Nature and Literature Festival Features Renowned 'Trail Marker Tree' Author

PALOS HEIGHTS, IL -- Lake Katherine Nature Center and the Palos Heights Public Library will debut a free Nature and Literature Festival from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, April 29. The festival is free and will be held at Lake Katherine, 7402 Lake Katherine Dr, Palos Heights.

Highlights include writing booths, a create-a-poem wall, author and photography exhibits, art projects for children, and food vendors. A fun literary themed hayride adventure, narrated by Jeannine Kacmar from Palos Heights Library, will investigate the Native American myths that give meaning to the world around us.

Author Dennis Downes, 65, author of Native American Trail Marker Trees: Marking Paths Through the Wilderness, headlines the festival with an informative talk at 11 a.m. He will also demonstrate the ritual of turning a young oak sapling into a trail marker tree at the park.

Traditionally Native Americans used trail marker trees to navigate through dense forest. The trees are altered when they are young and supple to achieve a permanent and distinctive bend in the trunk. They can be found throughout North America.

Downes, from Antioch, Illinois, has spent 35 years studying trail marker trees and has visited 42 states for his work.

“The history of trail marker trees is important as it was almost lost to common knowledge,” Downes says. “It’s an ingenious form of land and water navigation used by all the tribes of the Great Lake region and beyond. The trees were used to guide them off the main trails to things that human beings needed such as mineral and copper deposits, medicinal plants and some of the trails led them to ancestral and ceremonial sites. They also marked portage routes that were extremely important and useful in the Great Lakes region.”

The festival is free and open to the public.