Hiking Hartland Marsh and the Ice Age Trail

The Bark River

Spring was still trying to catch up from our unseasonably cold April last week. But this day dawned brightly and suddenly turned unseasonably hot. Shedding jackets, a dozen or so of us gathered at the Cottonwood Wayside for a hike into Hartland Marsh led by Jeff Romagna, a volunteer with the Ice Age Trail Alliance.

Hartland Marsh Preserve is nestled between the Lake Country Industrial Park and the Gleason Commerce Center in Hartland. Its 180 acres is protected by the Waukesha County Land Conservancy in partnership with the Ice Age Trail Alliance and the Village of Hartland. The Bark River meanders through the middle of it, somewhere out where we couldn’t see it from the Wayside.

Our tour began on a mulched path, known as the John Muir Overlook, through a hardwood forest featuring ancient bur oaks. The trail narrowed, then led to a boardwalk across the marsh and over a small wooded island. 

Birds were plentiful, it being migration season. This is a rose-breasted grosbeak.

Another boardwalk looped through last year’s cattails and back to the forest. Here the trail was hemmed in with thickets of buckthorn. 

Most of the preserve has a far more open understory and the difference was striking. Jeff, our guide, introduced us to Paul Mozina, known as The Buckthorn Man, whose volunteer efforts have been largely responsible for removing this particularly obnoxious invasive species. Along with being more aesthetically pleasing to hike through, the cleared portions enable a more robust diversity of native species to flourish.

Across an open field we watched as a pair of sandhill cranes shepherded two chicks away from us towards a pond.

A side trail led us through a beautiful glade, over a hill and across the Bark River on a footbridge to another small island. Paul pointed out the many natural springs around the two hills that had led to its being a homestead, now vanished.

Four more sandhill cranes watched us warily from the marsh, their colors a nearly perfect match with the dead cattails. Can you spot all four?

According to the Ice Age Trail Alliance, wetland preserves like this are becoming more and more important as land is developed and urbanized. Wetlands serve critical ecological functions that help maintain environmental health as well as sustaining wildlife habitats.

Hickory sapling in bloom

By absorbing rainwater and nutrients, a marsh helps reduce flooding, prevents shoreline erosion along waterways, recharges groundwater, and enhances water quality.

Preserves like this one also provide opportunities for recreation, research and education, serving as both a laboratory and outdoor classroom for students and teachers.

The John Muir Overlook is a 1¼-mile loop linked (across Cottonwood Avenue) to the Hartland segment of the National Ice Age Scenic Trail. We hiked east along a portion of the trail until we reached the Aldo Leopold Overlook. The 45-foot tall glacial hill—which could be an esker or a moraine, according to Jeff—gave us views of the surrounding marsh. As we turned to go, a pair of brilliant white egrets sailed in to land on an open pond.

Tree huggers! It took three to reach around this enormous oak.

Photo essay: Ice Age Trail at Loew Lake

I recently went for a short hike along the Ice Age National Scenic Trail where it runs through the Loew Lake Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Caught a few shots to share.

The Ice Age Trail, of course, runs for 1,000 miles, looping through Wisconsin along the terminal edge of the historic glaciers. I’ve never walked more than a few miles of it at a time, but I love the idea of it.

The Loew Lake segment of the State Forest is located at Highway K and County Line Road in Washington County. There is a parking lot for the trail there. The park is 1,090 acres of glacial topography and wetlands along the Oconomowoc River. The trail connects with the Holy Hill segment on the north and the Monches segment on the south, in case you want to hike farther than the 4.8 miles in the Loew Lake segment. 

Reconsidering Aldo Leopold in the Kettle Moraine

One of my favorite passages from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is from a story called “Great Possessions:” He says, “…at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.” How often in my explorations of the urban wilderness I have tried to make those boundaries disappear! Leopold left his home in Madison and made his way to his hobby farm in rural Sand County in order to get that experience. Now and then I too feel the need to leave the city for more unbounded spaces.

Lynn and I stayed in a delightful B&B in Eagle. It was situated on 20 acres that the owners had put into conservation easement. 20 acres sounded like plenty of room to roam in until I’d spent the 15 minutes it took to reach the neighbor’s boundary. Like Leopold I could have walked right through, but I’d be walking across the lawns and roads of an exurban subdivision instead of farms. I drove off to the state park.

The sky was just beginning to pale as I pulled into the Ice Age Trail lot off Highway 67. I considered skipping the required day pass. At this hour no ranger was likely to come by and I didn’t relish taking off my gloves to fill out the form. Besides, I reasoned with myself, my other car has an annual parks sticker. My arguments didn’t overrule my sense of obligation – or perhaps that nagging fear of getting caught. Some of the boundaries we experience are the ones we carry around inside. I used the stubby pencil provided and stuffed $7 into the too-small envelope – why they don’t have an envelope large enough for the bills they are intended to hold?! And, yes, my fingers ended up feeling like icicles. My toes were already cold, too, from standing there.

Even at this early hour on a Saturday, cars went by now and then. The Ice Age Trail led off parallel to the road. There was another obviously well used but unmarked trail heading off away from the road and toward the Scuppernong River. It was a relatively “blank spot on the map,” to use another Leopold expression, and therefore more appealing.

I needed a brisk walk to get blood flowing to my extremities but numerous footprints had frozen into the packed snow making it both uneven and slippery. I also had to dodge dog turds melting their way towards the ground. The dog walkers turned back at the flooded prairie where the trail became a sheet of ice thin enough to fracture with every step. In places I broke through.

Then a creek crossed the trail. Probably no more than a trickle in summer, it was swollen with snowmelt. I unwisely tried to position myself for a shot of it and ended up with icy water in one of my boots. I briefly considered aborting my hike – I still hadn’t warmed up. But also the sun still hadn’t risen and I had taken only that one unlucky photograph. I plunged through the stream and on down the now less travelled path.

