Blue Mound State Park

Story

Blue Mound State Park is a state park of Wisconsin, USA, located atop the largest hill in the southern half of the state, near the village of Blue Mounds. The 1153acre park features a pair of observation towers affording views of the Wisconsin River valley and Baraboo Range to the north, the mounds, buttes, and rolling forests of the Driftless Area to the south and west, and the young glacial plains and city of Madison to the east.GeologyWest Blue Mound, the park's namesake, rises approximately above the Military Ridge. However, when viewed from several miles to the north or south, the apparent local relief becomes more like 600to. The mountain, as most of the other large mounds of the Driftless Area, is an outlier of Niagara dolomitic limestone. It is a monadnock, having been created through centuries of erosion, with the harder dolomite being more weather-resistant than the other surrounding rock of the region.Activities and amenitiesThe park contains a large open field, a swimming pool (the only one in a Wisconsin state park), shelters, campsites, and many miles of trails for hiking, biking, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. There is a nature center by the picnic area with natural history exhibits. Naturalists offer programs in the summer. The Military Ridge State Trail, which follows the natural east-west contour of the ridgeline from Fitchburg to Dodgeville, abuts on the southern edge of the park.