Walnut Point State Park

[music playing] Lacey: It may not be the biggest state park, but Walnut Point State Park near Oakland still packs a punch when it comes to outdoor activities.

We'll share why you should take a hike here coming up.

Rameen: Take A Hike on WEIU is supported by Rural King, America's farm and home store, camping supplies, kayaks, fishing, and pet supplies and more.

Find your store and more information regarding Rural King at ruralking.com.

Lacey: Hi, I'm WEIU's Lacey Spence.

I've lived in Central Illinois my whole life and if there's one thing I've learned, you don't have to go too far to find the beauty of the great outdoors.

Come along with me as I visit a variety of parks and natural areas across Illinois and share why you should take a hike to each episode's location.

Adventure, and fun await in Take A Hike, the miniseries.

Lacey: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Take A Hike.

I'm your host, Lacey Spence, and we are kicking off season two with a familiar guest.

We've got Tom Hintz here who is site superintendent of Walnut Point State Park.

Welcome back to our show.

Tom: Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Lacey: Of course.

And you will remember that Tom was in season one at Lincoln Trail State Park.

He wears many hats and he is the site superintendent at both places.

So today we are at- Tom: Hickory Grove.

Yes.

Lacey: Hickory Grove.

All of the beautiful foliage out here.

So if you could start, how did you end up over both parks?

Tom: Well, it was part of the position.

It was set up by the IDNR that one superintendent would handle both parks.

It used to be a standalone site a decade ago, but now it's two sites kind of melded together, so it works good.

Lacey: A jack of all trades here.

So as we are looking at Lincoln Trail State Park, which was featured in season one and then now Walnut Point State Park, are there any big differences that you notice?

Tom: Well, Walnut Point is a little bit smaller, but it's a pretty little park.

I mean, it's a beautiful park.

It's less than five... Well, it's about 500 acres.

And Lincoln Trail is about 1100 acres, so it's almost twice the size.

And Lincoln Trail has a larger campground and it's got a larger restaurant and such.

But this is a great little park for a family to come for the day and to come camping here too.

Lacey: We're tiny but mighty.

I was actually very excited to be coming to this location as I grew up in Oakland.

Very fond of this location.

Tom: It's a beautiful park and I think it was really well-designed.

I don't know who designed it, but it's the way they designed the roads.

You go to the other side, it's not a loop that goes around through the park, it kind of ends in the campground, but when you're out there, you think you're so far away from the entrance, but you've got...

The way it's set up is they've really maximized the views here at the park, the way they set up the roads.

It's kind of neat.

Lacey: Oh, yeah.

And when you're winding through just how the trees tower over you, even on the way to this interview, we saw a deer.

So there's no shortage of wildlife at the park.

Can you talk about it?

Tom: Well, this is a great place for all kinds of different animals and such, birds and such.

Ducks and all kinds of different birds love to go and get into this lake here.

We see great blue herons here all the time.

And sometimes in the very early spring, a common loon will come through just like Lincoln Trails State Park and it'll stay for a few days on its trip up north.

But with the amount of woodland cover that we have here, there's a lot of really cool woodland birds.

And you come out here in the wintertime and it could be 20 below zero, but you're going to have a great day bird watching because there's just birds everywhere here.

It's really fantastic.

The woodland environment here lends itself to all kinds of different woodpeckers, pileated woodpeckers, redheaded woodpeckers.

So it's a pretty exciting place to come bird watching in my opinion.

Lacey: Definitely.

And we are actually sitting just feet from one of the docks here.

Fishing is also pretty big, yes?

Tom: Yes, yes.

We had a fish biologist who was an EIU grad that was here for decades and he retired and he really paid a close attention to this lake and the bluegill population.

So we have a very good bluegill population here and we've got a new fisheries' biologist that is really working on this lake as well.

So they're doing a really good job with this lake as best as they can.

Lacey: So for folks who are coming to visit, can they only fish from the dock or can they bring a boat?

How does that work?

Tom: They can bring a boat, but there's no gas motors.

You have to have an electric motor to go around and it's a smaller lake, so it's probably best to have just an electric motor here or a lot of people like to fish off of kayaks in this lake.

And it's a real nice quiet way.

And then you can get into all the little nooks and crannies of the lake.

The lake's got all kinds of little, what I call fingers, where you can go on in and fish off the shore.