By the time I reached the river I was warm, the sun was just breaking over the ridge to the east, and the prairie grasses lit up like fire. I was able to make a few satisfying photographs, but the greatest reward was more ephemeral. I had gone far enough from the road to hear…nothing. No animals rustling the grass; no birds calling; no wind in the trees. Nothing at all, except the ringing in my ears – perhaps the accumulated residue from the urban cacophony I had left behind.

After a while a small plane interrupted the peaceful silence. Its distant transect of the sky reminded me of the one mosquito that gets inside a tent, small but impossible to ignore, knowing what it will do as soon as I fall asleep. I was reminded not to be asleep to my own impact upon the earth. 

The plane was followed by a long line of geese, honking with undecipherable urgency. In “March” Leopold writes, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is spring.” Although we had a thaw last week, it is February yet and I didn’t need this week’s snow to remind me it is not spring. Those geese, contrary to instinct, likely have grown accustomed to surviving through the winter in Wisconsin, surviving off the detritus – or voluntary largesse – of a society that likewise finds itself untethered to the seasons.

I walked back, warmed and thoughtful, observing patterns and discovering curiosities encased in the ice that I’d rushed across before. Where I’d broken through a new sheet of ice had already healed over the wound. It broke more easily in its weakened state. For three hours I had walked over many acres, across the unbounded spaces of the park, and was thankful for the opportunity. Like Leopold I consider land stewardship a moral imperative. In a time of ever dwindling natural areas, it is also that much more important for economic sustainability as well as psychological health. But the ice has gotten very thin. We must tread more lightly than ever.

To see more images from my excursion in the Kettle Moraine, go to my flickr page.

Hunting for a place to hike in the Kettle Moraine

What were we thinking?!! Well, we were thinking the way we think: that we had a day to be together; it was a nice sunny day; we like to hike; and we are near the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Ergo, let’s go for a hike in the Kettle Moraine.

We clearly were not thinking about hunting, or hunters, or that this was the first day of hunting season! But, as soon as we left West Bend on Hwy 45 north, it became abundantly clear. Next to every vacant field, it seemed, cars, trucks, SUVs, were parked and out in the fields were little orange people carrying rifles. Now, if you’ve ever hunted none of this is news. In fact, even if you don’t hunt, many of you are probably scratching your heads wondering how naïve Mr. Urban Wilderness could be! (How long have I lived in Wisconsin?) But at that moment our innocent, if naïve, intention to hike in the woods was abruptly called into question and I was reminded why I’d always made it a point not to go out in the country during hunting season. And so, although I certainly knew about hunting, it was a revelation to witness the social phenomenon first hand as it plays out in one of my favorite parks.

We didn’t witness any actual hunting, mind you. At infrequent, irregular intervals we heard shots off in the distance, but never saw any action. What we saw were clusters of vehicles wherever there was a place to pull off the park road. We glimpsed blaze orange glinting through the trees and saw orange action figures wandering in full sight around the edges of fields. Some merely sat, like this one (above) we drove past on our way to one of the few designated “no hunting” zones in the park. An hour or so later, after our hike, he and two others standing nearby didn’t seem to have moved. As I popped out of my car to take the photo, I wondered uneasily what would happen if a deer ran between me and him. I quickly got back in and drove off.

In places the hunters were so thick they put me in mind of the “backwoods humorist” Norman Pettingill, who made innumerable drawings of Northwoods culture, many of which depict the foibles of hunters. In his crazy cartoons hunters fill every available space between trees, blast away indiscriminately, drink incessantly, etc. Coincidentally (?), we saw a display of Pettingill’s work, done over five decades of the Twentieth Century, at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan the same afternoon. Here’s a sample (below) to give a sense of his scabrous humor and graphic style. His depictions made it clear I’m hardly the first to wonder if the woods are more dangerous for the hunters than for the deer. (By the way, nature lovers as well as art lovers will enjoy the Kohler's animal-themed main exhibit, called Animal Magnetism. Check it out.)

We stopped at the Ice Age Trail Visitors Center to inquire about safe places to hike and were rewarded by a friendly ranger who gave us the map – and lent us each an orange vest. Thus fortified, we made our way to Mauthe Lake and the Tamarack Trail where we did enjoy a delightful walk around the lake. Unlike the vast majority of the park, which welcomes hunting, here we had the trail to ourselves, and although it was quite cold, the bright sun made for a lovely stroll.

This curiously sawed stump reminded me of a human variant of the beaver sculpture I found a couple weeks ago (see previous post.)

The interpretive signage in this section identified it as a cedar swamp. The cedars have shallow root systems and therefore fall over easily. In some places there seemed to be more fallen ones than were left standing. The monochromatic late autumnal colors conspired with the apparent devastation to make the landscape seem apocalyptic. To my eye, all of it was beautiful, none of it picturesque.

We saw only three people the whole time. Two looked like puffy blaze orange snowmen, sitting awkwardly at a picnic table in the campground. The third was this lone kayaker making his way up the Milwaukee River, which both feeds and drains Mauthe Lake. We exchanged greetings as he paddled underneath the trail bridge. Then he disappeared silently around the bend.

A great fusillade of shots somewhere beyond the tree line reminded us of the orange army that has invaded the park. My thoughts turn toward their target. For the record, I have no quarrel with those who kill deer – as long as they do it responsibly. (In the tiny, tenth-of-an-acre urban wilderness that is my front yard, the deer are nothing but plant-killing pests. I rarely see them; only their night time rubbings and chewings.) I, however, find the quiet sounds of nature itself more agreeable than the sound of guns. The sigh of wind in the trees and the honking of geese high overhead fill me with peace.