Who spilled the beans?

Colorado or Bust:  Days 4 and 5.

There were some fun trail segments here in the very heart of Wisconsin, as I crossed the southern half of Portage and Waupaca Counties.  The majority of the two days of hiking were off-road, in the woods, with birds singing and cool breezes.  I got to visit Shunk and Foster Lakes and meander the surprisingly rugged terrain between them, got to hike through flower-studded savanna in Emmons Creek Barrens natural area and listen to the noisy creek at a rest stop beside a truss-style footbridge.  I got to traverse the length of Hartman Creek State Park, all on dedicated foot trail in the woods, and I had some good up-close-and-personal walking beside the Waupaca River, but somehow it was the quirky things along the road walks that most caught my fancy.  First came the view above, of the spilt beans.  And no … these are not Jelly Beans.

Here's the full story.  A field had just been planted in soybeans and the center-pivot irrigation system was cranking away, trying to get the little beans to germinate.  I passed the access road to the field and …

… did you know that soy beans are pink?  Well, after they're prepared with a coating of protective stuff, nutrients, and fungicide they are.  The farmer left a trail of them that spilled out of his planter.


Second comes bustling downtown Petersonville, situated right on Peterson Creek.

The shot above was taken at the intersection at the center of town.  Directly diagonally across this intersection stood the town directory, requiring first names only:

On another bit of road walk I passed a field left fallow since last year and had to stop for a photo.  It was showing its colors in the drifts of some sort of weed that had taken up residence in place of last year's crop.

Lastly came this quiet pond at the edge of a big factory dairy farm.  The cattle, seen behind, shackled 24/7 in their stalls, with piles of feed forever heaped before them, had the waterfront view, the water provided by their own 'runoff'.

Wisconsin is famed for its milk and cheese, but the trend toward factory farms like this is seriously disturbing.

But enough of all that.  On to the real segments of trail, where real nature takes top billing.

First, when I got on trail I passed the only Ice Age Trail hiker shelter I've encountered - a quaint log cabin wedged between a quiet rustic road and a noisy quarry.

It was neat as a pin inside, with a bench and table, neatly rolled blanket, and fresh carpet.

There was an upper loft, a trail register book, and a genuine privy hidden in the woods 100 feet away.  Reminded me of the Appalachian Trail, where such amenities are found every few miles along the whole 2000 miles of trail, but with much less population pressure.  The register had about one entry every two weeks.

This shelter makes it clear that the Ice Age Trail builders are serious about their trail.  Many trail segments are posted with plaques like this.

The Mobile Skills Crew picks and prioritizes the trail work projects, and when they show up the job is done right.

Okay, now to the nature shots.  Waupaca River first.

Noisy little Emmons Creek as viewed from the rest stop by the bridge.

The field studded with wild lupine, being restored to prehistoric oak savanna.

Blooming water lilies in Foster Lake:

And the rest was trail in woods or beside woods, where the scenery isn't all that remarkable, but sometimes what the eye sees isn't the richest part of the experience.  Listen to the Wood Thrush, please.

And remember the words of Henry David Thoreau:

"Whenever a man hears it [the song of the Wood Thrush] he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him."

Here are the GPS tracks for the Day 4 and Day 5 hikes.

I'm continuing south through Central Wisconsin and crossing from Spring into Summer.  In my next report I cover a long uninterrupted road walk of 14.2 miles, but highlight the little things along the roadside - wild-flowers and such.  It was actually one of the most fun days yet.  Stay tuned.

The Ice Age Trail, New Hope-Iola Ski Club segment - an oasis amid long road walks

Colorado or Bust, Days 2 and 3

My Day One hiking had been all on roads, and it wasn't until near the end of Day 2 that I bridged the 28.5 miles of official road walk to get to some real trail.  And pretty trail it was, with surprisingly rugged rolling terrain (see the headline photo above) and pristine lakes and ponds.  Shown here is Severson Lake:

With all the spring rains up here, water levels were super high.  This footbridge actually sank slightly into the water as I crossed it, and both approaches required a leap.