Lacey: And approximately, do you know how many acres the lake is itself?

Tom: I think it's 46 acres.

Lacey: And there's, like you're talking with those fingers, there's a lot of opportunity for shoreline then?

Tom: Yeah.

It's beautiful.

Lacey: Wonderful.

Tom: It's a beautiful lake.

Lacey: Are you able to talk at all about the history of just how Walnut Point came to be?

Tom: Well, there was a settlement kind of close to here, I think in Douglas County that they called Walnut Point, and it was an early settle settlement and just outside of Oakland, and that's where it got the name from.

I've seen some historical black and white photos of where that settlement might have been, but I don't believe that settlement was here on the grounds at all.

I think that that settlement was far away from us.

Lacey: Gotcha.

And so it's always nice when there's a little bit of history behind the place because it helps you appreciate it even more.

So we've talked a little bit about birding and fishing and boating, kayaking, but one thing we haven't hit on yet is there are some beautiful little trails out here.

Tom: There are.

Lacey: Can you talk about, besides the one that we're saving for later, can you talk about the other trail options here?

Tom: Well, we have a trail that goes out to what we call it, the Old Observatory Trail.

There is a building back there, but it's not open, but you can go and walk around it.

And that's the longest trail that we have.

And we have the Whispering Pines Trail, and I have the trail map here.

These are available in the office.

The trails here are through some of the nicest ecosystems that you're going to find in this part of the state.

The springtime, I have never seen a park more lush with spring wildflowers than Walnut Point.

And then a lot of the plants that are here throughout the summer too are just constantly flowering.

So you can come out here even in November and still find New England asters in some of our prairies blooming.

But the spring wildflowers are, I think, the best in the state at Walnut Point.

And we have a lot of people that work really hard on this park to maintain that.

Our heritage biologist over the years have done prescription burns here.

I've participated in a bunch of them, and that gets rid of a lot of the non-native flora and just gets that native flora coming up.

So with that, we get really cool butterflies and even more neat things coming from it.

So it's cool.

Lacey: Well, if you'll remember from season one, Tom is definitely the guy for flora if you've got any questions or anything like that.

And so that's pretty high praise coming from you to dub Walnut Point as such a haven for wildflowers.

Tom: It is incredible.

You have to come out in the spring and then walk on the trails and you'll see wildflowers that you're not going to find in too many other places.

Lacey: And so you'd mentioned the Observatory Trail, which is the longest.

What other options are there?

Tom: Whispering Pines, it's 1.75 miles and that's a really, really beautiful trail too.

And then the Woodpecker Trail, which is a hundred percent ADA accessible, which is my favorite trail.

Lacey: Wonderful.

And we'll be talking a little bit about that trail coming up, but we're also sitting at one of the designated picnic areas and there's a lot of great picnicking opportunities out here.

Can you mention a couple more areas that folks can stop at?

Tom: Yeah, we have Twin Points and we also have Pleasant View, which is right near our concession stand too.

And those are really nice too.

We have the group use area and there's a nice area that you can have a picnic out there as well, but Pleasant View is the one that people rent out and Twin Points also.

Lacey: Wonderful.

Now also Walnut Point known for its camping.

Can you talk about what opportunities there are there for folks?

Tom: Well, we have 34 class A sites with electricity and we also have 20 class C sites.

Those are walk-in tent sites.

We do have some B sites.

We've got six of those that we want to convert into electrical sites too.

So at the B sites you can pull your vehicle in, but you won't have electricity.

But they're nice sites too.

So we're planning on hopefully getting electricity out of those sites someday.

And we're even looking at the possibility of maybe solar, trying to get a solar site there to go and provide electricity to them.

But that's all in the making.

We're, we're still looking into that.

Lacey: Sure.

But that's exciting to think about that you might be able to go that green route for the health of the environment, keep stuff nice out here.

Tom: Exactly.

Lacey: So if I'm somebody who's interested in renting a shelter maybe, or if I'm trying to camp, is that still I call the park office, is it online?

How does that work?

Tom: It is online.

You go to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources website and the very first page on that website you'll see book a shelter or a campsite, and you just click that.

You have to set up an account and so you'll set up an account with them and then you'll be able to go and make your reservation.

