A few of these Bubolz photos ended up in a game I made, Where in the Fox Cities? Drop a pin on the map and see if you can place them around the Fox Valley.