Road walks aren't all that bad, even on busy highways.  I chose picturesque parking spots to stage the various legs of the road walk in pretty places like Peterson County Park just south of Galloway.  It sits on cute little Tree Lake

Another parking area was at the Wisconsin Lions Camp, which has an extensive network of trails that are open to guests who register (It's an active kids camp).

I passed a huge field covered in deep shade cloth and couldn't identify the plants being grown,

But there was a group of friendly workers coming out of their shady fields for their 10AM break as I passed.  They waved and offered me an ice cold coke.  Not one of them spoke a word of English, but with my broken Spanish I was able to learn that the crop was Ginseng.  Turns out that Marathon County grows 90 percent of the Ginseng produced in the USA.  American Ginseng is native to the Appalachians but in the wild it's over-harvested and getting rare.  It's a medicinal herb used in traditional medicine by Native Americans.

And you never know what you'll spot along the road.  As I said in my first report, the Monarch Butterflies are here in force.

For my Fifty Trail route I got creative and diverged from the Ice Age Trail Alliance map set's 'official' 13.1 mile road walk down to the next completed segment at Shunk and Foster Lakes.  The suggested route meandered on country roads, but I chose a route that arced east to the cute, clean little towns of Iola and Scandinavia so I could hike a half mile of real foot trail at Jorgens Park Preserve.

The lake glimpsed to the right above is typical of the small lakes in this area.  Here's Jorgen Park's pier.

Iola is also on a lake.  Here is the view from Veteran's Memorial Park, also affording a bit of lake-side off-road hiking from the Post Office, through Memorial Park, and down past historic Iola Mills.

The area was settled mostly by Norwegians and was a major logging area, so log 'totems' of Vikings are a popular motif:

My chosen route also allowed me to hike a mile of the Tomorrow River State Trail, a rail trail with good crushed limestone surface.

All in all, my chosen route beats the pants off the 'official' suggested route.  It pays to do the research.  Here are the GPS tracks for "C.O.B." Days 2 and 3:

Next comes more abundant trail straddling the border between Portage and Waupaca Counties.  Can't wait to get back into the woods.

Colorado or Bust, Day One. Back to Wisconsin

I'm back.  Returning to a trail junction I reached on October 27, 2017, to resume "Hiking Home" to Colorado, and the last remaining places where I've received mail and 'hung my hat.' 

I call it my 'Personal Continuous Footpath', an uninterrupted trail of footprints that connect every place I've ever lived.  I've been working on this since 2011 and have successfully connected Key West Florida, Topsail Island North Carolina, Wilmington, Delaware, State College PA, and with the Appalachian Trail all the way to Katahdin, Maine thrown in.  When I left off this project in Fall, 2017, I was hiking south through Wisconsin, heading to the home where I learned to walk, in Sauk City, near the state capitol of Madison.

I was chased off the trail by winter as I hiked east out of Wausau, Wisconsin.  At the time I had planned a detour via the Mountain-Bay rail trail and a cobbled-together route through Green Bay to the eastern terminus of the Ice Age Trail, but have changed my mind and now intend to continue to stick with the Ice Age Trail from where I left off then, and hike south (trail east).  This is a shorter route and allows me (and the Fifty Trail route that I'm hereby establishing) to include the Devil's Lake section of the Ice Age Trail, which is commonly considered to be the best segment of the entire trail.

The ultimate goal is to visit the last two places where I lived--Sauk City, Wisconsin (with a visit to the hospital where I was born in Madison) and then to Colorado where I did graduate school.

I have two very different trail options for how I could get to Colorado--either via the North Country Trail, or via a newly established Great American Rail Trail, the route of which was just revealed last month (May 2019).  That route has a few small to moderate-length road-walk gaps, but it takes me across Iowa and Nebraska.  The North Country Trail crosses northern Minnesota and North Dakota where it leaves me hanging with some huge gaps and lots of road walking to get south to Colorado.  Since that is the route of the Fifty Trail, I consider it to be a project for later.  First I want to give full attention to finishing 'Hiking Home,' a project that I've been working on for nearly 8 years now.

