It’s a steamy summer day, the Environmental Protection Agency has declared an ozone alert and the heat index is 106 degrees. But still a breeze sweeps across the open fields of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, rustling the grasses and cooling the damp faces of tourists from Chicago.
The members of a tour group pause on a small wooden bridge over a shallow stream. Dragonflies zigzag over the olive water. Along the banks, tall cottonwoods anchor their roots in the damp soil as the upper branches sway in the wind. After a hard drive of more than an hour on boiling expressways, the sights and sounds of Midewin Prairie, the largest tallgrass prairie east of the Mississippi River, come as welcome relief.
Though visits to the Chicago area’s newest federal park are still restricted to guided tours, up until a few months ago it wasn’t possible for most civilians to have this experience. Since the 1940s, the land now called Midewin (pronounced mi-DAY-win; it’s a Potawotomi Indian word meaning healing) was the Joliet Arsenal, known better as a place where 4 billion pounds of explosives were manufactured than as a habitat for prairie plants.
But in 1977, the munitions plant stopped production, and in 1993, the Army decided to relinquish the property to private hands or to another government agency.
The freeing up of the largest undivided tract of land left in northeastern Illinois, home to 16 state endangered or threatened species of plants and animals, set off a two-year flurry of speculation. When the dust settled, a consensus was reached among the interested parties to use 985 acres for a veterans cemetery, 455 for a landfill and 2,895 for industrial parks, and to transfer 19,165 acres to the U.S. Forest Service to create the nation’s first National Tallgrass Prairie.
“The tallgrass prairie is the most endangered ecosystem in North America,” says Lawrence Stritch, project director for the Midewin. “Most of it was drained and tiled to feed a growing nation. It’s the richest agricultural land on the planet and was among the first ecosystems to be plowed under.”
At Midewin today, the term “tallgrass prairie” is somewhat of an optimistic misnomer. Only 300 acres of the site, less than 2 percent, is actually high-quality prairie. But using seeds from nearby Goose Lake Prairie, labor from volunteers and paid professionals and techniques developed at smaller sites throughout northeastern Illinois, Stritch and his team hope to restore the ecosystem that graced this landscape before it was plowed.
“There are fine examples of prairie restorations in the Chicago area, but the one thing none of us have ever been able to do is carry out a restoration on a landscape scale,” Stritch says. “Here we have the chance to not only bring back the plants but to bring back the major missing component, the large grazing animals like bison and elk.”
It’s the enormous size of the Midewin that excites the imagination of conservationists. “If it’s hard to get a handle on just how big 37 square miles is, try to imagine an area larger than the entire city of San Francisco,” says Stritch. Right now, over half the land is planted in corn and soybean fields. The existing agricultural leases will help finance the restoration, but it will still take 20 to 50 years to re-create the tallgrass prairie.
After the stop along the bridge, the group visits one of the 396 sod-covered bunkers that dot the landscape. The Army built these concrete Quonset huts to cure and store TNT. Visitors file into the bunker one by one.
With a crop of lush grass growing thickly on the curved roofs, the bunkers were intended to be difficult to spot in air raids. Today, cows graze on top of them as though they were just any ordinary hill.
Inside, the air is dank and the walls cool to the touch, insulated from the hot sun by 5 feet of concrete and sod.
A tour member asks what the Forest Service intends to do with the structures. “Do you like the idea of a `Bed & Bunker’?” says Shannon Horn, a wildlife biologist for Midewin, jokingly. She explains they won’t be removed in the foreseeable future. “The Forest Service doesn’t intend to erase what happened here.”
The question points up the fact that the Forest Service does have an odd job to perform here. Along with the endangered or threatened plants and animals at Midewin — such as the spreading sandwort and the upland sandpiper, loggerhead shrike and Blanding’s turtle — come row crops, hay fields, pastures, 1,400 buildings, many miles of train tracks and roads, and a responsibility to create both an ecologically significant prairie and a park that can serve a growing urban population.
Unlike in the old days, when the Forest Service managed mostly vast tracts of uninhabited forests and grasslands, here it must perform the complicated operation of transforming excess industrial land into a vast tallgrass prairie.
