Hi, I'm Rafi Wilkinson with Indiana Dunes National Park. I'm here at Talliston Dunes, one of my personal favorite trails here. We have over 50 miles of trails and 14 different trail systems. This is really one of our most overlooked. This is a 2.9 mile trail and it really gets a lot of varied habitats from wetlands to some of the really best oak savanna we have here and really nice views. This time of year, early summer we also have great loop ins and prickly pear cactus to see and it's just absolutely great hike and on a busy weekend, I really recommend coming here instead of waiting in line for other places. So follow me as we take this hike. So we've really just gotten started on this trail and already there's many interesting things to see. For example, here we have a lot of black cherry trees. It's going to have this very distinctive bark that's peeling up. Go down the trail a little bit further here and we're going to see really one of the showcases of this trail are the purple loop ins that come up every spring, sort of early summer, just gorgeous and we're going to see thousands of these blanketing the hillsides a little bit further into the trail. We have some yellow pecoons here, very very flashy. And one of the things I really like about this trail is it's one of the easiest places to see prickly pear cactus and although you know very found throughout the United States, they really like these sort of sandy soils here in the Indiana Dunes and we find them everywhere. I always find it amazing that they survive the winter quite well. They survived prescribed burns very well and they will have beautiful flowers here within the next month. Here just in this little bit of area this is what Indiana Dunes is all about. It's really condensed habitats and plants to see here. So we have arrived here really the kind of start of the trail into the dunes. We've had a very nice sort of flat walk and sort of seen a lot of the prickly pear cactus and stuff. One thing to note here as well is that even though we're Indiana Dunes and we're in Indiana, you really need to be prepared for anything here. We obviously have all four seasons and we have dry weather and we certainly have wet weather. And so obviously a rugged pear high kebub or something you should expect to either see anything from here. We have loose sand right up against a flooded trail and it was changed week to week month to month. So you just got to be ready for it. But we can see we're going to be in a real tree. We have nice loopings here that are going to lead us into this trail. So let's see what's coming up next. So we've now arrived at a really cool feature of this trail. It's called the Inland Marsh. It's part of our extensive wetland system that permeates throughout the Indiana dunes. This wetland here was formed around 3,500 years ago when we had a lake level drop leaving these 3,500 year old dunes here. The water table rose up to create this marsh and it's just filled with birds and other aquatic plants. In fact, when we just arrived here, a mallard and some wood ducks flew off. So and I do want to point out that we'll see that it being in the marsh, the water can be higher, it can be low and so obviously planted accordingly and we're boots but well worth it and just a real gem on this trail. I made it. So I met another point along the boardwalk section where over the Inland marsh here and what I really want to point out is we can see very here really in the casing dunes. This is all part of the Taliston dunes. These are all parabolic dunes and as the wind was blowing, it pushed the sand into these arcs. What you need here is that these are not the same direction as today's dunes. So we're still forming these parabolic dunes but this is part of a 3,500 year old layer in which the wind was different. The wind was more out of the west, northwest as opposed to mainly out of the north when we have our strong storm. This is evidence of an earlier time again around 3,500 years old but we see what it's left us here as the dunes formed. The water table actually came up to form these beautiful wetlands. This one over here is covered in lovely grasses. So I've stopped along the trail here because I found some pretty interesting things to point out. It's certainly first and foremost here. We have our lupins. We really just blank it the Oaks of Anna here and I think they're just beautiful and they're part of the lagoon family. They've been used as a food source, really worldwide for over 3,000 years and they also are very important for a lot of butterflies during the larval stage of butterflies. This is a food source for them. So they're very dependent upon the lupin. Right above this here we have a sassafrest tree that's starting to grow known for obviously for making a teat of it but one of the interesting things about sassafrest is they're one of the few trees that have very distinct leaf shapes. We call mittens. So here we have this. They can look like this. They can look like this or here they can look together. So very interesting. And lastly we have more of our pecunes here that are also sort of spread throughout this really delicate yellow flower that really just adds a lot of vibrant color to the trail. So here's some really cool plants. Obviously we have this really showy. This is red columbine. Interesting to note that it's actually poisonous and can be toxic and so they actually recommend not to touch it. Certainly if you're going to work with a lot of plants but it's obviously very showy and provides a lot of contrast against the green here. We have some raspberry growing here and then we have something called Solomon seal. It's interesting. This is called false Solomon seal because the flower is on top of a showy where the true Solomon seal of the flower would be underneath less showy. So just you know obviously this is a little area we have so much going on. Let's see what else we can find. So what an incredible area right? Doesn't get any better than this. We just have patches of loopons everywhere. We've actually arrived at the trail junction here for the cutoff. So we came from the parking lot, went up that first hill, we came to our trail head. I always like to do the trail counterclockwise. We found the wetlands there and now we've arrived here. If I go straight here, it's going to add about an extra mile onto the loop well worth it. If you have the time the rest of this is just going to be sort of undulating through the talus and dunes. Taking a left here is going to shorten about about a mile. It still offers a really nice ridge line view but you're choice to pay about how much time you have. Either way you're going to get this just incredible display of the loopons here for us. All the spots in Indiana Dunes National Park, I really love this high area here in Talus and Dunes. We're high up top of Dunes region, we have these great views down. This is called Oaks of Anna. It's a pretty rare habitat. There used to be over 50 million acres of this in the United States. There's now less than 100,000 acres. Here in Indiana Dunes we do maintain and restore about 1,000 of those acres. In 2014 we were part of a $1 million effort with Save the Dunes, Shirley Heinsland Trust and the Nature Conservancy to restore this and it's an ongoing project. What makes the Oaks of Anna so interesting is that it's very sparse. We can see we have a lot of light downers, not a lot of understory here. We have all these loopons rolling. But left alone this will come up into a mature forest. By lightning, by Native Americans and by now us doing prescribary and fire is really important to these. This habitat, it won't be here without fire. We do maintain this now and it provides this wonderful understory. It's just one of the critical habitats here in Indiana Dunes and one of my absolute favorite places to be in the park. So one of the interesting things about Indiana Dunes is of course topology, geography and so much of it is hills and sand dunes. And we can see that here, obviously, underlating terrain like this. But if you ever see a flat spot, I'm going to walk over here. You're going to have to ask yourself, how can this be so flat knowing that it was just sand blowing around and forming the dunes. And unfortunately, what we have is an area of sand mining. It's very, very popular throughout from the late 1800s through the mid 1900s and some actually still continue today. But we at the National Park, we use those for our parking lot. So for instance, where our tolls and dunes parking lot is, flat, great for a parking lot because it was sand mine. West Beach are largest 600 car parking lot, completely flat. That was completely sandmined out. You know, this park is obviously we try to capitalize on wherever we've had human interference before with this and celebrate the natural areas. Wow, I just finished up a great hike here at Talestin Dunes. Saw the loop ins, they were just magnificent today. But I do want to point out, this hike is really great year round. I love hiking it in the wintertime when there's snow on it, spring in the fall. Just remember, like all of our hikes here, just come prepared, bring water, expect hot conditions or cold conditions or sometimes you know, like deep water like I saw today. And I also really want to encourage you, this is just one of 14 different trail systems. They're over 50 miles of great hikes here at Indiana Dunes National Park.