University Place

Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail

– Today we are pleased to introduce Melanie Radzicki McManus as a part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum’s History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum’s employees. Melanie Radzicki McManus has worked as a news reporter at a Green Bay radio station, as a press secretary at the Wisconsin State Capitol, and as editor of two local publications. Since 1994, McManus has worked as a freelance writer and editor, specializing in travel and fitness. She has won numerous awards for her writing, most notably prestigious Lowell Thomas Gold and Grand awards for her travel journalism. Her book, “Thousand-Miler: “Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail,” was recently published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Here today to discuss and share stories from the Ice Age Trail, please join me in welcoming Melanie Radzicki McManus. [applause]

– Thanks for coming today. I’m really excited to be here because I love the Ice Age Trail, and I’m excited to share everything I know about it with all of you. To start with, I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of the trail and our National Scenic Trail System to give you a little bit of a background because if you’re going to do any hiking, it’s just really helpful to know how the trail came about, what it really is, how it fits into the National Trail Systems Act, and how it’s administered. So, first of all, where the trail goes. This is the Ice Age Trail. It’s roughly 1100 miles long. It is about two-thirds finished. So, today, it’s about 650 miles of signed trail and about 350 miles of what they call connecting roads. These are areas where they’re hoping to get land in the future for the trail, but they don’t have it secured yet. So the Ice Age Trail Alliance, which is the governing body for the trail, has maps available where they show connecting road routes where you can walk from the end of one trail segment to the next. So if you want to do what’s called a through-hike, which is hiking the entire trail, it is possible, but you will be hiking two-thirds on trail and a third on road routes.

The western terminus, to the left, is in St. Croix Falls in Interstate State Park, which incidentally was Wisconsin’s first state park, and it opened in 1900 or 1901. And on the eastern side, it is in Potawatomi State Park in Sturgeon Bay. The trail roughly starts, if you look going from the west to the east, it starts in St. Croix Falls and goes to the Antigo area. Then it loops down and goes all the way to Janesville, which is the southernmost point, and then it goes up, as I said, to Potawatomi State Park. And the route is roughly tracing the terminal moraine for the last glacial. Now, I’m going to get back to the Ice Age Trail in a minute. I’m going to talk a little bit now about the National Scenic Trails, where they are and what they are. So, sometime in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers, scientists, legislators were all talking about how Americans were working really hard, it was post-World War II, but they needed to take some time for recreation. And they were starting to learn how good it was for people to be outside and in nature, how healthy that was for you, for your body, for your mind.

And at that time we had already started building a lot of the national parks. Those were started in the early 1900s with Teddy Roosevelt. But a lot of the big national parks for Midwesterners, unfortunately, were out far west with Yosemite and Glacier and Yellowstone, Acadia in the east. So the researchers and scientists and congressmen said let’s start developing some trails that people can get outside. Walking was becoming popular. And so they decided to come up with three types of trails that could be developed: National Scenic Trails, National Cultural Trails, and National Historic Trails. So in 1967, Congress passed the National Trails System Act that said let’s get some of these trails out there, and let’s get some Americans out in the outdoors. Now, at that point in time, in 1967, America’s very first long distance trail was already in existence. And that is the Appalachian Trail, which I want to try and point here, if I can find my little… There we go.

Okay, so here is the Appalachian Trail. It starts in Springer Mountain, Georgia, or that’s the southern terminus, and it goes about 2100 miles up to Mount Katahdin in Maine. That trail was developed in the 1920s and 1930s. And so it’s considered the granddaddy of our national trails. Another early trail, which some of you might be familiar with from the popular book and movie “Wild,” by Cheryl Strayed, is the Pacific Crest Trail. And this goes up from, through California, Oregon, and Washington, from Mexico to Canada on the Sierra Nevada’s Cascades. And the third biggy is the Continental Divide Trail, also which goes from Mexico to Canada on the Continental Divide, where the rivers on the east flow into the Atlantic and the rivers to the west flow into the Pacific. So in 1967, the Appalachian Trail was already built, the Pacific Crest was probably about 90% finished, so they petitioned Congress and were designated our first two National Scenic Trails. Now, they didn’t get to become a National Scenic Trail just because they petitioned, just because they’re long, or just because they’re pretty.

