Day 18: Sunday, September 8, 2013
Location: Jerry Lake Segment between FR 572 and Sailor Creek Road (end of Segment), Taylor County, WI
Sunday morning while camping in the forest. It calls to mind gentle whispers of morning breeze, soft dew on the grass, frogs singing good bye and birds singing hello. It means hearing the gentle rustling of aspen leaves and the chirping of the last few active crickets. Maybe somewhere deep in your brain you even register the first mutterings of the earth as summer starts to lose its grip and the season begins changing to autumn. And, if you’re where we happened to be on September 8, it also means pickup trucks, honking horns, hound dogs baying and shotgun shooting somewhere off in the distance.
Last night we kept the windows and doors closed because it was supposed to get fairly cool, and we weren’t disappointed as we woke to a mere 55 degrees, with the inside of the car heavily fogged because we were closed up inside all night. Maybe the fogged windows explain why the truck honked at us as it drove by at 6:30 in the morning. Maybe not.
The first thing we wanted to do this morning was finish Jerry Lake Segment. We had only 1.8 miles of trail left, and we were feeling really pretty good. We dressed and brushed our teeth, and didn’t even have breakfast, although we did drink our coffee. I haven’t mentioned before, but Theresa makes our home-brewed coffee before we leave each weekend, mixes it with just the perfect blend of Hazelnut Coffeemate and doses it out in empty Gatorade bottles so we have a mug every morning. It’s cold, but it’s good. We drove up and dropped one car at the end, where it sat the day before, and then drove south to the end of the Segment, at the southern crossing of the trail with Sailor Creek Road. We were a little disappointed, really, because there’s no sign. There’s nothing there to indicate that you have reached the beginning, or the end, of the longest trail segment on the entire journey. OK, to be technical the Gandy Dancer Segment is 15.1 miles compared to 15 for Jerry Lake, but Gandy is just a bike path, really. That hardly counts, and besides, with the new trail cut in 2012 that leads to that excellent bridge across the North Fork Yellow River, Jerry Lake has to be at least 15.2 miles long. I’m giving it the crown. And there’s no sign. I can’t even remember if there was a sign at the other end, but I don’t think so. Come to think of it, we looked across the road and there’s no sign marking the beginning/end of the Lake Eleven segment, a very impressive 14-mile Segment all of its own. For someone who likes to ‘touch the sign’ to mark the beginning or the end of their day’s hike, it left me feeling empty somehow.
No matter. Off we went. It was 7:40 in the morning, and 55 degrees. This was really an excellent piece of trail, and would have been rated an ‘A’, except that there were many downed trees along the way. I cleared as many as I could, 20 or more, but there are at least 2 major snags I left behind that force walk-arounds and another 10-15 logs left laying across the trail that people can easily go over but should still be cleared. There were no bridges built in this piece of trail, and none needed, since there were no mucky areas in this weather. We could see one or two places where people had placed a few branches for wet weather crossings, but all-in-all this was a very nice hike. Early on, we got to the Jerry Lake campground, where we located the one place where apparently we could have gotten to the water last night for our bathing, but we wouldn’t have been able to locate it easily in the dark. It was a great camping area which had been recently used, and even better there was a pit toilet of sorts back in the woods, which comes in remarkably handy when you need one. Toilets and toilet paper are two things you don’t truly appreciate until you don’t have them. Fortunately, so far, we’ve always had the paper. Actually, as we were hiking Theresa got a phone call. That’s a little startling in the middle of the forest. Someone needed a square dance caller for later that day. Even if we could have gotten there in time, which was questionable considering our current location on the trail, we didn’t want to go.
There’s little else to say about this section, except that it was really nice walking, fairly level, and well blazed. We finished up about 9:05, and the temperature had risen only to 62 degrees. Great hiking weather. Running total: 162.7 miles of trail covered; 9.1 miles ‘extra’ hiking/biking.
Location: Lake Eleven Segment between Sawyer Ave and Sailor Creek Road (end of Segment), Taylor County, WI
So – by 9:05 in the morning, we had finished the great and famous Jerry Lake Segment, which frankly wasn’t even a goal for the weekend before we started. Next we moved on to the Lake Eleven Segment, starting from the north. We drove one car down to CTH M (what’s this hard stuff on the road with the lines painted on it?) and drove down to where the trail crosses about a half-mile east of the Richter Road intersection. There really is no decent parking near the trail on this highway, and if it weren’t for a driveway of sorts we found about 0.2 miles further east, it would have been a lot farther before finding somewhere to park. We ate our breakfast, loaded our bags, and started our looping hike around the east and north sides of the Mud Lake basin. It was here, just as we started out on this section that we met an obstacle that nearly ended our hike. Theresa had a little headache at the car and took Advil, but by the time we got in the woods it turned into a migraine. Only time would tell if it went beyond early symptoms and reached the severe pain stage, but we took this hike very easy, and I left behind whatever snags and limbs were on the trail. Fortunately, the trail was excellent – Class ‘A’ most of the way with a few Class ‘B’ problems, such as downed trees and overgrowth of raspberries and other trail-side sun-loving species. These were the result of having a corridor so wide in places that the sun got through and created the same type of mess you find along power lines, where thickets of berry bushes can choke a trail to impassability, though it never got that bad. There were also some places where roots and rocks made for less-than-ideal footing, but I have no complaints. Even with Theresa’s headache, we made the 2-mile trek in just over an hour and a half. We never really got a good look at Mud Lake, but when we got to what I can only think of as Mud Creek, we found an excellent bridge that was an absolute necessity if you were going to make a dry crossing. There were three bridges in all, and each appreciated. When we reached the car it was 11:38 am, and the temperature was still only 64 degrees, so the hiking gods were taking good care of us.
