Next up we're visiting Killin Wetlands, a Metro Nature park near Banks, on the far west side of the metro area. The park comes to about 590 acres overall, but most of it is a swampy lake, and most of the non-swampy part is leased out as farmland, so public access is limited to a small area in the NW corner of the park. So you might feel a bit underwhelmed with what trails and so forth are available just going by the size of the place. The 2016 master plan for the park, essentially what's there now but with a few things punted off to future phases haven't been built yet. In particular, the plan envisons a boardwalk that juts out into the lake for a bit, which would have helped with the sort of photos I had in mind. I had brought a camera with an infrared filter along, thinking the wetlands would be sort of photogenic in an infrared sort of way on a sunny day, but alas no. Here's one photo that I thought turned out ok, at least ok enough for the 'Gram:
A 2015 Metro doc about the wetland restoration side of the effort mentions they expect restoring the place back to more or less how it was before Euro-American farmers did a number on it will take roughly the same amount of time it took to get to its current state, so something in the 150-200 year range. And yeah, one possibile future may be what I said in the IG caption, people beaming in from near and far just to vibe with the peat. But that was a few years ago, and extrapolating from current trends here in late 2025, it strikes me that another likely possibility is that in the 2220s we'll be in the early centuries of an extended second Dark Age, and we'll be back to tossing people into the nearest peat bog (i.e. here) for witchcraft, or for saying the Earth is round, or knowing numbers greater than 12 or so. On the bright side, that means the wetlands here will be a huge help to the future archeologists of the mid-4440s as they decipher what happened here, and some of the better-preserved ones will end up in museums and be given cutesy nicknames, like that guy they found frozen in the Alps, and everyone will vow not to let it happen again, and they'll really mean it, and who knows, maybe they'll even be right next time, at least for a while.
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