Great Places Series - Lake Herman State Park

This large state park is one of our states’s oldest, I took the Luce trail and really enjoyed it, though it looked like all three of the trail systems would’ve been really beautiful. It was a brisk Saturday morning in January and mostly what I was hearing while walking was my footsteps crunching through the frozen Snow. When I arrived just before sunrise, I saw some ice fishermen and a deer and later as I was leaving it was obvious that the park was a popular place for people to take their weekend walks. I was lucky with my timing as I got to the trailhead that I was looking for just as the sunrise was very colorful with lavender, pink, yellow and blue. I can’t wait to go back to Herman Park again in other seasons and experience it over and over again.

Sunrise at the Luce trailhead.

If you are interested in seeing the painting from Lake Herman State Park or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

Great Places Series - Pelican Lake State Park

I loved the trail system at Pelican Lake and enjoyed my morning visit in mid November. I found the path snowed over on the way to a look out of the lake and I had fun trecking over the drifts to get to the overlook. A few birds and the sounds of my footsteps in the snow were the only things to interrupt the silent solitude of this hike.  

If you are interested in seeing the painting from Pelican Lake State Park or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

Great Places Series - Lake Cochrane Recreation Area

I visited Lake Cochrane in January and arrived at the park at just about sunrise. My goal with some of the parks I visited in winter were to catch great sunrises to see the way the sunlight played with the snow. I traipsed around on the frozen crust of windswept snow making sure to catch the sunrise in just the right way. I wasn’t the only one out though, the earliest fishermen were headed out to their shacks to try their luck.

If you are interested in seeing the painting from Lake Cochrane Recreation Area or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

Great Places Series - Spirit Mound

I consider it a treat to wake up early with the goal of getting to a park or nature area to hike by myself at sunrise, so the morning I spent at Spirit Mound was perfect. It wasn’t terribly cold for a January morning and being a Sunday at dawn the landscape all around us was pretty still so the soft sunrise and quiet prairie were all mine (my dog was there too I guess but he was quiet as well). The entire time there I thought about the stories of the place that had been told to the Lewis and Clark expedition about the little people that lived there and the fact that this is a location where you can stand in the same place that the expedition would have been. Sense a lot of their camps were on the river and that has changed so over the years due to damming.

If you are interested in seeing the painting from Spirit Mound Historic Prairie or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

Sunrise at Spirit Mound. 

Great Places Series - West Pollock Recreation Area

It wasn’t a very long path that I took but I took my time really enjoying the quiet morning sounds and colors

I made the 40 minute drive from Mobridge up to Pollock before sun-up because I love to catch these parks at sunrise and have them mostly to myself. I wasn’t disappointed. The frosty morning, a light dusting of snow that only clung to patches of grass, geese and the pastel sky were so beautifully serene together. I am excited to paint the subtlety of those elements. 

 If you are interested in seeing the painting from West Pollock Recreation Area or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

Geese flying were just the faintest dots in the sky.

Great Places Series - Richmond Lake State Recreation Area

I loved the gradation of color in the late fall sky and reflected in the lake.

Richmond Lake was my first stop on a little weekend trip on November 12th. It was beautiful weather for November with ice on the edges of the lake, freezing the mossy rocks until spring.  It was a quiet day other than the chatter of geese out in the middle of the 1,000+ acre lake, and I seemingly had the Quaking Aspen Trail part of the park to myself.

If you are interested in seeing the painting from Richmond Lake State Recreation Area or any of the other Parks and Recreation Areas before they are released to the public please reach out to me via the contact page!

This nice little trail is about 3/4 of a mile.