So … for this first report, there isn't a lot of hiking to cover.  It's mostly just a written re-introduction.  The eastbound Ice Age Trail leaves the Mountain-Bay Trail and follows a specified but unmarked road walk for 28.5 miles between the Ringle Segment at Hatley and the New Hope-Iola Ski Hill segment.

Road walks on the Ice Age Trail are unofficial.  There are no yellow blazes.  You're on your own.  And so I've chosen to take some different roads.  Instead of leaving the Mountain-Bay Trail at Hatley, I'm including the section east to Eland where there's a nice museum display and trailhead (shown in the report from fall 2017 and again as the headline photo above.

From there I headed south to Wilson Lake County Park.

It was a cloudy drizzly day.  Back in Topsail it had been summer for a month.  Here it was in the 50's and breezy and felt like early spring, although corn has been planted and is sprouting, the Monarch Butterflies have arrived in full force, and the Sand Hill Cranes have nested and hatched their little ones (see future reports).

From Wilson Lake I headed to the village of Elderon (love that name, it evokes a Tolkienesque feel) where there's another lakeside park, and then on to end the day at the Community Center in the village of Galloway where the sky was finally beginning to clear and the local potato barons have erected a patriotic memorial to one of their own.

Here's the GPS Track of today's Route,

And for an overview of my long-suffering Personal Continuous Footpath route, follow this link for a full map.  (Be patient, it contains almost 2000 individual hikes, so can take a few seconds to load).

So it's "Colorado or Bust."  Watch this space for the continuing reports.

Hiking Patagonia, Part 4 of 4, French Valley and the End of the World

Highlights of the French Valley hike were the half dozen avalanches we witnessed.  Each began with the sound like a squadron of jet plane engines roaring off the mountain.  Then the cloud of cascading snow came billowing out of the clouds, which shrouded the higher glaciers on Paine Grande.  We finally did get a full view of this greatest mountain in the park before the day ended.  Read on.

My last day in Torres Del Paine National Park started out with rain and gray skies.  I had rearranged my schedule in order to stay an extra day and do this last significant hike, to the French Valley lookout beside the massive Paine Grande peak.  Forecast was for the weather to improve, and thankfully it did.

The hike begins with an hour ferry ride the length of Lago Pehoe to Paine Grande Refugio, a major campground and lodge that is not accessible by overland vehicles.  Everybody huddled in their vehicles at the Ferry terminal rather than waiting in line at the boat ramp, in order to stay out of the wind and rain.  But by the time we arrived at the Refugio, as you can see below, the weather had improved.

The challenge of this hike is less about the elevation change and more about the need for speed--to get there and back in time to get in line (the boat has room for 100) for the last afternoon ferry ride at 6PM.

The first part of that challenge is that the ferry doesn't arrive at the Refugio until 10AM.  Then off we marched - me, guide Nino and a 40-something American couple named Sara and Paul.

The first part of the hike undulates along the slopes beside picturesque Lago Skottsberg.

To the right is the lake, with views of the Cuernos beyond (I had close up views of Los Cuernos peaks on my previous hike, see part 3) and to the left the great mountain and most of its glaciers were shrouded in cloud, out of which pour a number of cascades.

The next delay came once we actually reached French Valley.  We had to wait in line at the suspension bridge across the French River in order to get across to the Italian Camp, a busy hiker campground.  People were lined up to cross both ways and the strict rule is that only one person is allowed on the bridge at a time.

From Italian Camp the French Valley trail climbs several hundred feet to the panoramic viewpoint of the glaciers up on the grand peak,

with views of the valley between Paine Grande and Los Cuernos, of the Cuernos themselves, and of Lago Nordenskjold and the landscape behind us down the valley.

