Thank you for your support of the Friends of Blue Mound State Park in 2024. The park continues to experience record numbers of visitors and the Friends have continued working tirelessly in their mission of enhancing and preserving the park to ensure all park visitors have a good experience. The Friends would like to highlight the major accomplishments over the last year, talk about the significant infrastructure investments being made, cover some of the changes with the organization and events that occurred this year.
For starters, it’s hard to overstate the impact of members and volunteers on the park. To celebrate our volunteers, we restarted the volunteer appreciation dinner in June, just a few weeks after the Horribly Hilly Hundreds event. Volunteers made a nice showing, packing Brix Cider in Mt Horeb to enjoy a chili bar and prize raffle. We also hosted our annual membership meeting in April, which brought in a number of members beyond just board members. We welcomed Alyson McGinty to the board, who has been lending her expertise in ecology to our prairie management program this year.
The Digital Media Coordinator continued to expand and extend our digital media presence in the form of social media management on Facebook and Instagram, as well as regular blog postings on friendsofbluemound.org. 2024 saw the creation of a regular newsletter, and a commitment to advertising events happening in the park on our online platforms to increase awareness of weekend and evening programming. Both of these pushed up attendance at park events throughout the summer.
Events
2025 Member Meeting
The FBMSP board has decided to move our annual membership meeting from April to Fall/Winter for 2025. As we lock down a date, we’ll send notices out to the membership so they can attend. The change in date will reduce the planning work in the first half of the year, when our two biggest events of the year also happen (trail run and Horribly Hilly Hundreds). If you want to be notified of the new meeting date, plus other updates about the park, please join our mailing list.
Horribly Hilly Hundreds
This year’s Horribly Hilly Hundreds was once again a success, seeing a return to Race Day as the event coordinator. There were a number of logistical challenges for the management team, but in the end the weather was beautiful and participation was high.
Join us on June 14 for the 2025 Horribly Hilly Hundreds One-Day Challenge Ride!
Current Park Projects
Park WiFi
To speak to the park infrastructure projects funded by the Friends, WiFi has been available at the front park office since June and became available at the Friends shelter in December. Fiber optic cabling needed to be run to various locations in the park. This project was in collaboration with the Mount Horeb Telephone Company, who donated infrastructure and is covering a portion of the ongoing operational costs. The new fiber throughout the park will also allow the DNR to upgrade their telephone equipment from the aging and unreliable copper lines, in addition to spreading the Friends’ WiFi network.
The new internet connectivity in the front office has helped park visitors stay connected and allowed the Friends begin to accept credit cards for Friends merchandise. Internet in strategic locations throughout the park goes a long way to enhancing the experience of park visitors and renters of the shelters. Look for placards with the WiFi password on the walls and consider making a donation to the Friends if you find it helpful to support the ongoing costs of operating the network. In the spring, an electrical rework of the open-air shelter at the top of the park will be completed and WiFi will be added at that location. This will serve the shelter, picnic area, and playground, in addition to being critical to Horribly Hilly Hundreds event operations each year.
Woodshed Construction
In mid-November, excavation and grading began for the new woodshed near the front office. This project is many years in the making, and will see construction starting in the spring as the weather warms up. This new building will not only allow for significantly more firewood storage, but also centralize Friends storage within the park and house an all-terrain track chair to improve access to the trails. The existing woodshed no longer keeps up with the pace of firewood sales, and poses a safety hazard for users who need to cross traffic to buy ice and firewood. The new location is centralized in the front office’s parking lot, and a garage door will allow remote operation for park staff who will no longer need to manually unlock/lock the ice and firewood each day.
Dirk Racine Memorial Shelter
In collaboration with CORP, the Friends have committed $30,000 to the construction of a memorial shelter at the mountain bike trailhead in the Friends shelter parking lot. This will be a gathering place for mountain bikers and other trail users, with planning for the shelter taking place in 2024 and construction beginning in late 2025 or 2026. The shelter is in memory of Dirk Racine, a frequent visitor to the park and avid mountain biker.
Amphitheater
And finally, our multi-year multi-stage amphitheater project continues to move forward. We expect to spend a significant amount of time in the planning and development stage in 2025, with 2024 having been spent evaluating locations and narrowing down on a site. We’re ending 2024 with surveying and site evaluations for a location on the east side of the mound, away from the existing location, near the East Tower. If you’re interested in learning more about this project, a project landing page is being developed on the Friends website to keep people informed as we move from the site-selection and vetting process into actual design, contracting, and construction. 2025 will firm up a timeline for construction, which is unclear if it will start in 2025 or 2026. The existing amphitheater will continue hosting the wildly popular Music on the Mound in 2025, and be demolished once the new amphitheater’s construction completes.
Speaking of which, 2024 saw record attendance at Music on the Mound. Many nights completely packing the amphitheater, with blankets and lawn chairs spreading out into the picnic areas on top of the mound. Planning for 2025 is moving forward, and look for the same schedule of Saturdays in July and August for 2025. We’ll host rain or shine, moving to the Friends shelter in the case of rain. We look forward to continuing to pack the house for events in 2025.
Get Involved
It wouldn’t be a complete end-of-year message if we didn’t mention areas we need help with in 2025. The organization continues to become more complicated to reflect the changing administrative landscape of nonprofits and volunteer organizations. We continue to seek new board members to lend their knowledge and experience to the work we’re doing. We would welcome board members who want to commit to a limited scope of involvement as well, meaning you don’t need to feel like you’re doing everything on the board if you join. In addition, we have the following specific opportunities that are less of a commitment than joining the board but still help the organization with our mission:
- Membership and Volunteer Coordinator – Send welcome letters, manage the membership and volunteer databases, and solicit volunteers for events like the HHH, candlelight ski/hike, and Blue Mounds trail run.
- Communications and Marketing – Write and develop online content for the website and social media, bolster the digital presence and communications of the Friends.
- Horribly Hilly Hundred volunteers – Everything from pre-event and day-of coordination, being a volunteer or the top-dog manager of a rest stop, merchandise sales, food serving, cheer squads, communication management, task runners, and just about anything you can think of an event might need.
- Firewood Splitting – The Friends supply the firewood for use at the park, and using the gas log splitter to split logs offsets the pre-split firewood we need to buy commercially.
- Prairie and Ecological Management – Volunteers to help with prairie restoration and ecological management work throughout the summer months.
- Grant Coordinator – Manage annual FBMSP grant applications for our naturalist funding, in addition to grants for capital projects like new/updated structures or major park initiatives like prairie or woodlands restoration. Help in sourcing grants to expand initiatives or fund new activities in benefit of the park.
If you’re interested in any of these opportunities, or to learn more about what it means to be a board member, email [email protected].
As always, thank you for your support of the Friends of Blue Mound State Park. I look forward to seeing you out at the park.
Justin Gleicher
Co-President
Friends of Blue Mound State Park
