common_nature | Irwin Prairie, Toledo area, Ohio

Toledo sits right on the southwestern-most corner of Lake Erie, about an hour south of Detroit. As such, it's a quite unique mix of lakeshore and woodland/scrubby grassland environments (or at least it seems that way from three hours south of Toledo). They have a forest with sand dunes in! Part of that odd environment is the Great Black Swamp, which covered most of northeastern Ohio before serious European settlement. For some reason or another, I started playing around with the "Things to do in Toledo" pages of TripAdvisor over the fall and found the Irwin Prairie State Nature Reserve, which preserves just about the biggest piece of the swamp left. I don't know a whole lot about it; mostly just what I read in the map/brochure from the trailhead and what's on the state DNR webpage. Just... here is a nature reserve, stay on the boardwalk. I suppose that it's pretty normal to people up there, but it seemed so amazing coming from just a few hours away.

I drove up there in... May or June, I want to say, back before it got so soul-killingly hot out even on the lake. It was absolutely worth the trip.

The place is surprisingly hard to find; my GPS directions sent me to Irwin Road, which cuts through the middle of the park. Parking is on Dorr Road/246, about a block or so east of the intersection with Irwin. I don't even remember any signage before that turn. You pull into the driveway after the sign pointing to Irwin Prairie and wellp, information board and a boardwalk; this must be the place.

The boardwalk goes about a mile and a half through alternating thin woodland and wet grassland. The map had a quote from a settler in the early nineteenth century talking about how the Great Black Swamp was just untold hundreds of miles of soggy prairie with hardly any trees, but there are substantial chunks of young woodland in between the belts of prairie, so I'm not sure if this is reclaimed land that was restored, or if it was originally like this and people back then just had a different idea of "few trees."

Irwin Road cuts through the middle of the preserve, and the bulk of the swamp prairie lies on the far side, where you aren't allowed to bring your pets or your bikes. It's amazingly flat and much bigger than it looks; it took me a good twenty or thirty minutes to make it from the road to the next tree break in the distance. Which thinking about the people crossing this land in Conestoga wagons when that's pretty much all there was between Toledo and Chicago (which, I mean, right now, is about four hours west by freeway, and that seems like kind of a pain-in-the-ass trip)... it sort of boggles the mind.

I tried a few times and never got very good shots of it, but you could see the breeze moving through the grass like waves on a sea. Also there are squadrons of redwing blackbirds just shrilling and kekking away from every side. One of them got very angry at me for wanting to walk past the "Irwin Prairie" sign at the start of the second part of the trail. I suppose it might have had a nest in one of the bushes or trees that grew up around the culvert at the side of the road, but it seems a little late in the year for that.

And the interesting thing is that grass? Even in the drier section nearer the road, it's not all grass; it's grass and ferns and tiny little irises all the way to the tree line.

Once you reach the trees past the first patch of prairie, the boardwalk splits in two to circle through some more woodland. I'm not sure if the reason for it is the ground being wetter, but the second patch of woods had much different plant life than the first. More broad-leafed green things and fewer ferns.

The wood and the grassland are much wetter than toward the entrance of the park. Off to the side of the stretch of the circle that goes along the swampy land, there's a little spur with an observation deck.

This is pretty much the Old Black Swamp as it was, except I'm not sure all those trees are original. It's a mix of sedges and tall grass and rushes. Looking at Google Maps, there are also an auto sales place and an excavation and demolition company just down the road, and it was a really strange experience to stand there on the lookout platform in this peaceful, silent place, thinking about the people who lived here hundreds of years ago, and every so often hearing all this metallic crashing and banging right across the road.

The woods were just thick with mosquitoes, but the sedges and long grass were full of tiny little moths.

And then you basically turn around and walk back out the same way you came in once you've finished the loop, and shooting into the sun in late afternoon is no good for decent photos. But I'll definitely go back when it's not so godawful hot out.