Prairie State Park
This is another 417-magazine inspired photography event. I love the magazine, when it arrives each month, I cannot wait to dive into it. The April edition included a section about State Parks. I enjoyed reading Brandon’s article about Prairie State Park and knew I had to go (April, pg. 68). Seeing a bison herd with the 3 calves was going to make a spectacular day.
The Plan
Once I picked out a date to go (May 27), the game plan was to get up early and get to the park during the early hours of sunrise. I had it pictured perfectly in my head, I would find the bison herd and position myself so the sun would be behind them. I had even less success than Brandon did. Which made for a funny exchange in the nature center with the staff behind the desk. When I walked in after walking the 3 main trails, I asked them “hey don’t you have signs posted that a bison herd roam freely in the park?” They replied yes, we do, “Well they don’t roam freely enough, I did not find them!” We then began to talk about the research teams from MSU and Pitt that come by often to study them. The teams are able to use their tracking devices to find them but sadly the park does not have access. I put a pin in that thought, how fun would it be to accompany a research team and document the day with some incredible photography.
The Trails
One of the first items to research for the trip was the section of the park I was going to search for the bison. Of the 7 trails located within the park, 4 of them list bison as a possible encounter. I settled on Coyote, Dover and Gayfeather trails. Since I was only going to walk on 3 of the four trails, the trail I left out had a high probability of being the bison’s herd choice of habitat for the day. The trails were a wonderful hike, everything was so green, and I had a nice zero-turn deck size path to walk in. There were plenty of songbirds, their voices made a nice blend with quietness of the nature hike. The grade on the trials went up and down. This created several ridges that produced beautiful high points looking down onto a valley. Tree lines broke up the openness and the next ridge provided a nice backdrop in the images. Overall, it was a wonderful day, if there had been a bison sighting, then the Yelp review for the day would have been a perfect score.
