Day 72: Harwood Lakes Segment (Part 2), Chippewa County

Day 72: Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Total Miles covered for the day: 5.9

Location: The Harwood Lakes Segment between the west trailhead on 167th Street to the east trailhead on CTH E. 

5.9 miles of trail covered.

Though I am calling this Part 2 of the Harwood Lakes Segment, I can hardly say we had hiked any of it previously that we were aware of. In fact, we didn't realize we had already hiked 0.2 miles of the segment until we were more than halfway through our hike today. More on that later. 

This morning, we woke up in Cornell in our AirBNB and were not looking forward to the day. The weather was predicted to be another scorching hot day, with high humidity and a heat index near 100 degrees. But we were now just 6.1 miles from closing our western gap (or so we thought). Six miles. One segment. And we would have achieved our goal that we set out this spring, completing all the maps from 1-31 along the northern march. One by one we have been ticking off segments, maps and counties, from McKenzie Creek to Chippewa River, and today we would finally close the gap by hiking the Harwood Lakes segment, if we could. 

Even though it might have worked out better for us to have gotten up at 4 am and gotten on the trail with the first hint of light, we just didn't have the energy after all we had done recently. Instead we had a nice breakfast and got a slightly later start.

We dropped off our target vehicle at the large parking area on CTH E, then drove our launch vehicle down the winding gravel road known as 'Deer Fly Trail'. I can confirm that Deer Fly Trail is indeed very drivable, and when you reach the trail crossing there is plenty of room to park. This is the exact opposite of what you might expect if you have driven down similar 'roads', 'trails' and 'firelanes', that may or may not have the dubious distinction of being labeled 'rustic' or (worse) 'primitive'. This was actually a great way to cut this segment in two, and we weren't the only ones who knew it. 

When we arrived at the parking area, we were met with the same array of vehicles we had seen a few weeks earlier on the Firth Lake Segment. The Chapter Volunteers were here!!

I'll give you a minute to figure out all the jokes packed into the 'Eskergo' plate. 

We weren't sure which way the team went to do whatever trail maintenance they were planning on doing, but we hoped to run into them again and give them a round of applause. 

We started out hiking eastwards at 8:45 am, with the temperature already at 65 degrees and climbing. We touched the sign and off we went. 

The very first part of the trail was a brief downhill, followed by a long uphill climb gaining about 80 feet in elevation over the course of two tenths of a mile, with an almost immediate drop of 50 feet in elevation over the next one tenth of a mile. This pattern would not be broken for the rest of the hike.

The forest here is quite young, with very few of what I would call 'mature' trees. There were lots of ferns and wildflowers in the understory, and the trail was in extremely good condition. I can't think of a single spot along the whole trail that was muddy or unpleasant to hike in any way. There were bridges and boardwalks when you needed them...

Signs when you needed them...

And benches sprinkled along the trail. 

The bench pictured above is at a spot called 'Kim's Crossing'. It wasn't much of a crossing, and it wasn't much of a view, but it was a truly great bench, built with love and hauled out to give us hikers a break if we needed one. 

Thanks, Kim!

Sensitive Fern

So there are a few things I remember about this part of the trail. 

The first is that we encountered what appeared to be a father-son pair making the absolute most out of their hiking day. They were on the kind of hike that achieved 25 or 30 miles in a day, except that they didn't have the right supplies. They had no time to chat, and it seemed like they were working very, very hard at having fun. I wondered if they even noticed all the beautiful ferns around them.

The next thing I recall is that for a brief period of time, the trail was shared with a horse trail. It didn't last long, and the signage was good for both trail hikers and horse riders. 

Which leads me to a random thought. Time and time again on the trail I have seen people walking their dogs, dutifully toting along a little plastic bag of poop to be discarded later on. There are even signs telling pet owners that they must clean up after their pets, using all manner of icons, euphemisms and/or delicate language. But then there are the horses using the exact same trail. Where is their little plastic baggie, huh? 

I remember seeing this little nugget stuffed into the side of a sign. It was a fortune cookie fortune saying, "Your great happiness is based on the warmth of your heart." It still makes me smile.