When asked if he finds the project daunting, Stritch laughs. “I probably should, but I don’t. This is the most exciting thing any of us have ever been involved in.”
Guided tours
The Army still owns the site and will until about Nov. 6, the date scheduled for transfer to the Forest Service. Because the Army isn’t in the business of managing parks, and because serious hazardous waste sites from munitions production remain on the property, access to the new National Tallgrass Prairie is restricted to guided tours planned in advance.
Groups interested in visiting this summer and fall can request a tour; though the staff needs a minimum of 20 people at a time, a smaller group can sometimes be accommodated by the staff’s matching it up with another undersized group.
The next tours for the public are at 4 p.m. Thursday and at 10 a.m. Sept. 15. Others will be scheduled through the course of the fall until November. Public tours are free, but you must call ahead to reserve a spot.
For information about group tours or to reserve a place on a public tour, call 815-423-6370, ext. 14.
Self-guided driving tour
Though it’s not the same as walking on it, much of the Midewin property can be viewed from roads. Also, other nearby natural areas provide a glimpse of what’s to come at Midewin and allow the opportunity for real prairie hiking.
From Chicago, you can reach Midewin by heading south on Interstate Highway 55. (The prairie is about 55 miles southwest of downtown.) Leave the highway at Exit 241, marked by a sign for Wilmington. At the end of the exit ramp, turn left onto North River Road. Go east 4 miles to Illinois Highway 53. Turn left at the “T” onto Ill. 53. Go precisely 1 mile north to the headquarters building, which is a red brick farmhouse. Brochures giving some of the history and flavor of the site are available, and staff can answer questions during business hours, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
From the headquarters building, if you drive north on Ill. 53, you’ll be inside the boundaries of the Midewin Prairie for 3-plus miles on that road; parkland is on both sides of Ill. 53. At Hoff Road, the north boundary, turn right. You can drive for about 6 miles to the eastern border; when you reach the abandoned railroad right-of-way, you’ve reached the end. The Will County Forest Preserve District plans to convert the right-of-way into a bike trail that will run into Custer Park in Joliet.
If you drive south on Ill. 53 from the headquarters entrance, you’ll be inside the prairie for less than a mile; turn left on South Arsenal Road and you can parallel the southern boundary of the preserve for about 5 miles.
(To get back to the headquarters from either jaunt, retrace your route.)
Adjacent to Midewin on the south is the 4,200-acre Des Plaines Conservation Area, owned by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Open to the public, this area provides a chance to visit a similar ecosystem. Much of the land is held as hunting and fishing habitat, but a portion of the site contains a high-quality prairie called Grant Creek Prairie Nature Preserve. Hiking trails, picnic areas and a campground are available at the site. Instead of turning left onto North River Road after exiting I-55, turn right and you’ll arrive at the main entrance for the Des Plaines Conservation Area.
Only 11 miles away is Goose Lake Prairie, up until now the largest true prairie in the region. Return to I-55 and go south one-third of a mile to the next exit, Lorenzo Road. Travel west on Lorenzo for 7 miles; Goose Lake Prairie is on the right-hand side. It’s well-marked and has a visitor center.
Eating
After sweating in the prairie, check out the cool chocolate malts in the outer-space atmosphere of the Launching Pad, a drive-in on the main drag of Wilmington.
From the Midewin headquarters, drive south on Ill. 53, a stretch of road that was once part of the famous Route 66. Go for 2 miles. The restaurant, on the right side of the street, can’t be missed. It’s marked by a statue of a giant in a green jump suit, wearing what appears to be a welder’s safety helmet, and holding a rocket that says “The Launching Pad.”
Sleeping
If you decide to stay overnight in the area, there are chain motels in Joliet and Morris.
If you want to camp, you can choose from the Des Plaines Conservation Area’s campground on the west side of I-55 and the campgrounds at Kankakee River State Park.
The scenic Kankakee is a great place to canoe, and bike trails stretch along its north bank.
To reach Kankakee River State Park from Wilmington, drive south along Illinois Highway 102. Go 10 miles to the Chippewa Campground, or keep going 2 more miles to the Potawotomi Campground where there’s canoe and bike rentals. Horses can be rented nearby for trail rides.
