Join Me for Landscape Photography and Hiking at Devil’s Lake Wisconsin
In this video, I’ll bring you along on a hike to make landscape photographs at a breathtaking location in Wisconsin. Even though it was June, the weather was cold and wet, the the mood fit the lake’s Native American name of “Spirit Lake.”
Devil’s Lake is a naturally-formed lake created by glacial activity during the last ice age. The lake sits in a former gorge of what is now called the Wisconsin River, but was formed when a branch of the last glacier dammed up both ends with moraine deposits and then melted, filling the gap with water.
The lake has no known surface outlets, but may flow underground into the nearby Baraboo River.
There are many sacred Native American effigy mounds across Devil’s Lake State Park. The one featured in the video is called bird mound and it looks like a swallow with a forked tail, just exactly like the ones that we just saw flying in low circles over the grass as we walked to this mound on the morning of our visit. What a fantastic direct connection to the people who saw fit to build this mound.
According to a historic placard nearby, the bird mound’s wingspan is 240 feet.
This mound, like the others scattered around the park were built between 750 years and 1400 years ago by the Woodland Indians, ancestors of modern Native American tribes that still live in the area.
Native people may have lived in the region for 12-16,000 years, although Ho-Chunk officials claim ancestry in the region up to 300,000 years ago.
The name Devil’s Lake is a mis-translation of the local native Ho-Chunk language that means Spirit Lake or Sacred Lake. For the Ho-Chunk people the lake is a sacred place. According to Wikipedia, the lake has been called spirit lake by numerous other Native American tribes in the region.
Black and white photographs made on this trip to Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin
