We drove down to Tower Hill State Park, a place I'd been saying I've wanted to go for years. Its main attraction is a structure built up along a cliff where lead shot was made in the 1830s.
Like many things, it didn't quite live up to my mental construct. The park only contains two total miles of trails, puny when it comes to state parks around here. The smelting house was only mildly interesting, with signs explaining how the molten lead was once poured from a lidded ladle down into a 60-foot shaft. The lead droplets formed perfect mini spheres on the way to the pool of cool water below. The VCR-driven display in the house was broken, but I would have been more surprised had it worked.
Anyway, perhaps I would have been more impressed if it were not for the hundreds of tiny ravenous vampires that swarmed around us, desperate for the taste of human blood. The mosquitoes were overwhelming here. As my companion pointed out, remember that protected pool of cool water? Yeah, that's also a great place for mosquitoes to breed.
Determined to get a good hike in, we drove down County Highway T from Spring Green to Blue Mound State Park. Truly a picturesque route, with wooded hills that rise up dramatically behind clover fields. Happy cows graze next to the winding creeks etched into the land. We were in the Driftless Region, a part of Wisconsin that escaped the glacial pancaking that took place 100,000 years ago.
Blue Mound was everything I had hoped Tower Hill would be. It has a fantastic view over the countryside, complete with actual observation towers. Fewer mosquitoes out for blood. Instead, fat grasshoppers skipped from leaf to leaf. A few daddy long-legs dropped onto Aaron. But if you go for a walk in the woods, you're gonna get some hop-ons.
I've heard rumors of bison here, but we didn't venture into the prairie. On the way out of the park, we stopped by a country store with a wrap-around porch and attached ice cream shop. There's something so simple and relaxing about sitting on a bench, stretching your legs out before you and holding a melty chocolate ice cream cone in one hand.
A good day.