Kettle Moraine - Paradise Springs and Scuppernong Springs

After I hiked the Scuppernong Trail on Sunday I still had some time to kill before being able to settle in to my campsite so I headed over to Paradise Springs Nature Area.

It's a paved looped trail that leads to a catch and release trout fishing pond. At the far end of the loop is the spring house. The interpretive signs in the spring house were missing and/or vandalised so I had to look up the history on the internet: in the 1800's an individual visiting a local farm drank water from one of the springs and believed it to have healing/restorative power.  He promoted this idea and word spread, creating a booming spa and recreation era that actually was the basis for the forming of Waukesha county. Hard to believe this was once a resort area; now this part of Wisconsin is nothing but farms and small towns. Eagle is so small that there was no restaurant open for me to have dinner and no grocery store either so I had to eat a bag of potato chips from the gas station!  I didn't get a picture of the spring house because people were using it to cool down.  I wandered around the pond and took pictures of the twelve spotted skimmers and tadpoles instead.

 There wasn't much else to see, so I drove back to Ottawa Lake and parked across the street at the Scuppernong Springs Trailhead. The hiking trail is a former railbed that led to Eagle Lime Products company that mined marl here almost a century ago. A strange oversight doomed the company. While the process of incinerating, cooling and packaging the lime was simple, the large-scale machinery needed to make the business economical required large amounts of fuel. Scattered hardwood trees in the vicinity quickly fell to the axe, followed by less useful softwoods. Scouts discovered a thin vein of "coal" north of the marsh, near Ottawa Lake. It was probably a peat deposit. There are no coal deposits in Wisconsin. Company officials also discovered that farmers in the region preferred to haul marl themselves from local sources. The firm's competitors in the quicklime business routinely ran even larger-scale operations, further eroding its bottom line.

After only six years of actual lime production (1908 to 1914), mining and processing operations ceased. Some of the ruins are still located along the trail.

Further along the trail there are several bridges crossing the Scuppernong River. I couldn't resist taking off my shoes and climbing in to explore.

 

All good things must come to an end (especially when the rocks are covered with sharp little barnacles and you forget to pack your water shoes) so I got my shoes back on, finished the trail, and headed to my campsite.

I set up my tent cot, opened up my gourmet dinner of potato chips from the gas station, and settled in to read "Timeline" by Michael Crichton on my new Kindle. It was great to read hands-free and it didn't take me long to get used to the slight blur when you turn the page.  When I reserved this book (six months ago when I bought the Nook and returned it...don't get me started on the library reservation system!) I didn't realize that it was one that I've already read, but it's a great story so I was happy to read it again, especially since it was free!