Day 8: Sunday, August 11, 2013
Location: Wood Lake Segment, between Bear Ave West and North Loop Road, Taylor County, WI
The earth is a very unyielding bed. No matter how cheerful the campsite may look, how serene the fire, how silent and natural the surrounding forest, a county park is sure to provide a hard-packed, unforgiving surface virtually guaranteed to make you ache anywhere you have bones. It’s bad enough if you sleep on your back, but if you sleep on your side, or folded in any other position, it’s immeasurably worse. Don’t get me wrong. We own an air mattress. We just didn’t bring it. We got up, stiff and sore, wishing that we had taken ibuprofen the night before, and dragged ourselves into our clothes. Breakfast was a brief affair, and we saddled up and started walking. This was the result of a bit of brilliant planning on Theresa’s part. We had parked the Prius a few miles down the trail, and were able to hike directly there from the campsite, since the trail actually came within 100 yards of where we slept. A very nice piece of trail led south and then east along the edge of Wood Lake, and it was a gem of a hike, as advertised. Relatively easy walking, well-marked trails, and even though it felt longer than the 2.1 miles I guessed it to be, we actually got to the car sooner than I expected. Only two more segments faced us for the day, and they were both shorter than the one we had just finished, if only barely.
We drove the car about a mile back to the west along Cutoff Road (the real one) and parked where it intersected the trail leading back around the north side of Wood Lake, so as to complete the loop around the lake and walk back to the campsite. Again, the trail was lovely, and needed only minor grooming as we walked along. We got back to the campsite feeling a little tired for not having slept well, but took a nice rest packing up the tent and having some late lunch.
Finally, we got back in the car and drove to the intersection with the real Bear Ave East, or north as I like to think of it, and hiked the last couple of miles back to the car to complete the Wood Lake segment, a total of 12.1 miles broken into three day’s effort. Except that we weren’t really happy. We hadn’t actually connected the dots in the middle. Rather than driving back to pick up the van and call it a day, we drove back to Bear Ave Middle and walked the 0.7 mile gravel road bypass around the closed segment at Gus Johnson Creek. Even if every foot of trail wasn’t covered, we can say honestly that we walked the entire segment, from one end to the other, and actually did some extra in-and-out hiking on a closed segment. Running total: 47.2 miles of trail covered; 7.6 miles ‘extra’ hiking/biking. End of Day 8.
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