You got to make reservations for camping three days in advance, but- Lacey: Don't procrastinate.

Tom: And if you want to camp at this park, you need to make your reservations early because this park, this campground is booked solid every single weekend through the summer.

It's very, very popular.

People love it here.

And one of the reasons why is some of the camping sites are right there on the lake.

So you can go out and you can fish right from your campsite right in the lake.

It's just beautiful.

Lacey: What is the season of camping?

When can they start booking and when does it kind of close off?

Tom: Well, we never close the campground.

We have electricity in the campground, but we do close the water system down at the end of October because we don't want the pipes to freeze and such, so we shut the water down.

So you'd have to bring your own water during those times.

And then usually we wait and see how the weather is going.

But usually before April 1st, we have that water system set up.

Now presently we are working on a new water system.

The plans are in the making for a new water system for the park.

So we will not be on a well system, hopefully by spring of 2023 we'll see.

But that, we'll have water coming from the Embarras Water Service coming in here, so that would be great.

Lacey: That's exciting.

I have to ask, is there anything else in the works for Walnut Point or is that kind of the big project, that and getting some solar in?

Tom: That's the big project right now.

Yeah, that's the big project right now.

Just a few electrical things that we want to do on the shower house and stuff like that.

But this park is in pretty good shape.

It's really a nice park.

Lacey: And what's it like for you to be able to see folks come in and enjoy it, I mean, from fishing to camping to taking in the trails?

Tom: It makes me feel good when I see people enjoying the park and they'll send messages to our Facebook page or they'll compliment me when I'm out in the public and such for here and Lincoln Trail.

But I have to give credit to my staff.

The staff here is just incredible.

And the staff at Lincoln Trail is incredible.

I can't maintain these parks by myself.

I administrate it, but these guys do the work.

And I've never had a more dedicated staff in my life.

It's really a pleasure working with these people.

Lacey: And so they get to see the fruits of their labor every time someone comes in and shares a smile at Walnut Point.

Tom: And it means a lot to them.

So that's good.

Lacey: I wanted to ask about, there is a prairie restoration on site.

Tom: Yes.

Lacey: Can you fill us in on what that entails?

Tom: That might have been back in the seventies, and that's over by the Woodpecker Trail too.

And it's got some beautiful prairie flowers in it that are in full bloom right now.

I mean, this is the time of the year where the prairie is just showing its stuff.

And we burn it just about every year.

Some years we don't get to, but we try to.

And if you want to see where the best place to see butterflies and such, that's that prairie.

And there's some pretty interesting flowers that are in there.

Lacey: Now, let's kind of circle back to talking about prescription burn because you were saying that that can pave the way for beautiful plant life to come back.

Is that something that's still actively happening or is that more of a past project?

Tom: No, we do prescription burns.

It's part of our maintenance schedule.

Some areas we might only burn every three years.

Some areas with a lot of invasives, we might at first burn it every year for three to five years.

And then we get into more of a maintenance burning, but prescription burning, the Native Americans burned most of Illinois before any of us moved here.

And they did that for various reasons, for hunting reasons, to clear out areas so they could have their village.

If they were moving into an area, they wanted to have a village, they would set that up and use prescription burns.

And in time, over thousands of years, the understory not only adapted, but became dependent on those prescription burns.

And in our wisdom, we thought we got to stop fire.

And we started the "Smokey the Bear" ethic.

And with that, a lot of the non-native plants came in from there and got a foothold.

So now we're kind of turning the hands of time back and we're trying to bring back prescription burns on a lot of our sites throughout the state of Illinois.

Lacey: Earth Day, do you all do any cleanups or anything out here?

Tom: Well, we do Earth Day in the parks here, and usually two or three schools will come.

We try to find a project for the kids.

We've been planting a lot of little oak trees lately.

We're losing a lot of oak trees in the park for various reasons.

And they're a very important tree in our ecosystem here.

And so replanting oak trees with the kids, they work on that for a couple hours, and then we take them on a little bit of a walk and show them different plants and stuff like that and make it a nice educational day for them.

They love doing it because they're out of the classroom and they're planting trees for us.

So Earth Day in the parks has always been a great program.

And that goes statewide.

So anybody that sees this, if you have a school that's in another part of the state, go ahead and look up Earth Day in the parks.

It's a great program.

Lacey: Wonderful.