I remember that there were a lot of trees that had been cut down in recent logging, but the trail very delicately avoids those areas almost completely, skirting just inside the edge or avoiding completely the open areas. 

One of many benches

And then finally it was no longer possible to avoid the logged area, so the trail cuts across a narrow area that is completely open save for the grasses and the thousands of aspen trees sprouting up. The trail is less defined here, and you can barely see Theresa in the shot below making her way up a short hill. 

And then the work of the Mobile Skills Crew comes back into focus, returning us to the gorgeous dirt single-track route that has carried us along. 

I remember passing the camping area on the southwest side of Picnic Lake, and thinking to myself that for the through-hikers, this would be a glorious place to camp for the day. You could invite friends. You could stay for days. 

And the thing I remember best about this section is being followed by a lawn mower.

Now before you go getting all disgruntled about this kind of noise-making on your oh-so-quietude on the trail, consider this: The only reason the trail isn't completely overgrown with grasses, berry bushes, aspens, thorn apples, poison ivy, nettles and any other variety of vegetation is that people like this go out a couple times a year and actually MOW the trails. Yes - those trails. The ones you hike along, over the rocks and boulders, across the creeks, up and down all those hills, happy that you never, ever have to go back and do that again. There are trail volunteers who take these DR Brush Hogs, or whatever that thing is, and mow the edges, in two directions, not walking in the middle where it's easiest, but walking on the edge where it's all lumpy-bumpy and uneven. 

As far as I'm concerned the single most unappreciated element that makes a good trail into a great trail is the work done by the people who mow the edges. These men and women are true and proper trail heroes. More than the ones who put out benches (though they are also among the trail elite in my eyes), more than the ones who go out with chainsaws to clear the downed trees (and could we get by without those heroes?), more than the ones who go out periodically to refresh the paint on the trees, more than all of those the mowers of the trail stand alone in my mind as the ones who make all the miles enjoyable. 

The guy in the video, by the way, is named Dave. Dave is a lanky, strong guy who spends a lot of his time in the summer mowing trails. He and I chatted for a while and I thanked him and his whole crew for the great job they do maintaining the trails in Chippewa County. I contrasted that to the Blue Hills area, which we said we had just finished and found somewhat lacking, and he told me that they don't really have very many volunteers up there, and once a year this crew goes up there to do volunteer work as well. I told him that of all the things we love on the trail, the benches and the trail mowing were the two we appreciated the most. He said that he has made dozens of benches through the years, and he hauls them out and puts them on the trail himself. In the summer he gets help carrying them whole from the road to wherever they sit, and in the winter sometimes he'll haul them out alone, using a sled. 

This day he had only gone as far as the bridge on the south end of Picnic Lake and turned around, so it was on his way back that we chatted, not far from the camping area on Picnic Lake. "I need to go find my wife," I told him. "It's been brutally hot for days. I'm hoping she found a bench somewhere to wait for me to catch up."

"I just put in a new bench on Picnic Lake," he said. "Be sure to stop there!"

About 30 seconds after we parted ways, I heard his motor stop. I didn't think much about it and I kept hiking. When I reached the bridge at Picnic Lake I noticed that the water level had risen significantly and there had been a stop-gap extension put on the bridge on both ends. 

And as I walked around the south end of Picnic Lake I hollered to Theresa, who hollered back from up the trail. She had indeed found the bench that our friend Dave had placed there just last fall, and it was in a place so completely and totally in need of a bench I marveled that one had not been placed there before. 

The two of us were there for quite a while enjoying the view, when here comes Dave, trailing along behind us. 

"I didn't think I'd be seeing the two of you again", he said. "But then I ran out of gas up there on the trail."

I told him I was wondering how that worked, because I hadn't seen him toting any extra gasoline. He said that usually doesn't happen, because he fills up the tank before he goes out and it usually lasts both ways. He told us he was walking to the same end of the trail we were to meet someone who was bringing him some gasoline, which was a heckuvalot closer than walking nearly three miles in the other direction and back again. 

