Day 212: New Hope-Iola Ski Hill Segment, Portage County
Day 212: Saturday, August 6th, 2022
Total Miles hiked for the day: 1.7+; Net Miles 0.6
“I will never be done hiking.”
- Mr. Snail
“Will I ever be done hiking?!?”
- Mrs. Snail
Location 1: The White Cedar Segment
0.0 Miles of trail covered (Purely a for-fun hike)
People have been asking us where we're hiking now because they still want to get Snail patches, so Theresa set up a for-fun Snail Hike here at the new and newly opened White Cedar Segment.
There was some debate on what the name of the new segment should be. The trail is on the Rice Lake Preserve, but calling it the Rice Lake Segment would theoretically be confusing with the city of Rice Lake out near the Tuscobia Segment. Naming it for the nearby town of Pike Lake wouldn't work because there's already a Pike Lake Segment. In the end they settled on calling it the White Cedar Segment, which I find a little bland, but it does describe well the environment at the heart of the property, where hikers pass through a boggy area filled mostly with White Cedar trees, also known as Arborvitae. Translated from Latin, arborvitae literally means 'Tree of Life', so named because they are such a rich source of nutrients that even people can utilize.
The area is classified as a 'Cedar Swamp', because it is a wetland filled with woody plants. The soil is saturated during the growing season, and has standing water during the rest of the year. Swamps are less acidic than bogs, but more acidic than marshes or fens. Arborvitae is one of the few trees in our growing zone which can tolerate completely saturated soil conditions like that which exists here on this property, and they tend to dominate the canopy in places like this.
It is the amount and persistence of free-standing water that made it necessary to build the very long boardwalk in the middle.
But enough about that. We decided to host a hike here for a lot of reasons. First, it was short. The trail was only six tenths of a mile long. 1.2 if you do an out and back. Second, it was very close to home. Third, it was brand new, so there were a lot of people who have never hiked it, and might need to do so for their thousand-miler status. Finally, we had ended our IAT adventure while working the segment, not walking it. We wanted to enjoy the walk. That was a perfect combination, and as a result we had a great showing. By 11:00 am the cars were lined up down the road and we had a large group of people waiting for us.
Since this was all about a fun hike, I'll mostly just present the photos (since I don't have names to go with them).
Even after the group photos we had more people dribble in.
Including this dear, sweet person who is one of the 'Pointer Sisters', a group of women we met on the Tuscobia Segment a year ago last May. She belongs to one of the pairs of feet that adorns our Table of Contents page.
I figured I'd better get in there with a selfie just to prove I was there.
One thing I will mention is that the DCA has been moved. It used to be a large, flat area that was highly accessible from County Road Y. This spot has been officially decommissioned because they deemed it to be too close to the trail, and truthfully, too close to the road. It has now been moved to a new spot atop an esker, which can be reached from the hairpin corner where the IAT bends at about a 140 degree turn. The new DCA is.. smaller. And not flat. Frankly, it's a little disappointing. If I was going through there camping I might just decide to set up shop in the old site.
I spotted an interesting rock as I was walking. I cleaned it off a bit and put it on a rockpile so other people would see it. It was about the size of a very small loaf of bread. Someone told me it looked like a piece of steak. They weren't wrong.
Making our way back I spotted this glorious shelf fungus. I was never able to get a name for it, but I'm sure there are plenty who could name it on sight.
The trail-builders who created the boardwalk decided to put in a platform in the middle of the cedar swamp to give people a place to pull off to the side and admire the environment, or have lunch, or listen to birds, or whatever. It is a subtle way of saying, 'Stop here and stay awhile. Enjoy this. Don't just walk through without appreciating what you're seeing'.
I'm glad they built it.
The rest of the hike went pretty much as you'd expect. We were the last ones back to the parking area and most folks had finished and disbursed, off to the rest of their hiking day or whatever other plans they had.
Theresa and I, on the other hand, had an extra hike planned. Why? Because there was another bit of trail nearby that was closed when we came through but had since been reopened. It was part of the New Hope-Iola Ski Hill Segment, closed because rising waters had permanently flooded a footbridge. Recently the work crews had rebuilt the bridge, raising it up a foot or so higher than before, and so we set our sights on hiking this short section.
