Access & Directions

Located in Green County, Wisconsin, between Monroe and Monticello off Highway 69. Go west on either Center Road or Cold Springs Road, which merge, and go west 1 mile to W5677 Center Road. Open every day. No hunting. From the west, Skinner Prairie is between County N and Hwy 69; take Buehler Road to W5677 Center Road. Park along Center Road & walk in past the mailbox for W5677 Center Road, the eastern driveway. Please do not block either driveway. Access to the prairies is on foot from the driveway, past the cemetery via the unpaved maintenance two-track. Ahead and to the right is Little Skinner, a small parcel that marks the northwest corner, and the junction of 4 sections (2, 3, 10, and 11) in Monroe Township. To get to the big prairie, proceed downhill to the south via a 50-foot wide access through old pasture. The low ground can be wet, as it drains this valley into Argus School Branch and Bushnell and Skinner Creeks. Big Skinner prairie is the northwest-facing hillside, with wooded ravines on both edges. Yellow signs mark our boundaries. The central prairie is steep and rocky, with deep pits.

Google Map

Site Steward

Connect with the Chapter to see how you can care for this rare habitat at an upcoming work party.

This site is stewarded by The Prairie Enthusiasts Prairie Bluff Chapter.

What Makes Skinner Prairie Special

In the early spring, look for pasque flowers and listen for meadowlarks. Find a population of prairie turnip (Pediomelum esculentum), a plant of Special Concern in Wisconsin, with optimal viewing from early June to late August. See kingbirds hunt insects from the hawthorns. Practice your ID skills: find bluestems, dropseed and side oats grama. The autumn months bring Chapter seed collecting parties to Skinner Prairie for purple prairie clover and coreopsis. Notice how the prickly ash and hawthorns survived years of grazing to form large native colonies.

How was Skinner Prairie Protected

As early as 1828, John Skinner found lead deposits here in rock outcrops at the surface. U.S. surveyors noted Skinner’s diggings in May 1832 on the section line map marked today by power poles.

In 1976, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources published a Natural Area Inventory of Green County, written by Gary A. Birch with the assistance of Gary Eldred, Reynold Zeller and Clifford Germain. One of their sites was Sager Prairie, 35 acres of hillside in the Town of Monroe: “A relatively large dry prairie dominated by side-oat grama and little bluestem. There are more than 40 prairie species present.”

Local historian and Prairie Enthusiast Gary Felder visited Skinner Diggings one spring day in 1987, and found pasque flowers “in numbers that stagger the imagination,” with thousands of the early spring wildflowers covering the entire remnant hillside “like a blanket” spreading over the old mine shafts and rock piles. He wrote an article for the December 1988, newsletter of the Wisconsin Prairie Enthusiasts about Skinner Prairie:

“It is not very often that an individual is fortunate enough to find a natural area that satisfies the interests of two hobbies. In my case, local pre-settlement and early pioneer history coupled with the enjoyment of Green County’s remnant prairie sites. Skinner Prairie fits these criteria like no other site in Green County.”

In 1996, Gary Felder tried to find a buyer for Skinner Prairie — 40 acres of remnant prairie – that was subdivided into three home lots by the owner and listed with a local realtor. All the likely conservation buyers had other projects at the time, so all three lots now have houses. One of the buyers was Jim and Karen Freymiller, who built a house off Center Road, away from the prairie hillside that was their backyard acreage. One day Felder knocked on their door, and invited the couple to explore the prairie and diggings with him. Jim grew up in Boscobel and trained bird dogs, so he quickly caught Gary’s enthusiasm for native landscapes. In addition, this one had a Chapter from Green County’s early mining history.

In 2018, Jim and Karen Freymiller donated the 12.10-acre Skinner Prairie to The Prairie Enthusiasts.

How You Can Help Skinner Prairie

Volunteers from the Prairie Bluff Chapter have thinned out sumac and prickly ash on all sides. Volunteers mow weeds every summer to prevent parsnip, sweet clover and wild carrot from going to seed. Volunteers collect seeds here: side-oats grama, little bluestem and dropseed. Skinner Prairie, unburned for 100 years, got weedy and brushy after cattle stopped grazing about 70 years ago. Currently the fire regime is to burn some of this hillside, every five years (2013, 2018, 2023), although the Chapter burned a quarter-acre of a west side remnant for dropseed production in 2019.