The headache tolerable but not gone, we decided we could keep going. We drove the car down to the place where the trail crosses Perkinstown Avenue, about 0.4 miles east of the intersection with Richter Road. There was fairly good parking here, and we headed north at 12:00 even, temperature still at 64 degrees. This was a relatively short (1.3 mile) section with no bridges, no down trees, few hills, and very little to write about. I have to classify this as Class ‘A’ trail with one short (0.2 mile) part in the middle where it is more of a Class ‘C’, with rocky terrain, a log crossing (dry in this weather) and some bad footing. Then as quickly as it started, it switched back to ‘A’ hiking, with wide-grassy trails, easy footing, and great trail markings. We reached the end by 12:54, and the temperature was still comfortable at 73 degrees. The humidity of the day before was mostly gone, and there was even a nice breeze to keep us refreshed. Only one more piece to go.
Here’s where the madness kicks in. We were about 0.6 miles from the edge of the map in the atlas. That blasted, dog-eared, mocking ink-stain of a map telling us, ‘just a little farther…’ {sigh} Except that the next piece of trail was 2.9 miles long, and we were both tired. Theresa was very tired. The headache hadn’t helped any, either. There’s a place where the trail crosses FR 397 as it goes south where we might have been able to consider ourselves off the map, but that was a no-vehicles trail that would have added another 2 to 3 tenths of a mile, and we would have had to walk west at least a tenth of a mile to be sure we got off the map, then walk back east again to where the car was headed. That seemed like too much for too little, and despite Theresa’s better judgment we decided to hike the whole 2.9 miles from Sawyer Ave to Perkinstown Ave to end our day.
We drove the van to Sawyer Ave and went to load our packs, only to discover that all the Gatorade was 2.9 miles away in the car. All we had was water. Water is good and all, and it’s good for you, but when you sweat, it tastes salty. When you put drops in your eyes, they are saline. When they feed you through an IV drip, they use saline solution. Our bodies need salt, and we were running low. Gatorade would have been really helpful at that moment, and we didn’t have any. In hindsight we should have driven back to get some, but we were already showing poor judgment just walking that last piece of trail and we went ahead without it. It didn’t bode well as we stared off the edge of the road where the trail dropped steeply down to a boulder crossing just below a small beaver dam. We also discovered that the pack I use to carry the water shoes (just in case we have to ford a creek) was also in the car. We hoped we wouldn’t need them.
Let me classify this 2.9 mile section as a Class ‘A’ trail, which is marred by a handful of ascents and descents that were more suitable for donkeys than hikers. It wasn’t as bad as the hike up the Hospital Esker in St Croix Falls, but still it had to have been nearly a 25% grade in some places (25 foot climb over a 100-foot linear march). A good rule of thumb for trails is no more than 8%, and the reason is clear. When you have trails that are too steep, you get erosion, and there were places on this trail where time and water eroded it so badly that it resembled an accident scene from a gravel truck hitting a pile of mine tailings. Every time the trail went up and down, the route chosen was too steep, and there were even one or two places where the hiker is asked to hike up a hill just to hike right back down again, and not even for the reason of crossing to the other side. Some reroutes are in order if we want to try and preserve the integrity, safety, and beauty of the trail.
Along the way we found one nice bridge, and the campgrounds at Lake Eleven are reasonably nice. The whole section was picturesque and dry, and if it weren’t for the severe up and down crossings, this would have been one of our nicest hikes of the day.
We also discovered that despite all the miles and miles of empty trail, there’s always the chance of meeting someone. To date, we had met perhaps 20 trail hikers, but had only actually crossed paths with those going in the opposite direction twice. Make that three times. Of all the times to have a person come jogging by on the trail going the other way, this ruddy-cheeked bearded fellow came lumbering along just about the time that Theresa was taking a bare-cheeked rest on a rock to take care of necessities. He was literally jogging by. I had no time to distract him, and there was no time for Theresa to do anything other than smile. He laughed and kept jogging, saying something like, ‘no problem – I’ve done it, too’. He even kept his eyes averted. Champion fellow – quite the chivalrous gent. Theresa was somewhat embarrassed (there’s a pun in there somewhere) but she got over it quickly enough. I mean – it was only a number 1, not a number two. How embarrassing can that be?
We reached the end of the trail at 4:07 pm, about 7 minutes later than I had hoped. The temperature was back to 70 degrees. We drank deeply of the Gatorade, and drove back to pick up the van and head home. We had covered 8 miles of trail, with an extra 0.4 miles along CTH M. That was enough. Running total: 168.9 miles of trail covered; 9.5 miles ‘extra’ hiking/biking. End of Day 18.
No comments:
Post a Comment