Location – Eldon Hazlet State Recreation Area is located approximately 4 miles north of Carlyle in Clinton County.
My wife and I (and our two dogs) camped for two nights in this lovely park the weekend of the 30 of September, 2006. The campground is the largest campground in the Illinois State Park system and Carlyle Lake is the largest man-made lake in Illinois at 26,00 acres.
We hiked several miles of the trail system and saw quite a few deer.
Gorgeous colors of early autumn.
Fall blooming wild flowers.
Three acres of tall prairie grasses.
We found these really clear dog prints in the soft mud around the small lake by the tallgrass prairie.
Bigfoot Perspectives – The lake and all the lands surrounding it covers a very extensive area. There is a fairly sizeable deer population. All in all it appears to be very good habitat, although there are more than 800,000 human visitors to the park every year.
In two nights of doing all night recordings I was only able to hear several distant coyotes .
Previous sightings – in the book “Sasquatch – The Apes Among Us” by John Green on p.23 is a story about track finds in 1965 near Trenton, Illinois, also in Clinton County, about seventeen miles west of the park.