When Michael Boos heard about the latest plans by the Chicago Bears to play in a stadium near Wolf Lake in Hammond, one of his first reactions was nonchalance. After all, there’s been off and on chatter about the Bears moving to the area for years now. But then he began to see the strange possibil ities of such a move for Wolf Lake, which straddles the state line between Chicago and Hammond. “I can imagine if the Bears set up at Wolf Lake, it would be during hunting season on the Illinois side and football season on the Indiana side,” he said. “That should be a treat. We’ll see, but that’s a possibility. It’s a sad possibility for me.” Boos, who is in his early 80s, has used Wolf Lake for recreation for a long, long time. He’s seen the hunters prowl the lake’s western shore between October and January and anglers walking onto the lake in the cold months with their ice borers and short ice fishing poles in hand. He especially enjoys watching the wind surfers coast across the water’s eastern reaches in the warmer months, sometimes as he’s pedaling past down a shoreline path on his bicycle. In 1999, Boos helped form the Association for the Wolf Lake Initiative when the area faced a development threat as a proposed third Chicago airport. It was an effort to help bring various agencies and officials together across state lines to protect Wolf Lake and its wider watershed. Efforts for a third airport lost steam in the years since, but the association still hosts events and advocates for the health of the lake. Boos is still the organization’s executive director, though he’s looking to scale back his commitment. “When they decided not to put the airport here, we still had all these studies that had been done in preparation for it,” Boos said. “That really helped out those who were actively pursuing protection of the area. So that was very helpful, because they produced lots of studies on the environment. We knew much more about the environment than we did before that.” Among the things they learned was the water in Wolf Lake is remarkably clean, despite being sandwiched between heavy industry on Chicago’s South Side and Northwest Indiana. Among those who were learning about Wolf Lake at the turn of the century was Phil Willink, a La Grange Park resident who was a research biologist with the Field Museum of Natural History. “You would think there would be nothing natural left alive when you look at all the factories and everything,” he said. “But there’s actually a lot of diamonds in the rough there, a lot of fantastic places that have survived the last 200 years of development. And Wolf Lake is one of those, despite being dredged and this and that and all the factories around it.” Senior research biologist Phil Willink, then with the Shedd Aquarium, demonstrates how he uses a 15-foot net used to collect data of fish that live along the lakefront at the 12th Street Beach in Chicago in 2013. Willink, of La Grange Park, now works for the University of Illinois Natural History Survey and is president of the Association for Wolf Lake Initiative. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune) Willink, who is now Association for the Wolf Lake Initiative president, took his first scientific deep dive into Wolf Lake in 2002 as part of the Calumet Bioblitz, where he helped discover some of the lake’s “amazing biodiversity.” Among the rare creatures found there is the mudpuppy, an aquatic salamander that’s “a very sensitive species.” Further scientific investigation that started in 2016 revealed hundreds of them in the lake, he said. “It’s one of the largest populations in the region, as far as we can tell,” Willink said. That’s saying something, because the once-common amphibians are considered threatened in Illinois. When Willink signed on to lead the fish team for the Calumet Bioblitz, he first dove into the Field Museum’s collection searching for Wolf Lake specimens. “It turned out the Field Museum has been working there since 1898, and these fish are still in the museum — some are actually on display,” he said. “I looked at that and recreated the fish history of Wolf Lake over the past 100 to 150 years, and that history tells us the story of the development of the region and the environmental pressures.” With the coming of nearby factories and dense residential neighborhoods, “a number of sensitive species disappeared a long time ago,” Willink said. After the initial build-up, the lake continued to change because of increased fishing pressure. “The lake would be stocked with largemouth bass and other top level predators, and that made a lot of anglers happy but has had an effect on the rest of the aquatic community,” he said. “Then, more recently, a lot of invasive species moved in, and that had an effect on the community as well. So it’s faced a number of threats over the years.” A mudpuppy swims in Wolf Lake in June, 2015. The amphibians are considered threatened in Illinois, but have a thriving population in Wolf Lake, which straddles the Illinois/Indiana state line. (Post-Tribune) Along with the mudpuppy, which Willink called the “poster child for Wolf Lake biodiversity,” another survivor is the Iowa darter, a “small colorful minnow that’s sensitive to water quality. “It was once common and then became rare in the lake, but now it’s making a comeback because the lake is becoming healthy again,” he said. Thousands of years ago, Wolf Lake was a bay in a larger version of Lake Michigan. Over time, the south end of the large glacial lake filled in with sand, resulting in geologic features preserved in the Indiana Dunes National Park. “But it wasn’t all sand,” Willink said. “There were some lakes — like Lake Calumet and Wolf Lake. Wolf lake slowly filled in and became largely a wetland.” That changed in the 1950s, he said, with the construction of Interstate 90, when tons of material was dredged from the lake bottom to create fill for the roadbed. “So it was only about 4 feet, and now it gets down to about 18 feet,” Willink said. “There’s a whole succession story there, and that has formulated how I view a lot of natural communities. They’re not static — they’re always changing. That’s normal. That’s what they should be doing.” The Pavilion at Wolf Lake Memorial Park sits on the waterfront in the general area of the Chicago Bears proposed stadium location in Hammond on Feb. 25, 2026. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) It’s not just the nature stories that make Wolf Lake so important to Boos. “The allure of Wolf Lake is in its multiple purposes,” he said. That includes the deer and duck hunting, but just on the Illinois side. “I don’t know if it was ever legal (on the Indiana side), but they used to hunt there,” said Boos, a longtime resident of Chicago’s Southeast Side. “The police started cracking down on them in the 1970s, so you don’t find hunting over there anymore. But the fishing is big on both sides. It’s a year-round sport for residents here.” Boos collected even older stories for a book he wrote about Wolf Lake, including memories from people who “were out there trapping and fishing in the 1950s.” “They would get up early, go out hunting, and then go to school,” he said. Michael Boos, executive director of the Association for the Wolf Lake initiative, walks in an area near the Hammond Environmental Education Center in 2015 in Hammond. (John Smierciak/Post-Tribune) Willink called Wolf Lake the result of a “whole series of stories.” “Now we’re entering another chapter in this story,” he said. “The question that faces AWLI and many others is how should Wolf Lake continue to change, because it is going to change. “With the possibility of the stadium coming, there would be even more change, but what will that change be? That’s the question.” On the one hand, Willink and Boos are concerned a potential NFL stadium’s heavy traffic could affect nearby wetlands that act as a buffer, keeping Wolf Lake’s water clean. On the other hand, millions of people could potentially be introduced to Wolf Lake and its environmental importance. “Giving people the opportunity to see nature is huge, and there’s not enough opportunities to do that in the Chicago region,” Willink said. For Boos, his efforts with the association over the last quarter century have been aimed at protecting the Wolf Lake watershed, and helping bring people together over the state line to further that goal. As officials in Illinois and Indian jockey over where the Bears will end up, Boos is still working to make the state line less of an obstacle for Wolf Lake’s future, “to get Illinois and Indiana to discuss things and to agree on certain things,” he said. “We’re still fighting that fight.” Willink knows the money involved in the current fight that just happens to now involve the Wolf Lake environs likely makes the association a minor player at best. But whatever happens it will just be the next part of the lake’s story. “A land use map of the area would be so varied,” he said. “There are major factories and natural areas. You have communities, you have parks, and they’re all tied together in this relatively small space. And you still have this biodiversity, which is crazy because it shouldn’t still be there. And yet it is. “Nobody did that intentionally. We just got lucky.” Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at [email protected]. ...read more read less