A National Scenic Trail is a pretty difficult designation to receive. You have to have something significant about your trail to America. In the case of the Appalachian Trail, it ran along the Appalachian Mountains, which is a significant mountain range in North America. And similarly with the Pacific Crest. You know, the Sierra Nevada’s Cascades are significant. And the Continental Divide, again, is a very significant formation. Now, the Ice Age Trail and the North Country Trail were the two next ones in 1980 to get designated a National Scenic Trail. And we were able to get that designation, again, because our trail is tracing the edge of the glacier’s last terminal moraine. And not just that, but one thing, I knew we had a lot of glacial formations in Wisconsin, but I did not know until recently that we are considered to have some of the very best in the entire world.

So that’s a very cool thing. The North Country Trail is up here. It goes from North Dakota up to New York. It’s 4600 miles long, and it’s the longest of our National Scenic Trails. And a tiny bit, about 120 miles, of it runs through Wisconsin north of the Ice Age Trail. So that was 1980. In 1983, the Florida Trail, down here, came on board, and the Natchez Trace. And then, in 2009, the last few came on. There’s the Arizona Trail here, Pacific Northwest Trail up here, Potomac National Heritage Trail, and this tiny little guy that I’m going to be hiking this fall, the New England National Scenic Trail.

It’s the shortest at 215 miles. So from 215 to 4600, these are our 11 National Scenic Trails. Only three of them are only within one state. Ice Age Trail is one of them, and then the Arizona Trail and the Florida Trail. And I just want to take one minute to say one thing I really hope anyone that hears me talk is going to come away with a real appreciation for what a treasure this Ice Age Trail is. I mean, it’s not just ours, it’s everyone’s in America’s, but it’s all in Wisconsin and from being a travel writer for so many years and working with a lot of editors and people on the coasts, everyone always talks about the Midwest is a flyover zone and there’s nothing good in the Midwest and it’s a boring place and blah, blah, blah. And I think somehow, this is my own theory, I think somehow when you hear that all the time, over and over your whole life, that the Midwest is hicks and all that, I don’t want to say you believe it but you can look at something like the Ice Age Trail and say, well, it’s just a trail, we don’t have mountains, it can’t be that great, we’re not the coast, but yes, it is great. Yes, it is cool. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t have mountains.

You’re going to walk across some things that feel like mountains and that are very phenomenal glacial remains. And we really need to be proud of this. We really need to talk about it, use it, help develop it, whatever. It’s a huge status symbol, if you will. So that’s my little spiel on that. Now, back to the trail itself. How did our Ice Age Trail get started? Well, there was a man named Ray Zillmer, who I tried to get his picture for you last night three or four times and it kept crashing my laptop, so I gave up. But he was a lawyer out of Milwaukee. He also was an avid hiker and mountaineer, and he and his son actually climbed a peak in the Cariboo Range in British Columbia that no one had ever hiked.

So there’s a peak named Zillmer Peak out there. But he had hiked all around the world. He actually started some of the trails in Kettle Moraine in, I believe, the 1930s-1940s. He was very much keeping a watch as the Appalachian Trail was being developed and when all this research was coming out in the ’50s about the benefits of people being outdoors. And he kind of ended up having– He had very strong opinions about this. He thought people needed definitely to be out and recreating in the outdoors. He thought people should not have to drive, spend their whole vacation driving to the west coast or the east coast to hike. He thought everyone should spend no more than half a day driving somewhere and be able to get into the outdoors. He also thought a lot of the trails, especially the Appalachian Trail, were trying to pull people away from civilization and keep you in the wilderness as long as they could before you’d need to resupply, before you’d have to be dropped back into a town.

He didn’t agree with that. He had hiked a lot in England, and he loved the way the trails there just kind of meandered around and regularly would dip into a town, and, oh, you could have lunch and then you’d hike some more and, oh, here’s another town, I can stay overnight. He thought that was great. It was convenient for the hiker, and it really brought together the communities with the trail. So he initially thought let’s do a park, a National Park in Wisconsin. He knew about our glacial remains. And he thought let’s put it, you know, going around the terminal moraine. And as you can see here, it’s picture this ribbon of parkland going through the state. That’s what he was picturing.

He thought there’d be hiking in it, but it would be parkland so you could just see all this. And he talked to the National Park Service about that, and they said you are crazy, how in the world could we administer something like that? Most of their parks or all of their parks are pretty much a postage stamp kind of mass of land. They said we cannot do that, no way. So they nixed it, and then, unfortunately, in 1960 Ray died. But he had already been working with plenty of people who were excited about the idea of some kind of something with our glacial remains. So I’ll just kind of fast forward this part, but during the ’60s and it ended up becoming morphed into the idea of a long-distance trail. So then the National Trail Systems Act had passed in the ’60s, so the group of people that had been actively working for the last 10 or 20 years on this idea grabbed a chunk of trail in Kettle Moraine. It was actually, already developed because the forest was already developed, and it was called the Glacial Trail because it was one of the trails there that happened to go along around the terminal moraine. So they said this is going to be the seed of our Ice Age Trail.