We're in our last couple of minutes here.

Is there anything else about Walnut Point that I didn't ask about that maybe folks should know about?

Tom: I would just say that it's a nice relaxed park.

It's a little bit out of the way.

Any of the activities you're going to do here is very pleasant, and it's just a nice place to go for a day and to go camping and stuff.

And a lot of people have a lot of memories in this park, like yourself.

Lacey: Myself included.

Tom: A lot of people grew up fishing in this park, and so it means a lot to them.

So you don't have to have a huge park to generate a lot of love.

But it's a smaller park and a lot of people love it here.

Lacey: And we can see why.

In spring, summer, fall, and winter, there's a different look.

So you don't need to just come visit in summer or in spring when this airs.

There's still plenty to see in fall and winter.

Wonderful.

Tom: Exactly.

Lacey: All right.

Well, we're going to take a quick break and transition to our Take a Hike highlight with our ADA trail.

So don't go anywhere.

[drone sounds, music playing] Lacey: And we are back.

We have switched locations at Walnut Point State Park.

We are now at the Woodpecker Nature Trail, which is ADA accessible, which is fabulous.

So Tom, you're going to give us a little demo, a little tour of our trail.

Tom: Absolutely.

Lacey: So can you talk about the benefits?

I mean, getting ADA accessibility out here is huge.

Tom: It is.

And actually, those of you that have a loved one that's in a wheelchair or with a walker and such, and that time to get out into a state park or a natural area is precious.

It's time for those folks who want to get up and move around that can't and you, yourself, the caregiver, you can come on out here and walk this trail, and it's just beautiful for that.

There's a nice picnic table there that is ADA accessible, and bathrooms are ADA accessible.

So it's a really good trail for that, for folks that are confined maybe to a wheelchair or a walker.

Lacey: Because we want everyone in nature.

Tom: Exactly, yes.

And it's a great trail for that too.

Lacey: Perfect.

Well, let's dive in just a little bit.

You were saying that one of the other things that is great about this trail is the amount of foliage available to check out and look at.

Tom: Yeah, this is a great trail.

When you come here in the springtime, you'll see flowers, wild flowers growing up in the cracks of the sidewalks.

But now this is the summer flora.

And right here we have eupatorium rugosum, this is called the Joe-Pye-weed.

And legend has it that the Joe-Pye-weed was a plant that cured an entire town of typhus fever back in New England a long time ago.

It was named after a Native American named Joe Pye.

But one of the things I really like about it now, it's going to seed, but when it's actually blooming and flowering, there's lots of butterflies that love the nectar on this.

And then there's one tiny little, I guess it's a butterfly like bug, it's called the hobomok skipper.

And it'll fly around and around and around that flower.

And it's basically the most important plant to that little bug.

Lacey: Yeah.

Well, and as you're talking about butterflies and things flying around, it's so important to keep our natural spaces healthy and wonderful so that our pollinators can get in and do their thing.

Tom: Exactly.

Exactly.

And we've got a lot of pollinators and all these pollinator friendly plants out here.

In the early spring, one of the most dominant little flowers that comes up here is called the spring beauty, claytonia virginica, and they all bloom before all of the trees leaf out.

And so at times you can look down at the ground and you just see probably tens of thousands of bees, and it sounds like the ground is buzzing.

It's so cool.

Yeah, it's a cool place for that.

Lacey: So we got to make sure we check that out in spring.

Tom: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

By the time this comes out, it'll probably be when all of the flowers are blooming out here, and you don't want to miss that.

Yeah.

Lacey: Wonderful.

So what else do we have growing out here?

Tom: Let's see what else we have here.

Lacey: See, I told our viewers that if they need that they need plant knowledge.

You are the gentleman for the job because you've got such a wide array.

Tom: Yeah, studying plants my whole life.

I love it.

And I want to keep doing that once I retire too.

So, oh, this is a great plant here.

This little heart shaped leaf plant, it blooms in the spring.

It's called the wild ginger.

The Potawatomi nation called it sturgeon flower because the roots of it do taste like ginger.

And the Potawatomi used to hunt sturgeon when they lived way up in the Great Lakes.

And so they would take that actual root and flavor the sturgeon.

Now sturgeon can be huge, and so it provided a lot of meat for a lot of people, but it tasted like dirt.

