Photography by Jamie Dolan
I first saw the Northern Lights when I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, camping at High Cliff State Park. I don’t remember every detail of that night anymore, but I remember enough to know I wanted to see them again. That turned into a hunt that lasted decades. Over the years I’ve gone…
Tuesday, September 29th turned out to be a crisp, partly sunny fall day here in Waupaca County. It felt like the right afternoon to head up toward Marion and visit Keller Lake County Park, catch some fresh air, and get a firsthand look at how the park is holding up five months after the brutal…
Summer seems to have gone by faster than ever this year. It was a strange one, filled with storms, tree damage, more cleanup than I care to remember, and what felt like a nearly endless supply of hot, humid days. I’m not quite ready to let summer go yet, though I will happily give back…
For the last several years, one of my favorite late-summer traditions was the Sunflower Festival at Bergsbaken Farms up near Cecil. Last year, 2025, was the tenth one, and it was also the last. The brothers who ran it always said the goal was to make it to ten years. They made it, and then…
Some places have a name you’ve heard so many times that you just assume you’ve already been there. Mosquito Hill Nature Center was like that for me. The name has been floating around the back of my head for years, the way local landmarks do when you live in the Fox Valley. But when I…
I have driven past Menominee Park in Oshkosh more times than I can count, usually on my way to somewhere else. Last weekend I finally pulled in and walked over to the little zoo that is tucked inside it, and I am glad I did. It is small, you can see the whole thing in…
There is a little spot on the southeast side of Neenah that I had driven past plenty of times without ever stopping. It is called Conservancy Park, and it sits right in a neighborhood off S. Park Ave. I finally pulled in on a mid-August evening, mostly out of curiosity, and I am glad I…
I took a drive down to Horicon Marsh last week. If you’ve never been, it’s the big cattail marsh southeast of Fond du Lac, and it’s usually called the largest freshwater cattail marsh in the country. It’s split in two. The northern two-thirds is the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, run by the federal Fish and…
High Cliff is one of those places I keep coming back to. It sits up on the Niagara Escarpment on the far side of Lake Winnebago, and on a warm afternoon there’s almost always a trail there with your name on it. This time it was the flat one down at the base by the…
I have written a few posts over the last week and a half about the tornado that came through here on July 27, and about the damage it left behind at some of our local parks. Heckrodt Wetland Reserve, over in Menasha, sits right in the part of town that took some of the worst…
It was one of those easy early-August afternoons, low 80s and blue sky, the kind of day that makes staying inside feel like a waste. So I didn’t. I picked out two parks I had been meaning to walk, both of them sitting right on the Fox River, and made an afternoon of it. First…
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…