Lake Maria State Park

With Kieran team at a tournament in Maple Lake all weekend, we got a little antsy between games.  Sarah arrived at the ballpark just as the first game was ending on Sunday (she was coming from a triathlon up in Clearwater) with a slow leak in one of her tires because of an embedded nail and needed to get that fixed, so she took Kieran to Buffalo to fix the tire and get lunch.  That left Luke, Lex and I alone looking for something to do....we found it when we stopped at Lake Maria State Park.

We had never been there before, so we had about an hour (before we had to get back to Kieran's next game) to find some of the highlights for a later visit.  The ranger said that the deer flies were out and I sort of blew her off....I should have listened, they were out in force - thankfully, we only had an hour...

We took a 3/4-1 mile interpretive walk that took us along a lake and over a marsh on a boardwalk.  There were lots of little signs explaining the plants and animals that lived there....but there were too many deer flies to stay in one place too long....

The portion of the trail heading through the woods was easy going...

Once we got to the boardwalk though, it got a little tighter...

Many areas of the boardwalk are almost overgrown....being a small park, they must have limited staff...

The park protects an area of kettle and kame topography that resulted from the most recent glaciations, as well as a portion of the 'big woods' that existed prior to European contact.

It also protects multiple nesting sites of the threatened Blandings turtle.  We saw several signs along the road warning us to slow down and watch for turtles...

Even though we were only there for an hour, of course we got a picture of the sign!

And we got our passport stamped too (we did not complete the hiking club trail, that'll have to happen on another visit -- Kieran will have to be there too)...