The clouds continued to lift over Paine Grande as we returned to Italian Camp.  Better yet, there were no lines waiting to cross the footbridge so I could stop in the middle of the bridge and take a photo of the French River and the mountain slopes and glaciers beyond.

Checking the clock at that point, it was clear that we had to make time.  Five miles back to the ferry landing with two hours to get there.  I took the lead because I have a natural pace that would get us there on time, and Paul and Sara were troopers, keeping up that pace, even when I stepped it up another notch.  Nino, of course, was just strolling along in back.

The boat was coming up the arm of the lake as we came up over a rise and into view of the Refugio, so we were able to get in line in time.  As we waited in line, the Grand mountain finally revealed herself.

A fitting end to the day and to my Patagonia adventure.

Next it was on to 'Fin del Mundo' - the self-proclaimed 'End of the World' at the town of Ushuaia, Argentina.  Plans were to continue my travels, but it was in Ushuaia that I got the news of my Mother's sudden illness.  I had an afternoon and the next morning here.  I started by walking from the airport to the motel.

This is a town that embraces outdoor adventure despite the famously brutal Cape Horn climate.  Fall had arrived with snow in the mountains, but the denizens were unfazed.

Tourists were lined up to get photo-ops at the town's iconic visitor sign, but I managed to get this shot when one celebrating group left and before the next one assembled in front of the sign.

Many are here for Penguin tours, for Antarctic Cruises, and for various hikes and treks.  There were a couple of cruise ships anchored in the harbor, but one or two others that didn't look like they were going anywhere anytime soon.

Finally the next morning, as I had an early breakfast at my motel's penthouse dining room, I was treated to one of the most vivid sunrises I've seen anywhere.

Then it was two days on airplanes to get back to family.  I had a chance to say a loving good-bye to Mom and to fulfill her request to trim my beard to a length she thinks is more befitting a PhD scientist, and then to recalibrate my life.

Next it's back to the domestic trails, to resume my oft-delayed quest to hike to every place I've ever lived.  Reports will begin soon.

Hiking Patagonia, Part Three - Lake Sarmiento and Los Cuernos in a Hurricane

The highlight of the day was this ridiculously windy afternoon hike to Mirador Cuernos (Viewpoint of the 'Horns').  Here's a look at them from the trail.  The light colored rock is a granite magma intrusion that lifted these peaks above the surrounding landscape about 12 million years ago.

This was the windiest hike I ever did.  Here's a short video clip taken at the waterfall we stopped at along the way, simply called 'Salto Grande', the Big Jump, which pretty well captures the 'atmosphere'.  It was hard to stand.

In the morning it was nearly calm.  Go figure.  That's when I headed out from the motel after breakfast to do a seven mile meander around the south shore of Lake Sarmiento--a lake with no outlet.  It is filled by the rain and snow melt and loses its water entirely by evaporation.  The lake level is gradually dropping so there were some interesting sights along the shore.

Back at the hotel I captured this shot of the Towers of Paine from my room.  World class view, right from my bed.

After lunch it was off to the short hike to the Cuernos viewpoint.  This was an hour drive each way, but then just a four mile stroll.  It would have been a walk in the park except for that wind, which was literally picking the water up out of the lake in the background of the photo below and raining it down on us half a mile away.

The area had experienced a massive burn in 2011.  Every tree in the park over an area of 40,000 acres, had burned when a camper/tourist decided to put a lighter to his toilet paper rather than bury it.  This one lonely tree on the shore of a lake escaped the carnage.

Here's the actual view of the Cuernos from the viewpoint at the end of the trail.

What a relief to be back in the van after the incessant assault on the senses.  Wind is probably the thing about being outdoors that I dislike the most.  Better yet, was the pleasure of my warm bed in my calm room, watching the sunset over Lake Sarmiento with the Towers of Paine in the background.

This report has been long delayed because real life has intervened.  My dear mother, age 96 has left us.  In the last report, Part Four, I document the last hike I took before I got the news, and my quick stopover at the 'End of the World.'