So they started that in the ’70s, and then, as I mentioned before, 1980 Congress said, yes, this is a special enough place to be a National Scenic Trail, keep going. So they just were off and running. But there was a problem almost right away. As things go with politics or any group, people started fighting, and they had two trains of thought. One group of trail developers said let’s just get trail on the ground as fast as possible. So if that means we’re going to strike handshake agreements with people, that’s fine. And what that means is you’re Farmer John and you say I don’t want to sell you my land for your trail, but you can hike on it, sure go ahead, and shake hands on it. And another group of people said, well, yeah, you can get trail really quickly that way, but what happens, it’s not permanent and you never know, what happens if we lose that trail? And they said don’t worry about it, it’s just important first to get this trail developed, we can go back later and find permanent agreements. So a bunch of people started going out and striking all these handshake agreements, and the other group was working to try and purchase land and have it or get permanent agreements.

Well, just what the one side feared started happening. People would say– Farmer John, I’m going to kill you off, sorry. Farmer John dies and his kids get the land and they say we don’t want a trail here or we want to sell it and we don’t want to sell it with a trail. Or maybe Farmer John loves the hikers the first five years and someone comes through and litters one day and he says forget this. And so a National Park Service employee told me for the first 10 or 15 years they were working on the trail, maybe even a little longer, she said we just kept growing and reseeding. Every time we’d gain trail, we’d lose trail because these handshake agreements were not holding up for a variety of reasons. So at some point the main body that administers the Ice Age Trail, which today is called the Ice Age Trail Alliance, they said stop, stop the madness, we are only building trail if we can purchase the land or if we can get people to sign a permanent easement where this land is protected in perpetuity. Sometimes people will sign those free because they’re trail-backers. Sometimes they ask for, like, basically a rent payment every year.

So that’s the way the Ice Age Trail is operating now, and that’s why, one of the reasons why it’s not finished yet. Some people will say, how can they build a 2100-mile Appalachian Trail in 20 years and we’re working on the Ice Age Trail 50 years and we’re not done yet? Well, that’s part of the reason. And now, too, that we’re trying to purchase so much trail, there’s limited funds available and back in the 1920s, there was a lot fewer people in the US, it was a lot easier to buy land. A lot fewer people, a lot more land available. Now there’s less land available. So it gets trickier. But we will still get there. I did not mention yet this bifurcation, as they call it. That is right, this bubble in the middle here. So what this is, is an area of dispute again.

So when they were plotting out the trail, which Congress had to approve as part of the National Trail System, the actual terminal moraine runs right in the middle, and one side said we really think the trail should go here because if we put it to the east, we can lead people past Aldo Leopold’s shack and John Muir’s boyhood home, and those are significant environmental things we’d like to showcase. The other side said, no, if we put it out here, somewhere in here, I might be off a little bit, during the glacier’s time there was something called Glacial Lake Wisconsin. It was a massive, massive lake. I’ve got to look up the statistic again. It’s something like three Lake Winnebagos would fit into it or something like that. So that side said, no, we got to put it where Glacial Lake Wisconsin was. It’s outside the terminal moraine but it’s a major, major piece of the glacier. And, in fact, Glacial Lake Wisconsin was stopped up by the Baraboo hills and part of a piece of the glacier that had the ice sheet that had come down. And when the glacier started melting, this lake drained.

Some scientists or most scientists are estimating it could have drained in as fast as three or four days. And that lake draining is what chiseled Wisconsin Dells. So this fight went on and the National Park Service was like the parent and finally said stop, stop, we will create official side loops to National Scenic Trails, so you can keep both of these routes and then you guys just decide which is the official and which is a side loop. So they gave their blessing, they stepped away, and the people kept arguing again because the people who wanted the eastern side said, well, we want this to be the main loop and the other to be the side loop. So they were fighting and finally they just said, you know, we’re just going to sign a truce, we’re just going to leave it as it is. So now, today, if you want to hike the entire Ice Age Trail, you only have to hike one side or the other. It’s your choice. And that’s what’s considered, you know, completing the whole trail. But they have told me that in the somewhat near future the Ice Age Trail Alliance is hoping to decide, designate one side the official trail and the other the side loop.

