Damon B.
Yelp
I don't really know how to rate this place, I'll be honest. But for a nature preserve it has great parking, great paths, and was really easy to get to in spite of crappy signage. It has fields of very tall sunflowers (6-7 feet tall at the time I was there), corn fields, and swampy land. Come for sunflowers, bug photos, and nature in a relatively curated environment due to the obvious farming influence.
This isn't really a Yelp-y tourist place for you to take instagram photos or play with your kids. There are no bathrooms, no water, minimal (but plentiful for what it is) parking, and there's no tour guides. So if you are a high maintenance person, this is not for you. It's a nature preserve and you don't really belong here. Except it's public land and they have made an effort to keep the place open to the public.
I took my 2 year olds out here by myself with a wagon and it was great. I parked at the second to last parking area. As I was pulling up, a farmer was entering the path with a humongous, 10 foot tall tractor which looked like a tractor on stilts. There were only 2-3 cars in the parking lot and no one else around. The farmer took off before I could even see him in the cab of the tractor, which felt very isolating.
Immediately upon opening the car door I heard the buzzing of bees and random other bugs running into me and the car, and expected the worst. There is standing water everywhere out here but they must spray for mosquitos now because the warnings I read about online were totally untrue--we didn't experience a single bug bite. However the other bugs were not affected. I would rate this as tops for looking at wood bumblebees and butterflies. There were very few birds around at the time I was there, and they appeared to avoid the area, flying near the fields but never over them.
We walked down the path, which I posted photos of here on Yelp. The path is limestone rocks (not gravel) where the tractor wheels travel and dirt/grass. I pulled a wagon that is not meant for offroading and in spite of some bad conditions, it went fine. The path is maybe 1/4 mile long.
Once at the flowers, I saw only three people. Two were together, doing instagram selfies. And there was one goth girl chasing butterflies for photography. They were all leaving, making us the only ones out here. It was kind of weird being that alone but we made the most of it by running around naked. Okay only my kids ran around naked but that's because I was changing diapers.
The flowers were all facing the opposite direction of the path, so we had to walk to the other end of the field--something I was not excited to do in the heat and with a loaded wagon and two babies. But it wasn't bad at all! While walking the circumference of the field seemed like a bad idea at first, it made for great photos where we were really out in nature. I brought a stool along in my wagon but it was just in the way for kid photos. I would say maaaaybe bring one for adults but I found it to be more trouble than it was worth. Finding stable ground for a stool or ladder is challenging in these farm fields, and a little dangerous. Probably skip the stool if it's even a question. There are a few paths into the sunflowers that make for cool photos under a canopy of flowers, and most of the flowers were hanging down/bent downward, making them easy to phtoograph from the ground.
When we returned to our car, we were the only ones left.
So let me sum it up:
- great facility with nice roads and parking areas
- minimal pesky bugs when we went, no mosquitos
- lots of butterflies and bees, but nothing to be alarmed about with the bees as they are all wood bees
- 6-7 foot tall flowers
- some flower vandalism, but generally the place looked pristine
- easy to find on GPS navigation (google maps)
- great cell phone service
- can feel very isolated
- probably leave the step stool at home