Check out our Events Calendar to see upcoming work parties or contact the site steward to get involved.

Access & Directions

This prairie does not have any maintained trails or burn breaks on the site. However, visitors are welcome to hike the steep bluff. 

The parking lot for Muralt Bluff Prairie is located near W2635 County F, between Monticello and Albany. Access is by foot only up the steep bluff, and a trail will take you to the farthest west end. You can return by following the firebreak along the south and east edges.

Google Map

Site Steward

Connect with the site steward to see how you can care for this rare habitat at an upcoming work party.

Site Steward: Tom Mitchell (Email)

What Makes Muralt Bluff Special

Best times to see the abundant native plants are spring and fall. In early May, a large population of prairie smoke blooms on the northwest bluff along with shooting star, puccoon, violet, sand cress and Pasqueflower. Later in autumn, you can see all the tall grasses, nine kinds of asters, five species of goldenrods, gentians and blazing stars. Many other threatened and endangered species find a home here. However, changes in the surrounding land use have reduced the available grassland habitat from hundreds of acres in the 1970s to only the Muralt footprint today.

On July 20, 2014, a visitor to Muralt Bluff Prairie posted to the Southern Wisconsin Butterfly Association (SWBA) website a tally of the more than 100 butterflies that he spotted:  including giant swallowtail, eastern tiger swallowtails, clouded sulphurs, coral hairstreaks, summer azures, great spangled fritillaries, pearl crescents, question marks, eastern comma, mourning cloak, American lady, red admirals, red-spotted purples, common wood nymphs, monarchs, northern broken-dash and Delaware skipper.

The elevation of Muralt Bluff Prairie is also a sight to behold, with views of Blue Mounds some 40 miles away. 

Outcrops of limestone and sandstone rocks are present on the site.  Erratic boulders from an earlier episode of glaciation are present.  The last advance of the ice sheet stopped about 10 miles to the northeast 16,000 to 18,000 years ago, but a pro-glacial lake, named Glacial Lake Broadhead by Wisconsin geologists, backed up the valleys of Sylvester and Searles Creeks and the Sugar and Little Sugar Rivers, flooding the broad valley to the north of Muralt Bluff Prairie.  

How was Muralt Bluff Protected

During the early 1970s, early Prairie Enthusiasts Gary Eldred and John Ochsner independently discovered the unusual tall grasses and flowers covering Muralt Bluff Prairie. They kept visiting the site and made a plan to conduct a prescribed burn there. In April of 1975, Gary and John joined Reynold Zeller, Dan Hazlett, Jonathon Wilde, Deanne DeLaronde, Chuck Philipson, Tim and Peggy Hammerly, and John Ringhand as they dropped a match in the southeast corner and watched the fire follow the wind across the field to the north.  Their suppression  tools—snow shovels and burlap bags—proved inadequate to slow or stop the fire.  The Albany Fire Department responded to reports of a wild fire, but they were unable to get their trucks up the bluff, so everyone stood and watched as the fire eventually ran out of fuel.  Many cedar trees were scorched, the ground was blackened. But the following summer erupted in blooms of native flowers which were long suppressed by lack of fire. The sight was impressive enough that the Green County Board of Supervisors was persuaded to buy the acreage, protecting it from development. Read more about this first prescribed burn HERE.

Muralt Bluff Prairie was dedicated as a Wisconsin State Natural Area in 1977. With the help of The Nature Conservancy, an additional 12 acres was added to the site in 1981. The county deeded Muralt Bluff Prairie (then 62 acres) to The Prairie Enthusiasts in September, 2013. With the addition of the adjacent Iltis Savanna this is a 95-acre mosaic of prairie, savanna and woodland.  A fourth parcel, Stauffacher Prairie, which is located a mile away across from Gap Church on Highway 59, is considered by the Wisconsin DNR to be part of the Muralt Bluff Prairie SNA although that land is owned by the State of Wisconsin.

How You Can Help Muralt Bluff Prairie

The Prairie Bluff Chapter is stewarding the site by removing colonies of aspen, sumac, dogwood, prickly ash and honeysuckle that had invaded from the fence lines and wooded edges. These species are being removed as they smother and shade out the native plants and grasses.

Check out our Events Calendar to see upcoming work parties or contact the site steward to get involved.