Celebrate the Natural beauty of the door peninsula

The Door County Festival of Nature is a series of events coordinated by The Ridges Sanctuary and our partners in conservation to encourage visitors, residents, members, and friends to explore and celebrate the natural beauty of the Door Peninsula. Each year, we organize a number of field trips throughout the county, and special events to allow you to experience the county with field trips intimately involved in protecting and preserving these natural spaces and educating our community on their importance. We encourage you to learn more about this incredible event series and get ready to join us for Memorial Day Weekend!

Schedule of Events:

Special Event:

4:00 pm - 6:00 pm: Art Exhibit and Artist Reception

Painting and Poems from the Ridges
Works by Jeff Kunkel and Mary Elyn Bahlert

This exhibition features plein-air oil paintings by Jeff Kunkel and poems written by Mary Elyn Bahlert. Jeff and Mary Elyn are husband and wife. Both were born and raised in Wisconsin, and both are lifetime members of The Ridges. They now live in Oakland, California and return to The Ridges often. The works on display have been composed on site and will grow over the next few seasons.

These works, in word and image, are personal responses to their favorite places in The Ridges and are offered in the hope that they might help you deepen your relationship to this unique landscape.

The exhibit will be on display beginning Thursday, May 22 at the Cook-Albert Fuller Nature Center and will remain on display for the summer. Pieces will be added to the exhibition throughout Memorial Day Weekend while artist Jeff Kunkel paints in the Sanctuary during the Festival of Nature. Artwork will be for sale, and all proceeds will support The Ridges Sanctuary’s mission.

Jeff Kunkel:

Jeff attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He paints in oils in a style called plein air, which means outside, in the wind and sun and changing light. He paints loosely and quickly and completes a painting in one session. Not long ago, he was a Visiting Artist at the Cedarburg Bog near Cedarburg, Wisconsin. He is also an accomplished writer and has written two short collections of Wisconsin stories: Warming Fires and Bless Ewe. You can see his many books and paintings at jeffkunkel.org.

Mary Elyn Bahlert:

Mary Elyn is an intuitive poet who evokes images and feeling through her poetry. Her love of poetry and literature began as a child, and she can still recite from memory many well-known poems which she learned in Miss Ross’s English class at Peckham Junior High School in Milwaukee. She cannot attend a Christmas gathering without reciting, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. See her work at thewisdomyears.org.