Day 9: Adventures in Door County (Part II)

This morning, we woke up an hour earlier than we thought, due to Marissa's phone being in Eastern time instead of Central. We found out that her phone connected to the Michigan phone tower, which is the same time as New York.

We drove down to Kangaroo Lake, where we met up with Kari and Amanda for a work party on the TNC preserve. However, it was only the 7 of us at the work party- we had fun anyway! We learned about Hound's-Tongue, an invasive we focused on pulling during the work party.  Kangaroo Lake is a property that was purchased and is in the process of being restored.  The land was planted as a pine tree farm, but was never thinned or cut and so there are too many trees on the property.  We went in to remove the hounds tongue (the leaves of the plant look like the tongue of the dog!) that were seeding.  Carrie wanted to do everything possible to prevent the seeds being spread by the equipment that would be coming in the fall to thin out the pines.

 Here Kari is showing us how to recognize the seed head of the Hounds Tongue.

Photobombed by Kari!

But look at all the bags we filled!!

Afterwards, we went to Jackson Port Town Park for lunch, where we met with Mike Grimm, who is said to know everything about Door County. Since he began with the TNC in the 90's he has worked in the field doing conservation projects and as a grant writer.  He currently works in conjunction with other organizations to raise and organize money to buy land crucial to conservation efforts. He sometimes gets to go to properties to determine what species are present and what work would be needed to restore the area.  He told us that the lands worth is determined by how buildable it is, if a building can go on it the land is worth more. With his help we were able to calculate that out of the 380,000 acres in Door County, TNC owns 5,000 acres which doesn't seem like that much. But when combined with preserved areas owned by the Department of Natural resources and other non-profit conversation groups we realized that almost 10% of the land in Door County is protected!!!

Our View at Lunch.

Oh and we played in the park for a bit!

After saying our goodbyes, we met up with Nicole at the Southern-most part of Green Bay, which is the largest freshwater estuary in the world, but it is also an EPA designated area of concern. We learned that the lower part of the bay, including the Fox River, is contaminated by PCBs. In the Fox River, there is a dredging operation to clean the contaminated sediment, in which the very toxic sediment is dumped into landfills. Sediment that is not as toxic is used to rebuild barrier islands previously eroded away by high water and storms.  The TNC and their partners are hoping that over time wetlands will form behind these new islands which is a good habitat for organisms such as ducks as well as additional protection for the coast from storm surges. Nicole also gave us posters that explained the life cycle of the Northern Pike in Wisconsin, and how TNC is trying to preserve certain areas so that the Pike fish can migrate with ease from their breeding sites.  The craziest thing we learned was that some pf the Pike are using drainage ditches on the sides of highways instead of natural stream and river tributaries to get to the breeding grounds.  Apparently some local Wisconsians actually set up chairs along the highway to watch the migrations - after all these are large fish swimming through water only a few times as deep as they are!  We would probably want to watch too!

After the overview of Green Bay project, Nicole took us on a short educational trip to the Zippin Pippin roller coaster to look over the bay - the only way to see one of the newly constructed islands is from the top of the first drop of the roller coaster. It was a lot of fun and we found out that the ride was Elvis' favorite ride! It seems he rented it for 2 hours for private rides with family and friends the week before he died!

Afterward, we went to the Packers stadium and took pictures by the statues outside.

With the statue of Curly Lambeau - the founder of the packers and first coach! Did you know they were the first team to win the Super bowl and so got to name the trophy?  They named it after the guy in the next picture!

Vince Lombardi!  He lead the packers to 5 superbowl wins in 7 years and they won the very first superbowl!  FYI Brooklyn native....

And these are the neighbors showing packers love across the street from the stadium.  Can you see the Greenbay symbols in the fence?

This guy even had a turnstile and replica of the Lombardi Trophy in the yard!

Now that we're back home, we have finished our weekly grocery shopping......

Check out the sunset we saw on the way home from the store. We had to pull over to take a photo but it doesn't even begin to capture it!

...... and are preparing a dinner of turkey sausage, fried rice, salad and baked french fries! Tonight we are going to watch Footloose.  Marissa swears the original is better than the update but we have our doubts.....