Burning Star SFWA and Little Grassy Fish Hatchery

In early April, we started our longest hiking trip yet, visiting Carbondale for 6 days. For the first day of this epic trip, we visited Burning Star State Fish and Wildlife Area and Little Grassy Fish Hatchery. Burning Star SFWA is in DeSoto, IL about 5 hours and 15 minutes south of Chicago, or 15 minutes north of Carbondale. Little Grassy Fish Hatchery is in Makanda, IL about 30 minutes south of Burning Star.

When we plan a trip this long, one of our considerations is how much hiking are we going to have time for after a full morning of driving. We were fortunate enough to be starting our first day in Central Illinois instead of Chicago, but we were still concerned that we were going to be too tired to do any of the more demanding parks that this region is known for. So we settled on these two parks to maximize our time that first day, without becoming too exhausted.

Burning Star SFWA was originally a coal mining site, and was named by the company that first owned the land. The mine closed in 1992, and reclamation started soon after that. It is still in the process of being developed, which is why there are not currently any places to hike here. Right now the land can only really be used for hunting and fishing.

Despite the land still being developed, it was quite pretty, and surprisingly busy. While taking photos, several cars drove past us. The area was somewhat confusing, as it looked to us like the road led to private property, so we’re not sure where the cars went.

The other dynamic of our day was the high water at the park. The week before our trip, there was historic rainfall in the region, causing massive amounts of flooding. This will become a theme of the entire trip, as the further south we went the worse the flooding was, but this was our first encounter with it. One of the lakes was inaccessible to boaters because the boat launch was under water, and the gate prevented anyone from driving over. The other lake we were able to walk by for a little bit, but we could tell the water was high here too. Still, it was better than we were expecting it to be.

Our second stop was the Little Grassy Fish Hatchery. This was certainly an interesting property. There are no other fish hatcheries on the main park list, despite there being two others in the state that seem like they would also be on the list. Even more confusing, there is a Little Grassy Lake nearby, but it doesn’t seem to be a state park and it is in the process of being drained so that repairs can be made to the dam there.

Regardless, when you go to the IDNR’s park list on their website and click on Little Grassy, it takes you to a page about the fish hatchery, so that’s where we went. We randomly visited  Jake Wolf Memorial Fish Hatchery a few years ago, the first time we visited Peoria. Little Grassy is very similar, just significantly smaller. The displays are still very informative, and there was a video telling you about what the hatchery does. We looked around for about 15 minutes, and then went out onto a small patio that overlooked the outdoor pools.

At this point, an employee found us and asked if we would like to feed the fish. We had not been expecting this, and were excited to accept. He gave us each a cup of fish food, and we went over to a pool that had channel catfish in it. He informed us that they don’t normally have channel catfish, and they were most likely going to be used for kids fishing events at some point. He was also concerned that it might be too cold for the fish to come up at all. But after tossing the food into the pool, it only took a few minutes for them to start coming up.

Now, this experience would definitely be something that would be interesting for kids to do. But considering that we did not think we would spend more than 20 minutes here, and then getting a whole unique and unexpected experience, we were very excited and glad we had the opportunity to come here.

The first winery we visited was Blue Sky Vineyard. This winery usually has a lot of places to sit and enjoy wine outside, but they had not opened everything up the day we were there. So we sat inside and enjoyed the Italian inspired ambiance. The wine was very good, but they also had a bread and oil dish that we would recommend having with the wine.

Lastly, we visited Route 51 brewing. This brewery was completely empty the day that we went, which seemed weird to us considering how interesting the space was and how much we enjoyed all the beer we had. We may have simply visited on a slow day, but we would absolutely recommend Route 51 Brewing.

We weren’t expecting day one to be as eventful as it ended up being. Even with no hiking at all, we managed to have a very fun day. We can really only recommend Burning Star SFWA to photographers, hunters, and fishermen when the water is lower, but we still found it pretty. Little Grassy was definitely worth a quick visit if you are interested in fish, especially for kids. Overall, a surprising but good start to our Carbondale trip.