Day 209: Connecting Route, Marathon County

Day 209: Friday, July 8th, 2022

Total Miles hiked for the day: 7.5; Net Miles 0.0 

Location: The portion of the connecting route south of the Ringle Segment between Mission Lake County Park and Boundary Road 

7.5 Miles of trail covered

So we discovered a thing today while preparing for this hike. There is a new Segment about to be born right here in Marathon County, and it's in the Rice Lake Preserve through the area that lies east of the Disbursed Camping Area (DCA) north of Pike Lake. 

It's not open yet - it just has yellow flags marking where the trail will be put in sometime later this month. That also means that prior to our End of the Trail Snail Hike in September, we'll have another Segment to hike. It also means we decided to hike a slightly different route today. Instead of hiking the connecting route straight through, we hiked it to the two end points of that new Segment as though it already existed, planning to hike it at some point in the future. The distance walked on the road is not any shorter - in fact it's a couple hundred feet longer. We felt like it was a valid trade-off even if the new Segment doesn't open in time. 

Another Friday night walk, with dinner on the road. 

Crisscross hiking again, tonight. Theresa dropped me off at a few minutes past 5:00. With an apple for my dinner, I touched the sign for the park, which was our waypoint marker for the hike on June 30th, and started walking towards the sunset.

Random road hiking thought #1. I think finding a dinosaur bone would be about the coolest thing ever.

Have you ever thought about that? You read stories all the time. Kid following a creek bed in Iowa, discovers a Mastodon femur. Farmer leveling a hill digs up a giant skull. Someone walking along a road looks up on an eroding roadcut and sees a bone sticking out of the side of the hill. Think about it. Dinosaurs lived on this earth for about 200 million years. If just one animal was fossilized somewhere in the world every 100 years (an absurd underestimate), there would be 2 million animals to find. With dozens or hundreds of bones per animal this means there would be at least 100 million bones to discover somewhere.

I'd like to find one. Just once.

Random road hiking thought #2. Total amount of money I have found while hiking the Ice Age Trail: $58.32. Total amount of money I've spent hiking the Ice Age Trail - let's just say that didn't even out.

I have found quite a bit of money while hiking. A couple twenties, a ten, a fiver and change, a loose single or two. I think that may have paid for one of those restaurant trips on the road. I'll take it.

Random road hiking thought #3. Happiness is seeing a half-eaten milkweed leaf.

That one got a few thumb's up on Facebook. Most people know that monarch butterfly caterpillars are found on milkweed plants, eating the leaves that so many other insects cannot. The monarch is so dependent on this 'weed' that the species would not survive without it. The plants are full of a substance referred to as cardiac glycosides, which are toxic to most animal species. They incorporate these toxins into their body, becoming themselves toxic for predators to eat. That is why they can survive being so colorful and easy to spot. Nothing will eat them.

I almost forgot the shot from the snail cam today. Mission Lake Road wasn't this fancy, but there was a neat new line on smooth pavement along County Road Y.

Random road hiking thoughts #4. Knowing that there is a recipe for cooking stinging nettles has never led me to want to do so.

Actually, that's not quite true. I have actually wanted to cook them. I just don't have the courage to eat them, and picking them doesn't sound all that fun, either.

Random road hiking thought #5. Most men learn there is an alternative to reflexive violence the moment a horse fly lands on their zipper.

This wasn't purely original, but I did think about it as a fly was buzzing around me tonight.

I always look forward to this time of year, because I love seeing daylilies.

Random road hiking thought #6. Fun fact: Daylily flowers are edible.

A lot of people call these tiger lilies, but that's actually a very, very different plant. Daylilies grow with the flower pointed UP towards the sun. Tiger lilies have dark black spots, with the flowers pointing DOWN from the stem.

There are other enormous differences, like the fact that daylilies propagate from the roots while true Tiger Lilies grow from bulbs, but the most important difference to be aware of is that TIGER LILIES ARE HIGHLY TOXIC. Daylilies, noted as being edible and delicious, are not, or at least not to most people. I have seen some sites note that approximately 2% of the population will have a negative reaction to daylilies, too.

The ones you see along the road are almost certainly daylilies, or even called ditch lilies since they seem to love that microhabitat.

A true Tiger Lily looks quite different when you know what to look for. This is a photo of one of those that I pulled off Pinterest. Notice that even the stems and leaves look different on a tiger lily, with leaves growing off the stem. With daylilies the leaves grow from the base of the plant in a cluster, and the flower stem is always bare except for the bulbs. Think of those little black dots as poison sacs.

