Jeffers Petroglyphs

Over the Independence Day weekend, my husband and I wanted to do a family activity close to home so we drove to the Jeffers Petroglyphs. He thought he knew where it was and it turned out he didn’t quite, so we drove around an extra hour or so. We were on Highway 14 past Lamberton, and I said it isn’t this far, it’s closer to Walnut Grove and Westbrook. I finally called the site on the cell phone and she said it’s on west 30. By that time we were on Highway 30 going east so we turned around and finally found it.

Twenty bucks later, we enter the site and were...underwhelmed. It was a hot, humid day Sunday afternoon, not the best for taking a hike in a prairie. The petroglyphs are mostly covered in lichen, a live algae that grows and grows. If the Minnesota Historical Society people want to charge that much money — $6 for adults and $4 for children — there should be more to see. Scrape that stuff off!

A better time to see the ‘glyphs is sunset, they say. We saw a few; they look like a caterpillar crawled through mud and it dried. It was neat, though, seeing the prairie grasses the way the buffalo saw it thousands of years ago.