For the same reason as ours, there were several people with us that day who had also not hiked it, so a few of us headed south to walk this section of trail that had been closed until recently.
Location 2: The portion of the New Hope-Iola Ski Hill Segment between County Road T and Krogwold Road
1.7 Miles of trail covered
There's not much for parking at the spot where the trail crosses County Road T, but if you go up the road a bit the shoulder is wide enough to leave a car for a while. Having already dropped two vehicles at the Krogwold Road parking area, this is where we started from.
A much smaller group now, the five of us embarked on this short walk. It held a few surprises for us, because it was a lot more hilly than we gave it credit for.
When one hikes the road around this small section, it's easy to miss the fact that there are a lot of kame-like hills dotting the landscape and trapped pockets of water. I think this might be referred to as 'hummocky', being not a true moraine, nor a kame. I'm willing to be wrong on that.
It wasn't long before we reached the area that caused the closure of the section. Curiously, it is not out near Budsberg Pond where the largest amount of water lies but rather well before that, in an unnamed bog (not a swamp) that merges with a v-shaped pond that doesn't even show up on Google Maps except on the photo.
Given that the area had to be closed because of rising water height I might have been tempted to rebuild just a little higher still.
I guess what puzzles me most about this is that the boardwalk itself was 100% unnecessary. The bog could have been completely avoided had they taken the trail another 300 feet to the northwest, or so it seemed as I looked at it. It appeared to me that it would have been possible to simply skirt the bog on the north, sticking to higher ground.
If you ever see these berries growing like little green or white (or even red) alien eyeballs, don't eat them. Don't let your dog eat them, either. This is white baneberry. It contains cardiogenic toxins that have, according to my 10-second research on the topic, not yet been classified. Eating them will not make you sick, meaning that you won't start to vomit or anything like that. But it will stop your heart. So - that's bad. All parts of this plant will kill you. Leaves, stems, roots, berries. It's a good plant to know.
Part of the hilly but enjoyable walk.
It doesn't surprise me that someone saw a wedge cut-out that was left behind from a sawyer downing a tree and thought that it looked like a piece of watermelon. It does surprise me that they took the time to haul in paint and brushes and leave behind a piece of art. Either that or they hauled it out and back, which would be even more surprising.
This was found in the area where we were passing by the south end of Budsberg Lake. It would seem that someone disagrees with the name of that body of water.
A very short time later we ran into this fellow, who was out walking this trail and doing some sort of reconnaissance. He is someone who does trail maintenance out here, and worked on rebuilding the bridge. My best guess is that he was the one who painted the watermelon, though I didn't ask him.
Pictured below is a very common sight in Wisconsin during the summer. This is Indian Pipe, also called Ghost Pipe, Pipe Plant, and Corpse Plant. Contrary to its appearance, Indian Pipe is not a mushroom, and not any kind of fungus at all. It is one of about 3000 species of non-photosynthetic flowering plants. It is in the blueberry family, and technically it is a parasitic organism that depends on a specific fungus that helps them obtain nutrients from decaying organic material. This flowering plant, and many like it, are capable of growing in total darkness because they do not rely on sunlight for food. One hint that this is so is the white color, indicating that the plant is absorbing none of the available wavelengths of light from the sun, instead reflecting almost all the light right back off of the surface. The plant simply doesn't need sunlight.
For some reason I don't recall I stopped taking photographs from that point forward. As we made our way out of this hilly region, which felt like far more than the 1.7 miles advertised, we marched the last tenth of a mile or so along the edge of the field and I took the opportunity to harvest a few gooseberries, which were fully ripe and even getting to the point of overripe. They are small and somewhat prickly to harvest, but I have always enjoyed the flavor and I shared a few with my fellow hikers. Not everyone completely trusted my plant identification, and I suppose that's only fair. We all know there are lots of dangerous things out there that you don't want to eat. We had seen several already today, and the best rule of thumb is, if you're not 100% sure of what you're eating, then don't eat it.
That's it. That's the end of the story today. We ended up converting a 1.1 mile road walk into a 1.7 mile trail walk, but we had already considered this segment 'done', so all I've done is add the extra miles to our running total.
Running Total: 1214.2 miles of trail covered (1138.2 hiked), 437.2 miles 'extra' hiking/biking. End of Day 212.