Here's the bottom line. When you're foraging for things to eat in the wild, you have to know what you're getting into. Flowers are no different than mushrooms. Some are delicious, some of them will kill you. If you don't know what you're harvesting, don't eat it.

Random road hiking thought #7. When we look at an object the color we see is the color of light that is reflected by the object and not absorbed. If I couple this with the observation that leaves are green, I come to the conclusion that green is not a very useful color of light for producing food.

That may not be obvious from the start. The leaves that we see as 'green' are actually absorbing all the useful colors of light, from ultraviolet to infrared, and reflecting off the colors and wavelengths of light they don't need. Apparently, they don't need the green wavelengths to produce food, because that's what they spit out to show the world.

Could you imagine a world where some other color was the useless' one, say, blue?

Random road hiking thought #8. There are people in this world who derive their pleasure out of depriving me of mine. I have met far too many of those while walking these roads.

I have no new horror stories to share with you today, but this thought crossed my mind as one of those big trucks came roaring past me with their I-don't-care-what-you-think-of-me decorations. It makes me sad that I have to always be on the lookout for the 1% who take joy in making me feel unwelcome, and the 1% of those who might actively seek to do me harm.

Random road hiking thought #9. The earth is teeming with billions of tons of earthworms. Yet somehow, $3 per dozen seems like a fair price.

When we got to Wodora Acres Road, we cut in to the east to find the eventual trailhead for the new segment. We found it on the north side of the road, marked by yellow ribbon and flags.

With most of the hike completed for the day, we drove around to the other end to see where the segment would come out. We found it, down near the boat ramp, at the wide spot in the road where vehicles can turn around.

We jumped out of the car and I snapped a quick photo. I'm looking a little wild-eyed in this one, for whatever reason. Can't change that straight-line, mile wide mustache, though. That's in every single shot.

You can just see the yellow ribbons marking the place where the trail will begin. Looks like there will be plenty of work for the trail crew.

It didn't take long to discover that we didn't particularly want to hang around there. The deerflies were absolutely voracious, and they were there in the hundreds. If we had stood still we would have been covered in bites.

Theresa jumped back in the car and headed to the sunny part of the road, about a quarter of a mile up. She pulled over and parked, and started half-running back my way for the fastest, shortest crisscross hike we've ever done. She had barely started moving by the time I got to the car, and by the time I got back down to the end to wait for her she was red-cheeked and puffing along just a couple hundred feet from the end.

I don't know what it was about that gravel road, that piece of woods and that time of day, but that was as bad as I have seen deerflies anywhere on the trail.

Out in the sunshine there were no more problems, and we were able to take our time finishing up our walking for the day, crisscrossing our way up to what shows up as Townline or Town Line Road on the maps, but in practice shows up as Boundary Road on the road sign.

I walked past these two cranes who seemed quite unhappy with my presence.

I also spotted this little gem right as I got to the end of the road. I took this photo, but left the stone behind. Maybe someone else will get joy in discovering it.

Bonus Location: The portion of the Ringle Segment between Duncan Road and the place were the trail heads north into the woods
450 feet of trail covered.

There was no need whatsoever to do any more walking. But as much walking as we had done recently we wanted to be able to touch a blaze today. So we drove up to Duncan Road and parked at the roadside to achieve the nearly one tenth of a mile walk from the road to the blaze.

Hand-in-hand, we took this lovely, late evening stroll together down the Mountain-Bay State Trail.

Random road hiking thought #10. If on day one you took one step, and doubled it every day so that on day two you took two steps, day three four steps and so on, you would have walked 1 mile by day 11 and by day 21 you would have walked nearly a thousand miles.

I think I'll count these "miles" on tomorrow's hike. It will simplify the accounting. But I'll take the happiness for today. We can scarcely believe it, but tomorrow we intend to hike off the last few miles remaining before our September hike in Sturgeon Bay.

One more day. One more day, and then the final hike in September.

The tally:

• No new Snails today
• Completed Map 43
• Converted 7.7 miles of biking to the 'hiked' category
• 5.5 miles to go. That's not a typo. 

Running Total: 1211.7 miles of trail covered (1131.5 hiked), 428.4 miles 'extra' hiking/biking. End of Day 209.

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