Shedder and Shorts

Looking for a good day trip not too far from Lansing, we elected to hike the Long Lake trail at Yankee Springs State Recreation Area. This spot held a few attractions for us. There’s an interesting kettle there called the Devils Soup Bowl, but there’s also a lot of swamp, and we were hoping some of it might turn out to be Prairie Fen, the rare habitat that’s an academic focus for Anna. We hit the trail head around 11a.m. Jim Dufresne outlines a nice loop in his book 50 Hikes in Michigan that has one hiking out on Long Lake Trail, then Hall Lake for a view of the Devils Soup Bowl and returning along Chief Noonday Trail and about 1.5 miles of road. We quickly ruled out that loop as the heavy traffic would have made the road portion of the hike unpleasant for us. So, we headed out on Long Lake Trail with the map and figured we’d piece something together, avoiding the road and, hopefully, spotting some fen.

Tiger Beetle and Soldier Ant

We wound up circling around a circuit involving Long Lake, Hall Lake, a few other trails. We went out probably 3 miles to the Devils Soup Bowl, which is an interesting geological formation. The trail around it is pretty sandy, the usual sign of esker, but there wasn’t the pronounced distinction between esker and kettle that I’m familiar with from the Kettle Moraine area in Wisconsin. The Yankee Springs website lists the Devils Soup Bowl as a major attraction, along with Grave’s Hill Overlook.  The overlook, however, doesn’t exist anymore (I’m not the first person to blog about this). The thick stand of autumn olive that obscures whatever vista was once there is a great illustration of an invasive species running unchecked. In this second half of the hike, the part further east near the Soup Bowls and Hall Lake, there were lots of invasives like Autumn Olive and Japanese Knotweed covering the understory and filling the fields.

There wasn’t as much wetland as we’d hoped for here, but there were one or two spots that Anna said might well be fen. It’s difficult to make the call without really getting into them, though, and when folks lay trails they usually avoid fens because they’re not super friendly (water, hummocks, smelly, poison sumac, etc.). The neatest thing we saw was a tiger beetle eating a soldier ant. We watched the beetle struggle with the ant for a while, with the ant gradually growing more placid. Then we walked to the car and drove home while I imagine the beetle ate the ant.I guess the ballet of life goes on, or something.

Tags: fen, kettle, moraine, tiger beetle, yankee springs

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