Kettle Moraine

The day we arrived was rainy, and we used misleading information about the forecast to sleep in the car instead of setting up tents in the wet. We discovered that the seats do not recline far enough for good sleep unless you are prepared to squash the person in back, that mosquitoes are active 24/7 and not just from 8 to 10 at night, and that people who claim to be the wrong flavor are merely insensitive to the multitudes of bites they receive.

The dawn chorus was long and active every morning; with crows dominating for a while and cranes punctuating from time to time. And there were some pocket squirrels, tan and not much larger than a chipmunk, with a chirp like a bird (the tail bobs forward with each one), a machine-gun chirping call, something that sounds like and angry sneeze, and a howl/whine used when retreating full speed from some other squirrel with a bigger angry sneeze.

The kames and eskers and kettles and moraines are fascinating, and I confusticated the Ice Age Center docent with questions. Chief among which is: how did the rocks get up so high? She mentioned and then backed off the notion of churning at the front, but I think that may have merit--if the relaxation time is longer than the time for being shoved some distance then one might have slow motion turbulence.

And, of course, the continental ice sheet would not have been uniform--there'd be flow from regions of higher precipitation, which might present as lobes or as streams (slow moving, but streams nonetheless). When these intersected you might get some interesting turbulent flows. I don't have a good enough model of ice dynamics to do a back-of-the-envelope on what happens if a glacier moves over a deep trench (like a lake), but it would seem at least possible to get some gouging eddies going.

I wonder how high the kames were orginally--there's been some erosion since.

I wonder what the local Indians thought of the kames, and whether they influenced the mound builders (says here that some groups buried their dead in kames: late Archaic. From the phrase "believe the Red Ocher burials came after the Glacial Kame (Indians)" I gather that the dating isn't precise, but they're pretty sure both groups came before the Woodland Indians who were the mound builders.) This may need a little research.

Youngest Son and I went up "Dundee Mountain" in the twilight and came down in the dark with no flashlights; and persuaded the rest to travel it in the daylight later. It is really a large kame with a secondary and a tail which is almost an esker, and a kettle close by--so in a mile's walk you get to see most of the attractions of the area.

A busy digger wasp carried fly after fly into holes in the silty part of the campsite, and cicadas came out (one latched onto Youngest Son's tent to burst his shell--at night when we couldn't watch, of course).

We learned the hard way about trying to fillet still-slightly frozen bass, and that splitting slightly damp wood into small pieces doesn't guarantee a quick fire start. Youngest Son whittled shavings for starting the fire. He learned that damp pine needles, though they burn very nicely after the fire gets started, aren't the easiest things for initial ignition.

The town of Kewaskum (named after an Indian chief who used to live there) has an excellently designed city park. The crest holds a golf course and bandstand and other things, but over the hill the green runs down to the stream. The park is on both sides of the stream, there's a small dam, and whoever laid out the place has children: the trees were left in clusters, with green space between; ideal for 5-year old hide and seek or "adventures in the woods."

About half the sportsman's clubs abutted cemeteries--I suppose so they wouldn't bother the neighbors.

We brought lots of books, in case of inclement weather, but a good time was had by all--though you'd not get Youngest Daughter to agree.