Ozark General Store and Dairy Bar

Sawed Deadwood and Fungi

As promised on Sunday, this post is about the second half of our camping trip in the Shawnee National Forest. Instead of driving around southern Illinois, we stayed in Camp Ondessonk, except for the obligatory visit to the Ozark General Store and Dairy Bar and their $3 menu. They were glad to see us again and we were glad for the hot food. It turns out that the store had only opened that week. The family that runs it, has been in the restaurant business for decades though. They had another place, but then decided to retire. After a year of retirement they had had enough of that and opened this store, which is only a bridge while their new-new place is built down the road. The wife told me that their old store had only been open four days a week and only for lunch and dinner. Now, they are open every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don’t think that they understand the concept of retirement, but they seemed like nice people and their food was worth way more than what they were charging for it.

Back at camp, we headed out for a hike. Our destination was Cedar Falls, the second highest waterfall in Illinois. We had a map, but it wasn’t all that helpful and we had a fair amount of trouble locating the falls. After wandering about for a bit, we got directions. These directions described a dry stream bed as a road. I’m pretty sure that it would have broken an axle, if driven. On the way down I had joked with Anne that it would take four strong men to haul her out of there.

Almost immediately upon arrival at the falls, we heard a person screaming. It was a women, a college student and she had just fallen. The terrain was similar to that of the Garden of the Gods, only on a slightly smaller scale. Fortunately, she had ‘only’ fallen about six feet, but her ankle was badly sprained. She screamed whenever she tried to put weight on it. There were four of them, two guys and two girls, all students at Murray State, in neighboring Kentucky.

It was about a half-mile, all uphill, over rocky trail, to the nearest real road. It turned out that they were originally all from Saint Louis. We gave her our water and trail mix. She brightened when I told her that it had come from Schnucks. Her comrades helped her as much as possible. She gutted it out moaning or crying out all of the way. As soon as we reached the road, they hopped into their car and were off. We hiked back to Camp Ondessonk and having had enough adventure for one day, we decided to head for home too.

Garden of the Gods

We went camping this weekend, but our story really started a couple of weeks ago at our block party. We were speaking with neighbors about our desire to visit Shawnee National Forest and a suggestion was made for where to camp. Camp Ondessonk is a Catholic summer youth camp, but in the offseason its facilities are sometimes made available to the general public. This weekend just happened to be one of those occasions. It would have been nice to snag one of their many cabins, but waiting as late as we did, the best that we could get was tent camping. We ended up in the Ahatsitari group campground, which as things turned out was all ours for the weekend.

Ondessonk and Ahatsitari are Native American words. Ondessonk is the Iroquois name for the missionary who became the first martyr in what is now the USA. It means ‘bird of prey’. Ahatsitari is the name of the baptized Huron-chief who assisted Ondessonk. It was cold this weekend. We got our first frost. There was ice on the Prius Saturday morning and this morning our water bottles were frozen. Coincidently, we got an email ad from REI today, asking the question, “Cold-weather camping: are you prepared?” I would have to say no, but the nearby Ozark General Store and Dairy Bar, with its $3 breakfasts helped us to cope. Shawnee National Forest runs river-to-river across the southern tip of Illinois, from the Mississippi to the Ohio and has a number of interesting sights to see. On Saturday, we saw a few of them:

Millstone Bluff is an archeological site of a prehistoric Native American hilltop stone fort and village. After 1,500 years not much is left: a few graves, petroglyphs and depressions where dwellings once stood for the estimated 100 villagers. It was our first stop and was deserted when we arrived. The lack of other tourists allowed the magic of the place to resonate.

Garden of the Gods is pictured above, but while this one photo gives you a feel for the place, it certainly doesn’t do it justice. In fact, it only shows a small portion of the place and to get a shot that would really give it justice, would require much less fear of falling than I have. We had previously visited another Garden of the Gods. That one was in Colorado. That one had been impressive, so I was not expecting much from the one in Shawnee. Boy, was I wrong. While, Colorado’s Garden was impressive to look at, this one was both impressive to look at and crawl over too. There were hundreds of tourists here and it was impossible to get a good shot, without someone photo-bombing it. Here are a few choice tidbits of over-heard conversations:

“This is a no fall zone.”
To hooded twins: “Orange sit down right now. Red stay with grandma.”
“There is nothing here but rocks and overlooks.”
“Dad, remember when you cracked a rib?” “That was on a motorbike.”

Cave in Rock State Park is right on the Ohio River. In the past, it has served as a haven for Illinois River Pirates as in pirates on the Ohio River in Illinois. Actually, Illinois River Pirates sounds like something out of the movie, “The Blues Brothers”. This cave and its illicit use was featured in the western, “How the West Was Won”. In this movie Jimmy Stewart is waylaid by said pirates. The scene was shot on location there.

That was Saturday, Sunday’s adventures will have to wait until tomorrow.