We chatted for a bit longer, and then he told us that the trail we were walking on around Picnic Lake was basically all new because for several years the water level around the lake had been rising. 

"Beavers?" I asked. 

He said that no, it was because of snowfall and extra rain. The lake level had come up quite a bit on its own. He said that's why they had to extend the bridge. It's also why they had to come through and cut a new trail, because the old one was under water. If you go up to the lake picture above and look closer, you'll see that one of the close trees is in fact submerged at the trunk, and across the lake you can see a ring of dead trees right at the water line whose roots had been drowned. 

I told him that he and his crew do an amazing job of maintaining the trails - better than any other chapter as far as we knew, though in all fairness we can only speak to the chapters where we have been hiking to date. We told him that this new trail was amazing, and looked like it had been there for years. Later on we saw where the trail was not only cut fresh, but had been reinforced by boulders through a small switchback. These people really do work hard. 

We sat a while longer on Dave's Golden Bench and bid Dave farewell. Once we finally got up and rolling again, it wasn't long before we found ourselves at this sign, and shortly thereafter came out on CTH E, at precisely 12:04 pm. It was only 75 degrees so far, so the weather was cooperating. 

And, lo and behold, there was Dave, still waiting for his gasoline. 

Long story short, we were there while the owner of the Eskergo car and another very active chapter leader showed up to bring Dave his gas. We offered them all a round of applause and expressed again how pleasant it was hiking their trails and how much we appreciate their hard work. 

"Where are you from?" was the first question. 

"Wausau," I replied.

"Are you a part of the Marathon Chapter?"

"Nope. We're focusing on hiking the trail right now."

"You can do both," was the quick answer, and inside I bristled a bit but remained cordial. 

"I'm volunteering for the Mobile Skills project on the Ringle Segment this August," I said. 

"Well, then, I'll see you out there!" was the reply. "I'm the volunteer coordinator for that project!" (Team Leader? Crew Chief? I don't remember exactly what title he used.)

They proceeded to then take down my name and contact information to be forwarded to the Central Moraines Chapter leadership. 

I didn't mind. Much. I know that the trail needs volunteers. People who are dedicated, hard-working, and care about the quality of the trail. What they didn't know, and I didn't bother to express, is that I 'volunteer' continuously as I hike. One of the items I carry with me as I hike is a small saw, and I use it frequently to clear surprising large obstructions from the trail as we go. I'm sure I have cleared no less than 100 small to medium-sized trees from the trail, including those that have been laying there for years, and tossed uncountable thousands of branches and loose round stones off of the trail. Sometimes I rip encroaching trees out of the ground, the small ones that would eventually need to be cut down. Sometimes I take a branch and lever large trees out of the way, if I can take advantage of a little gravity to remove something that has to be climbed over or around. 

And I know that if people like the ones I was talking to didn't recruit volunteers, then Chapters like theirs couldn't exist. So I didn't mind being recruited. But it is unlikely that I will join the local chapter, at least not now. Instead I will go on contributing in my own way, and being grateful of those who in their way contribute to the overall beauty and wonder that is the Ice Age Trail. 

And I learned that the trail crew were all meeting at one of the Ice Cream Stores in Cornell for lunch, and that they were done for the day, so we wouldn't have the opportunity to thank them all in person. It's too bad. We were invited to come into town and see them in person, but if we were going to finish this trail today, going back to Cornell wasn't in the cards, so we parted ways. The two cars drove east, we drove west, and Dave headed back down the trail with his can of gas to finish mowing the forest. 

Thanks, Dave!

So for the second half of our hike we drove to the western trailhead sign and parked along the road where we had parked in the past. It was at this moment, as we consulted our maps and figured out just exactly how much hiking we had left for the day, what time we might finish, and how hot it would be by the time we were done, that we discovered we didn't have 3 miles left to go (half of the total distance), we didn't have 2.8 miles left to go (the exact distance noted on the map for this half of the segment), we had only 2.6 miles left to go because we had already hiked the 0.2 miles along the road that go north of the trailhead sign, that are included in the total distance for the Harwood Lakes Segment. 

