Yankee Southern Transplants in the Upper Midwest: Ancient sand dunes and winter wildlife

Last Sunday, we took a ride up to Door County to attend a winter dune hike/snowshoe program at Whitefish Dunes State Park on the Lake Michigan shoreline. As 1:30 approached, we were the only visitors that showed up for the hike, so we had a private tour from the awesome naturalist, Carolyn. She led us off-trail through the ancient sand dunes, some over 4,000 years old (according to dating), an area normally not open to hiking without snow due to the sensitivity of the landscape. We all had so much fun that the one hour tour turned into two!

It's really amazing to see the landscape in an area with ancient dunes. The base soil is still extremely sandy (mostly quartzite we learned) even though above ground the leaf litter and trees look like your typical mixed forest. The undulating "hills" that you see make you think you are in a mountainous area, but right on the other side is Lake Michigan. Carolyn told us about the dune formation and the "legs," or the linear structures projecting from the dunes depicting which way the wind was blowing when the dunes formed. Awesome!

You can see a "leg" heading off to the left of this dune, which means the wind was blowing in that direction when the dune was formed.

Soil under this uprooted tree is all very soft sand from the previous glaciation. Carolyn said that if all the sand from the Great Lakes disappeared, we would have to wait for the next glacier to make sand again.

We saw lots of wildlife and wildlife sign- fresh tracks in the snow (deer, coyote/fox, mouse, mole, shrew, porcupine), pileated woodpeckers calling and feeding up close, as well as 3 porcupines (2 up in trees, and one in the den). The park actually has a real problem with porcupines- we saw 3 and sign of at least 3 more in a relatively small area. Whitefish Dunes has a pretty serious outbreak of beech bark disease, which infects beech trees and ultimately causes them to die and break in half. As a result, they had to remove beech trees within 75 feet of any trails and parking areas for safety reasons. As a result, the park has plenty of deadwood for woodpeckers (and good den sites for porcupines!), but the forest is changing, especially as the deer browse on most of the new forest growth coming in after the beech.

Looks like a fox or coyote was here!

Good place for a nest?

Porky gave us quite the show- chewing away and not caring about us at all.

Carolyn showed us the site of an ancient village as well- hunter gatherers that inhabited the lakes region thousands of years ago. They selected this sheltered space within the dunes that protected them from the wind and the elements during winter. They even carved a walkway through one of the dunes from hundreds of years of walking the same path. When we stood in the village site, you could hear the wind going right over us, outside the protection of the dune fortress.

Site of the ancient hunter/gatherer village protected from the elements with dune "walls" all around (above) and the walkway they created from walking through the same spot in the dunes for hundreds of years (below middle).

After the hike, we checked out the ice shelves along the shoreline. Not as much as I thought would be there, but the water current is pretty strong in that inlet (I remember reading about a decent rip current in the summer), so that probably prevents total freeze. Earlier in the season, they actually had some ice volcanoes where waves would crash underneath and send a spray of water through the cone, which would then freeze on contact (so cool!). We saw some cones left behind, but no active volcanoes.

March 2015

September 2014

Cave Point County Park is a small Door County park located right next to the state park, so we wanted to check it out. There are some neat cliffs covered in ice, and several underwater caves that cause a thunder-like crash when the waves roll into them. Windy and icy, but well worth the stop! By that point, we were cold enough to head back to Green Bay.