Climber Rescue

Climber Rescue, originally uploaded by jw_creations.

When I arrived at Devils Lake, I was going to hike along the right side of the lake, however there was a rescue going on with several emergency vehicles - and if you view the full-size version of this shot you can see several people carrying a person out on a stretcher along the water-front. As they loaded this individual into the ambulance I could hear him yelling from across the lake.

A lot of people attempt to free climb these boulders, and every year many are injured and require rescue, and a few die.

Devil's Lake State Park is located in Baraboo, Wisconsin (just 40 miles northwest of Madison, and is situated along the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve. The nearly-10,000-acre park is home to more than 1.3 million visitors each year and has two large sandy beaches, camping, boating, hiking, fishing, and 500-foot high bluffs.

Originally as the glacier pushed and cut through the land, it piled up these hills. After the recession of ice and over the course of about 15,000 years, the soil and smaller rocks on these bluffs has been erroded away and fully exposed these exceptionally hard Baraboo Quartzite boulders.