Day 7: Saturday, August 10, 2013
Location: Wood Lake Segment, between Bear Ave West and STH 102, Taylor County, WI
Why in the world did we drive BOTH vehicles home? We could have left one sitting up in Taylor County and saved the gas and the alone time driving. We won’t do that again, if we can help it. Today we got up, drove BOTH cars back up to Taylor County, and planned to resume our hiking. But – change of plans (again). Today, we brought our camping gear with us, planning to stay at the Wood Lake county park. We decided we should once again start with the longest piece of trail first thing in the morning, and it worked out rather well. We parked the van at STH 102, and took the Prius onto the gravel roads that only show up on one of our three maps, looking for the place on the trail that theoretically crosses somewhere north of Bear Avenue. Long story short, it doesn’t exist. Don’t waste your time looking for it. We drove through rutted gravel two-track roads of deteriorating condition until Theresa wisely put a stop to the madness and said she wasn’t going any farther. Convinced it must be ‘just around the corner’, I got out of the car and jogged onward. This little side trip cost me about a 0.4 mile jog in one direction to a nice hunting shack, and a 0.4 mile jog back to the car to report that no, the trail doesn’t cross this track anywhere. A waste of time and energy. Back to Bear Ave where we should have started in the first place, we started our day once again almost an hour later than we should have, and hit the trail. The length of this first piece is up for interpretation. One sign says 2.1 miles, another says 2.5, and my legs felt more like 3. On the map, the little squiggly covers two miles as the crow flies, with significant north-south and up-down variegation, so I’m sticking with at least 2.8. Of note: There is one area of the trail that crosses a marshy area which was marginally marked, and there is only one good way through. The correct way is to cross the stream directly in front of you using the rocks which are at least partially hidden by long grass, sedge and raspberries. Then, cut a hard left along a causeway-like logging road which itself has been cut in two by water and must be hopped across. The WRONG way is to try and ‘go around’ either to the left or right. It starts bad and gets worse, although we proved it could be done. Across this area going west, the trail darts north into the woods. This corner was very difficult to spot, so with a little saw-work and yellow paint we made sure the next hikers would have an easier time of it. The rest of the segment went without incident.
Once done with this rather longish-feeling segment, we drove to ‘Bear Avenue Middle’, the second of three places where the trail crosses Bear Ave, found very good parking along the road and hiked down a broad logging road of a trail for about a half a mile. The problem was, the trail left the logging road about a quarter-mile into the trip and heads west into the woods, so we actually blew a quarter mile past and had to back-pedal until we found the turnoff. This was at least partly funny, because only a week earlier we had spoken to someone who alluded that he had made the exact same mistake. Out came the paint and the saw again, and this corner, too, became much harder to miss.
The segment hiked fairly well until about a mile into it. The western ¼ mile of this piece, however, has seen no less than four major trees come down across the trail which are in serious need of a chainsaw. I cleared paths through, under, or around the first three snags, but the last one was just silly. I followed the beaten path of many wanderers up the hill and around this one. Definitely a place that should be visited by trail maintenance volunteers.
Our next piece gets a little harder to describe. According to the Atlas on page 26f, we were headed for the place where the trail crosses cutoff road, north of Bear Ave. There is a short sub-segment that goes around and across Gus Johnson Creek, which we planned to hike east to west. Two problems. First, the trail section is closed due to beaver activity. More on that later. Second, the Atlas has all the roads in this area labeled incorrectly. The part that goes north from Bear Ave on the Atlas map that is labeled ‘Cutoff Rd (Primitive Road)’ is in fact where Bear Ave continues north. The third crossing of Bear Ave in fact occurs up there. The other road on the Atlas, labeled as Bear Ave between Cutoff Rd (Primitive Road) on the west and, uh, Cutoff Rd on the east, is actually Cutoff Rd, and not Bear Ave. And the one labeled Cutoff Rd at the east end of Bear Ave is actually North Loop Road. If you’re lost, so were we. Let’s try again. In reality, Bear Ave cuts north and crosses the Ice Age Trail just west of Gus Johnson creek, up near the north bend. Cutoff Rd then travels from Bear Ave to North Loop Road, which is the north-south road that ends at Wilderness Ave just south of the trail, but east of Wood Lake. Actually, it gets worse. Wilderness Ave does in fact make it to this intersection, but instead of continuing east from there, the name of the road changes to ‘Ice Age Trail’, even though the map still labels it as Wilderness Ave. Cute, but confusing. It’s like writing a story with two different main characters named ‘Bob’.
Back to the hike. We parked the car up on Bear Ave east (north?) and walked to the trail head, where we met our first ‘Trail Segment Closed’ sign. Apparently, a beaver dam caused a washout of the bridge across Gus Johnson Creek, and they recommended walking the road basically back the direction we just drove to get here. In the end, we both decided to hike the segment just to see if the wash-out was still a problem. After all, it has been fairly dry weather lately, so maybe we could get across after all. Truth be told, it was my idea. Theresa would happily have gone around. We learned two things on this little jaunt. There are a LOT of people who help to clear the trail of fallen branches, and trail closed signs pretty much mean the trail is closed. Not that one can’t hike down to the creek and look across the beaver dam to the other side, but it’s definitely an out-and-back hike. When I got down to the creek (which was a long way downhill by the way – I wouldn’t want to try hiking stuff like this when there’s snow on the ground) I heard the unmistakable slap of a beaver tail – the very varmint who probably caused the problem in the first place. There was not one beaver dam, but several in this area, and the erstwhile bridge floated forlornly in the middle of this black water backwater looked more like a misplaced pallet than a safe crossing. We stared across. Theresa knew all along there would be no crossing. I figured with the right shoes and the right attitude, the crossing could be made on one of the beaver dams, but they were fairly flimsy, and not yet water-tight. It could be very wet, and for no good reason. We hiked back up and out, around the branches and one enormous fallen tree which directly crossed the trail at the exact point of a 90 degree turn, and went back to the car. Rather than hiking the connecting route, we decided to count the in-and-out as sufficient and mark the segment ‘done’. We drove to the second car, then dropped the Prius off at the next place we planned to walk to, and took the van to the campground at Wood Lake County Park. The camping turned out to be free of charge, and really quite nice. We laid out our tent, started a little fire, did the wash up and dinner thing, and went to sleep fatigued but happy with our day. Running total: 41.5 miles of trail covered; 6.9 miles ‘extra’ hiking/biking. End of Day 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment