Between McHenry and Richmond sits an expanse of marsh, bog, prairie, stream and kame that looks much as it would have before European explorers reached Illinois more than 300 years ago.
This is Glacial Park, the largest of the McHenry County Conservation District’s 13 conservation properties and perhaps the biggest natural attraction in the county.
It includes:
– 2,806 acres and 6.5 miles of nature trails. It attracts nearly 80,000 visitors annually.
– Camelback kames, 100-foot-high piles of gravel that rise from a meadow floor. A waterfall from a melting glacier 14,000 years ago deposited the gravel.
– One of the southernmost “kettle” bogs, so called because it fills a kettle-shaped depression caused by a huge chunk of ice that broke off the same glacier that created the kames. Rotting vegetation and a lack of groundwater make the water highly acid and home to acid-loving plants, including cranberries, sphagnum moss and white violets.
– A kettle marsh, formed in the same way as the nearby bog but different because it is groundwater fed, making it less acid and home to cattails, rushes and duckweed.
– Trail of History, an event held the third weekend in October that attracted 13,360 people last year. It re-creates slices of life in the county going back to pre-settlement days.
– Lost Valley Marsh, a wetlands restoration project. Farmers drained the marsh in the 1950s, decimating local waterfowl and grassland bird populations. To restore the marsh, volunteers have removed some drain tiles and smashed others with long iron rods poked through the soil; they’ve also filled ditches and built earthen berms to hold back water.
– Twelve bird species on the state’s endangered or threatened lists: sandhill cranes, black-crowned night herons, marsh hawks, yellow-headed blackbirds, least bitterns, black terns, double-crested cormorants, pie-billed grebes, king rails, common moorhens, upland sandpipers and Henflow’s sparrows.
– Wood ducks, mallard ducks, wild turkeys and 103 other bird species noted in an annual breeding survey.
