Originally printed May 5, 2018.
Squeeze in the hike and avoid the raindrops. That was my challenge on Thursday as I set out to hike a 13.2 mile Connecting Route from Westfield to the start of the Chaffee Creek Segment of the Ice Age Trail. For better than a week I had been following the weather for Marquette County. The entire state was looking to get socked with a lot of rain this week. But, a window of opportunity showed itself Thursday IF I could complete my hike before 5:00. Gary E., trail angle par excellence, agreed to meet me at 10:15 in the morning to drive me to my starting point at Pioneer Park in Westfield.
There’s an old saying that half the fun of (name your event) is getting there. My trip from Milwaukee to Marquette County certainly did not fit that description. To help me plan my trip, I use a phone app called Wayz. The advantage of this app is that it adjusts routes according to traffic and road conditions in real time. For all my trips north of Madison, Wayz has routed me west to Madison, and then north on I-39. Something really nasty must have been happening on that route, because Wayz routed me west on city streets to U.S. 41 on the west side of Milwaukee, then north on 41 to Fond du Lac, and finally west to Marquette County on a state road. In the process, it changed my arrival time so I would now be barely on time for meeting Gary. If that wasn’t enough, it was raining like crazy for the first hour of my trip. I took a leap of faith to trust the technology and hope I would make it time to meet Gary, the trail angel. at a rest stop, I sent him a quick heads up note that I might be a touch late.
Speaking of Gary, this week would likely be the last time we’d be together, and I will miss him. He has been a great help to me as the trail angel for all my hikes in Marquette County. I really appreciated all the bits of advice on local restaurants and such. He even called the local Catholic Church in Montello to ask if they were hosting a Friday Fish Fry and sent me a note while I was on the trail. I have been writing donation checks in his name to the IATA for every time he shuttled me. Since on Friday he was going to shuttle me a good distance into the next county, I really felt he was going above and beyond the call of duty. So I brought a couple bottles of wine for him as a thank you gift.
As it turned out, I was a touch late to the pickup point, a rest area along southbound I-39 near Chaffee Creek. After a short drive to Westfield, Gary dropped me off at 11:00 a.m. at Pioneer Park. It was 50 degrees and cloudy as I started my hike.
A dominant image of Thursday’s hike was the sight of stately stands of big needle pine trees, some of them easily in the 60-70 foot range, broken every now and then by marshland, streams and lakes. I asked Gary about all the pine forests, and he said that they were planted in an effort to keep the sandy soil from blowing. A bar keeper said much the same thing. When the wind kicks up, it really causes the sand to blow, and it coats everything with a grainy film. Hearing that made me very grateful for the wet conditions in the days up to my hike and the lack of wind on this day on the trail. I was also very grateful for the cloud cover; even without extremely hot temps, I would have really baked if I had walking all that open space under direct sunlight.
Another image I took from that hike was the noise of jets. The area where I’m hiking is east of Volk Field and north of Truax Field in Madison. Both are bases for the Wisconsin Air National Guard, and they must use the skies in this area for training exercises. The jets were well above the cloud cover, so I never saw them. But I certainly could hear them. I expect that folks who live here year round are used to them, but people who come here on vacation must find living with the “sound of freedom” quite an adjustment. It was a constant throughout Thursday’s hike, as it has been for all my hikes in Marquette County.
The marshland seemed to be great bird habitat. While I saw ducks, cranes, blue jays, robins, cardinals, woodpeckers, blackbirds and sparrows galore, today I believe I had my first view of a bald eagle, a young one in its golden brown plumage. In the last hour of my hike, I also had two deer sightings.
Last, but certainly not least, I had the experience of seeing maple syrup sold by the honor method. While I’d like to think this is an example of “midwest nice”, I am pretty sure I’d see things sold this way in other rural parts of the country. And, I’m sure there’s a certain cold business calculus to this – who is going to spend the day minding stands like in the picture above when there is always so much to be done on a farm? But there is something wonderfully wholesome about coming upon a stand like this, where what is expected is the right, honest choice to pay for what you take or otherwise leave well enough alone.
I finished my hike just before 4:00, which was better than I expected. After the hike, I drove to locate the end point of my next hike. In this way I could drive to my hotel and determine how much time I would need for getting to the pickup point for tomorrow’s hike. Once at the hotel, I had a good hot shower before making the trip to The Rendezvous, a nice local restaurant, for dinner. I had some soreness, but it was good soreness – not the hurt of injury like my previous hike. As I sipped on my wine, I noticed that it had started to rain.
I missed it. Mission accomplished.
My Days on the Ice Age Trail 