This was good news indeed, because it was already 1:10 pm, and the temperature had climbed all the way to 78 degrees on the way to 90. Our break for lunch put us into the hot, miserable part of the day, and the last little push to finally, after weeks of hiking, close the western gap, was going to be an anticlimactic endurance hike through dangerous heat conditions. Any two tenths of a mile we didn't have to hike were cause for celebration.

Once more we touched the sign at the western trailhead and this time rather than hiking north along the road, we went east into the woods for our very last look at Chippewa County. 

I'll be brief in my description of the trail because this is already a very long post, and I have a lot of pictures to share. The trail was fabulous. There were a few hills, but overall they did a very nice job taking the trail among the hills, rather than up and over them. We got a decent view of the Harwood Lakes that gave the segment its name, but there are nowhere near as many lakes and ponds as are hosted by the nearby Chippewa Moraine Segment. When you need bridges, they are there, including the well-renowned curving, one-railed bridge over a peat bog that is dedicated to Cal Kraemer.

Another boardwalk in particular sticks out in my mind that is a long, winding construction that enables hikers to avoid what would otherwise be a long tract of mud. Also, the trail was clear, free of most rocks and debris, and there is at least two benches that I recall. Very, very nice trail. 

And of course we picked up some wood ticks along the way, and one or two deer ticks as well. But we have definitely seen worse. And now I'll just share some of the photos that tell the tale of what we encountered as we hiked through the heat.

Tracks from a very large deer - note that the toes point out, not in. 

Hello, froggie! I see you hiding in there!

Sharp-lobed Hepatica, post blooming stage

I want to take just a moment and elaborate on these next three photos. Theresa was walking ahead of me and she suddenly startled, similar to how she react when she sees a snake, but not quite as severe. She told me she was looking at a rock on the trail ahead of her when all of the sudden it moved. 

A rock in the trail that moved

A closer look told her right away that it was a turtle, of course, but not one we recognized.

Not being at all familiar with most turtles (I now a few on sight) I at first thought this might have been a Wood Turtle, but further research led me to conclude (based on the bright yellow chin on this fellow) that it was a very old and very large Blandings Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii). These are supposed to grow to a carapace size of up to 10 inches, and this old fellow was definitely reaching the upper end of that range. 

Besides taking the photos, we disturbed him (was it a him?) as little as possible and kept moving.

Bench overlooking Harwood Lakes

Cal Kraemer's Bridge

There is a bench build right in the middle of this gorgeous bridge construction that is dedicated to a deceased dedicated trail volunteer by the name of Cal Kraemer. We never knew him, but it sounds like he was a great guy.

Another view of Cal's Bridge. The bench is built into the middle on the left side.

Wild Strawberries!! Yum!

What is pictured above is the very long and very appreciated boardwalk that allowed us to just stroll casually across the top of what is obviously a very wet part of the segment in some seasons. There is a bench on the east end of this boardwalk.

And this is the very last photo we took in Chippewa County. 

After nine weeks of hiking through freezing rain, snow, hail, burning heat, and all manner of trail conditions from terrible to terrific, when we reached the end and closed the 140-mile gap, making for a continuous line from map 1 through map 31, we were too hot, too tired, and two absent-minded to even snap a photo. 

We did, I know, actually set down our hiking sticks and perform a formal 'happy dance', more out of a sense of ritual than elation, and then trudged to the waiting van. All the trail volunteer cars were gone, and we had missed them. We did see the part of the trail they were improving, though, a series of stone steps that were installed to prevent erosion. 

It was 89 degrees, and we were dripping with sweat. Deer Fly Trail lived up to its name as we were surrounded by clouds of them. Our western adventure ended at 3:10 pm on Saturday, the 12th of June. Yet we couldn't stop ourselves from pulling out the trail book while we sat in Cornell, eating our double-scoop ice cream waffle cones, and looking east to maps 32 through 39 to evaluate the 'Northern Gap'. 

We're coming for you next, Langlade County. 

Running Total: 512.7 miles of trail covered; 60.8 miles 'extra' hiking/biking. End of Day 72

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