So they needed something to go and flavor their meat.

Now the interesting thing, the way that this plant pollinates itself is it's got a little flower.

It's gone now, but it blooms in the spring, but it's a little brown, reddish brown flower that lays on the ground, and it smells like rotten flesh.

Lacey: Oh my gosh.

Tom: So yeah, all of the little carrion beetles and things like that go into that flower.

They get stuck in the flower for a while with some sticky stuff on the inside, and then they get pollen on themselves and they go to the next flower.

So that's pretty interesting little plant.

And it's a great ground cover too.

I think it would be a great plant to put in your yard too.

It kind of spreads eventually.

So it's nice.

Lacey: Yeah.

Tom: We can go over this way if you want.

Lacey: Sure thing.

And we're not even that far in.

Tom: No, we're not.

Lacey: And something to note for our viewers that are following along, there's already a bench that's just right off the entrance.

And that is phenomenal again, because we want to make sure that if someone is working on building up that strength again, you can take a break right off the bat and it's so peaceful.

Tom: Yes, exactly.

Lacey: Right here.

Tom: Exactly.

Lacey: There's more around every little bend here.

Tom: I talk to a lot of students here at this park every year.

This is an elm tree.

You'll see that it's got red, white, red, white, red, white, it's kind of layered.

It's kind of hard to see this now.

So it's an American elm.

A lot of our elms are dying from Dutch Elm's disease, which is sad.

But this was a very important tree to the native people of this area.

We always think of Native Americans having birch bark canoes, but they had elm bark canoes in this area, and it's very easy to strip the bark off of this tree.

And the native people also used it for almost like shingles on their wigwams because it was so easily pulled off and used as on top of the wigwams as shingles.

But if you go to the field museum, they've got an elm bark canoe up on the wall in the new Native American exhibit.

And it's just kind of neat to see that.

And again, unfortunately elm trees are dying from the Dutch Elm's disease, which is spread from the elm bark beetle.

But I still see elm trees all over the place.

We still have them.

It's not like the emerald ash borer that devastated our ash populations in Illinois in a very short amount of time.

We still have them, and they've got a lot of history to them.

Lacey: And so as we are making our way through the trail, not just flora to look at, but also some other scenery, can you talk about what we're looking at?

Tom: Well, this is one of the little narrow fingers, as I call it, of the lake.

And this is a great place to come in with a boat and fish off of some of these logs that have...

Some of these were actually dropped on purpose in the lake to provide more habitat for the fish, and also to get a little bit more sunlight onto the shore to encourage some of the plants to grow for erosion purposes.

But you get in between some of those logs, and that's where there's a lot of fish.

You can go and fish for them right there.

So it's a pretty interesting place.

And the good thing about this trail is we see water here, and you'll see water over there too.

It's almost covered or not covered, but surrounded by water for a while too.

So it's kind of an interesting thing to take a look at when you're out here too.

So there is a cool grass over here I can show if you want.

Lacey: Sure.

Tom: This is hystrix patula, is the scientific name of it.

And this is called the bottlebrush grass.

And the bottlebrush grass is a great woodland grass that holds the soils and holds... Well, there's a nice big spider on that one.

We'll grab this instead.

Lacey: Keep that over there.

Tom: Yeah, yeah.

But this is a great grass that'll hold woodland soils because in our prairies we've got grasses that have super deep, thick root systems.

We don't have that as much as in our woodlands.

So that's where we get a lot of erosion.

And so many of our recreational areas are woodlands surrounding a lake and all of that erosion and the shore keeps on just sloughing off into the lake and such.

If you want to go and hold the soil from going in a lake system, you got to control the uplands too.

And this is one of the grasses to go ahead and do that.

It provides great erosion control, but that's it.

They call it the bottlebrush grass, because it looks like a baby bottlebrush.

Lacey: Yeah.

Tom: Yeah.

Lacey: Well, Tom, you've been a wealth of knowledge and we appreciate your time-out here at the beautiful Walnut Point State Park, and we hope our viewers will join us for our next episode of Take A Hike.

We'll see you then.

[music playing] Rameen: Take A Hike on WEIU is supported by Rural King, America's farm and home store, camping supplies, kayaks, fishing, and pet supplies and more.

Find your store and more information regarding Rural King at ruralking.com.