Your Forest Preserves

Ethel's Woods

The site’s strategic location to neighboring Raven Glen Forest Preserve offers a direct linkage creating a large, contiguous land holding. Large preserves such as this provide a natural greenway corridor for better land management, wildlife protection and expanded outdoor recreation opportunities.

In fall of 2001, the Forest Preserve Board passed a resolution to name a forest preserve in tribute to Ethel Untermyer, who directed a successful referendum campaign in 1958 that formed the Lake County Forest Preserve District. Ethel took action to fulfill the request of her three-year-old son, Frank, who wanted a place to play in the woods.

Along the eastern edge of this preserve is 170 acres of century-old bur oak, white oak, shagbark hickory and black walnut trees.

Scattered throughout the site's oak-hickory woodlands are small, isolated forest ponds that hold water in the spring and early fall. These ponds, along with two Advanced Identification (ADID) wetlands bordering the high-quality Old Mill Creek stream corridor, and several creeks that flow into the site's prominent 60-acre Rasmussen Lake, provide valuable wildlife habitat and food sources for a variety of birds, mammals and reptiles.

Rasmussen Lake in the southern portion of the preserve was formed from the construction of a dam across Old Mill Creek in 1957. The outflow creates strong rapids along the stream corridor downstream of the dam. The stream winds through box elder, cottonwood, weeping willow, green ash and other flora.

The combination of the site's massive woodland and its serpentine-shaped lake offers a picturesque landscape reminiscent of a northwoods setting.