Kilen Woods State Park

Kilen Woods State Park

—Lakefield, MN—

This weekend's geocaching adventures are headed to a different part of the state: the southwest corner.  I have driven through this part of the state a lot, but I have never really explored it to see what it really has to offer.  These parks are all part of the tall-grass prairie biome (which we will finish this weekend), so they all have that in common.  Quite a switch-up from the North Shore state parks last time.

The first park we hit was Kilen Woods State Park.  This is a small park (553 acres or a little under one square mile) down near the Iowa border in southwestern Minnesota.  This is what the DNR says about Kilen Woods:

 "For a quiet, relaxing time, hike the cool woodland trail which meanders along the tranquil Des Moines River, or enjoy the view of the river valley from Dinosaur Ridge Overlook. You'll find pleasant surprises as you explore small creeks, prairie grasslands, and oak savannas. Visitors enjoy camping, canoeing, fishing, picnicking and hiking."
 

This part of the state was hit by really heavy rains during June that are still impacting these parks today.  For Kilen Woods they had a problem with trails and bridges from the flooding.  This caused damage, and as a result, many of the trails are still closed.  This does not compare with the damage these storms did to Blue Mounds State Park, but we will discuss that later.

Bridal party taking pictures.

When we got to the state park, Luke ran in and talked to the park ranger and was warned that the park was going to be really busy today.  There was a wedding going on.  This was a first for us, and it kind of hit close to home: a few years ago, Jess, my sister-in-law, had her wedding plans thwarted by the Minnesota government shutdown; otherwise, they would have had their wedding at Lake Itasca.  They were still taking taking wedding party pictures, and no guests had shown up.

The first set of coordinates (which were also hanging by the ranger station) pretty much brought us right to the place they were taking pictures.  That was pretty awkward.  Everyone was in their wedding clothes and Luke, Marcus, and I were tooling around looking for a geocache...  It seemed like they were taking pictures right around where we wanted to search, too...

They rented the building to hold the
reception we think.

Wedding seating is ready to go.

We grabbed our gear and started looking for the first location.  Marcus decided to bring a few friends along today—I like to call them Mouse # 1 and Mouse # 2—Marcus sounds so cute when he says, "mouse"... someday we will tell him they are actually rats.

"Good thing I'm here. Look what I found in the
back seat of mom's car."

"Ah, rats!"  Or as Marcus would say, "Ah, mice!"

The coordinates put us right on the west side of the building (full of the wedding party), and it actually put us right in the middle of the grass.

We wondered around for a while – I am sure we looked quite strange to the wedding party...  We looked on all sides of the building, under the overhang of the roof, around the outside of the building... I read the logs and found a lot of notes that said the coordinates were not very good.  I also saw a response from the part swearing that they were correct.  We eventually entered a set of coordinates that another geocacher had entered into their find log and tried them instead.

 The new coordinates were much more promising and led us towards the woods, and we quickly saw a small path leading to a tree – where the cache was hidden.  This was completely unexpected.  This was the first time we had been at an avian geocache that only had one stop.

Can you see the box?

We grabbed the box, signed the long, found the bird card, and hit the road...

Marcus and his mice were all happy to see the bird card. 

The Ammo Box.

Southwest Minnesota is all tall-grass prairie with lots of wind.  This means that there are giant wind farms and almost everywhere you look there are wind turbines – it is kind of neat.

So many wind turbines in this part of the state.

Windfarm along I-90.  Is there a rainbow in this picture??

One other fun thing about this trip is the amount of motorcycles that we say on the highways and I-90 (and even our campground that night).  They were all on their way out to Sturgis, SD for the motorcycle rally.  They were normally in small groups with a support vehicle following behind them.  What an interesting sight.

Sturgis bound...

A bit after this stop we also had to do a bit of grocery shopping in Luverne, MN.  Marcus picked out the most important food: bananas (the world's perfect food).  We really liked the fact they put little kid shopping carts in the store for them to push alongside their parents.  Very cute, but makes for lots of dangerous grocery store driving as we discovered.