Day 86: Connecting Route, Sauk County
Day 86: Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021
Total Miles covered for the day: 12.2
Location: The Connecting Route between the Juneau County line at N 43 38.463, W 89 49.929 to the north, where Oak Hill Rd turns into Lage Road, and Dellwood, Wisconsin to the south.
12.2 miles of trail covered.
This morning when we got up in our tent there was actually a thick fog covering the world, or at least the part we could see, which wasn't very far. The interesting thing about fog is that it defies the law of gravity in the way that most people think about it. Water - is heavy. Water is actually quite heavy, as anyone who ever lugged three gallons of milk from the back of the store up to the checkout counter and waited in line to buy it is well aware.
A single gallon of water weighs over eight pounds. Were you to drop this gallon of water from even a small height, the force of impact would test the integrity of any grocery store container. So why is it that water doesn't fall out of the air, but instead hangs around as perfectly visible and demonstrably wet - fog?
If you think it's because clouds don't weight much, think again. A typical cloud contains a staggering amount of water. A cubic mile of cloud contains over 4 million pounds of water. Breaking that down into human scale, an area of cloud 100 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 100 feet high carries about 300 pounds of water. Yet it doesn't fall. Aristotle was wrong, and so was Isaac Newton. Just because it's heavy doesn't mean it's going to fall. So how does it defy gravity like that? I don't know. Ask Siri.
So - forget gravity. Forget 'rain tarps', too. If water doesn't fall, then anything exposed to the air will get wet. That includes our sleeping bags, inside our roomy but very air-flow friendly tent. The rain tarp covers all the mosquito netting, but since our tent is designed to breathe, fog will simply flow through and create dew right there inside the tent.
None of this really mattered to us so much as we got up and made a breakfast out of cold eggs, hot coffee, and as a treat, oatmeal. Future reference - powdering oatmeal so that it will hydrate faster when using only boiling hot water does NOT result in a palatable version of Instant Oatmeal. It was instant, all right. But not very palatable. Hot, pasty glop was the result, made no less unpleasant by the addition of milk, salt, pepper, sugar, cinnamon, or anything else we had at hand.
Nevertheless - we had our warm beds, our comfortable car, and several options for what we would use to fill our bellies in the morning. We were more fortunate than many, and there was no complaint as we ate our meal. We spent a long time hanging around camp, waiting for the fog to lift and listening to the birds, before finally heading out for the day. We were being gloriously lazy.
Our goal today was to continue where we left off yesterday, moving north from Dellwood and hopefully getting past Wisconsin Dells. Once again we opted to use the bike and follow method, where one person rides their bicycle along the route and the other follows behind in a car to block the lane and provide support as needed. It's not as fast as using both cars and riding together, but it's a lot safer. For one thing, having a vehicle traveling behind you protects you from cars that like to cruise these country roads at 70 miles an hour. For another, the skies were very threatening, and by having the car there, we could stop at a moment's notice if thunderstorms appeared.
This is an elevation map of the route we traveled today. On the extreme right is Dellwood, where we started. The hills were short and sharp, but more or less even as far as elevation goes until we hit the parking area at Dell Creek. From there it was a significant climb all the way to the peak on Oak Hill Road. Then it was downhill again all the way to Hulbert Creek before climbing back up to the county line.
About the most interesting thing we encountered along the way was a flock of guinea fowl, bringing us joy and fond memories of the period of time in our lives not all that long ago when we, too, lived on a farm and raised these noisy, messy birds, with their bald blue vulture heads and their amazing spotted feathers. They are quite a sight if you've never encountered them before.
We didn't bike the whole connecting route all at once, and we didn't bike it all in a straight line. We took turns, each of us riding for a few miles, then switching as one or another of us needed a rest. We wanted to make sure we had both covered the same ground in case we needed to stop, and just as the second one of us reached the Juneau county line, the sky belched forth its first crash of thunder. We didn't make it to Wisconsin Dells, but our day was done. It was still fairly early in the afternoon, but the sweltering heat and humidity had done it's magic and all that water in the air finally started to fall.
We decided to head south once more to avail ourselves of the showers at Devil's Lake, though if we had just been patient enough we probably could have showered just standing in place. The warm water was better.
Then it was back to the campsite. Tomorrow would involve some biking and some hiking, once again dodging the rain as we closed out some of the gap in Waushara County.
Running Total: 619.2 miles of trail covered; 67.7 miles 'extra' hiking/biking. End of Day 86.
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