So, stay tuned. I don’t have any indication from anyone if they’re leaning toward one side or the other. So that is the trail today. I’ve hiked them both. And, actually, both today have very little trail. They’re mostly road walks. A few more things I wanted to mention. The Ice Age Trail passes through 31 of our 72 counties, and 60% of us live within 20 miles of it. So that was Ray Zillmer’s vision: easy access to the trail.

So that is a great thing. And it’s also maintained by 21 volunteer chapters. And that’s a very important piece to know if you’re hiking it. I knew that when I started out, but I didn’t really understand what it all meant. So, very, very basically, the Ice Age Trail Alliance, which happens to be based in Cross Plains, so we’re lucky it’s in our backyard, they have a small staff, and they work on getting money to build the trail, physically building some of the trail, maintaining some of the trail, advertising the trail, etc. and then there are these 21 volunteer chapters, which are areas around the trail, and they get volunteers to do, they really do the bulk of the reblazing it every year, cutting the weeds, that kind of thing, building new trail. And Ice Age Trail Alliance also has events throughout the year where if there’s a major trail-building project, they might have people go up for anywhere from a day to a week and build trail, build boardwalk, that kind of thing. But it’s really the volunteers that power and are in charge of a lot of these sections of trail. And so what does that mean for the hiker? Well, when I first started out, when I first learned what the Ice Age Trail was, I thought, oh, that’s right, the Ice Age Trail, I remember now, I hiked some of that in Kettle Moraine and I hiked some of that in Lapham Peak and I hiked some of that in Indian Lake. Well, these are all county or state parks.

So there, when the trail runs through a county or state park, there are county or state employees that maintain that trail, as well as all the other trails, and you’re getting a lot of people through. So those things combined means the trail is basically always in good shape. A bad trail there might be the grass is up to your ankle. So in my head I was thinking that’s what the Ice Age Trail is going to be like. It’s going to be like these trails, and it’s a prestigious National Scenic Trail, so I’m thinking it’s just going to be this, you know, you’re in the wilderness but it’s going to be a beautifully clipped trail that I just follow along. And on the second day, I had started in St. Croix Falls and it was like, oh, my gosh, what the heck? There could be wild raspberries up to my shoulders, there were a lot of weeds up to here, and I remember I was tripping all over and I remember at one point just yelling out loud to nobody because I was out there all by myself. I’m like, “This is not a National Scenic Trail. “This is an embarrassment. “We cannot be telling people to come out here.

“What if I was with my grandma “or what if I brought little kids along? “And this is a disgrace.” I had no idea how it was supposed, you know, how it operated. Well, then I talked to a volunteer the next day, and it’s like, oh, okay, yeah, I get it now. I had started my hike at the end of August, all the summer growth had been going on. At that point, long distance hiking in America had just currently been growing, you know, every year, but it had really, it was just starting to become a thing maybe five years ago when I was out there. And they were only getting maybe, they could get maybe two people a year in some of these sections of the Ice Age Trail that are far north. So if you’re only getting two hikers through a year and you maybe have 60 miles of trail in your chapter and there’s maybe four of you that are volunteering, maybe two of you are young people with kids who are in a lot of activities, maybe the other two are 80 and you can’t really hoist a big chainsaw on your shoulder and hike 10 miles into the trail to clean it up, of course the trails can’t be in shape every minute. Even if you were able to clean them out perfectly at the start of the spring, think of how your own yards, you know, it seems like sometimes the grass grows overnight. You just mowed it, you got a rain, and it’s this high. So that is something to keep in mind, and I don’t say that to scare anyone because it’s not like the whole thing is this wild jungle.

But you will get sections that are pretty rugged, which, in the end, I decided after I was so mad that first couple days, I really liked going through some of those because when you come out and, yeah, maybe you’re all scratched from the bushes or whatever, you’re like dang it, I got it, yeah, go me. [laughter] So, yes, that is part of the experience. But it is also something to let everyone know about too because maybe you are passionate about hiking and you’ll love the trail. So then see if you can take time and volunteer. Even if you don’t live in an area where there’s a chapter, they have these events, about a dozen events a year, where they’re building trail. You can sign on, you can do anything from pull weeds to learn how to do, operate the big saws and everything. Or that’s not my thing so I just bake cookies because they feed these people. Sometimes they’ll camp, like I said, anywhere from a day to a week. So they need food, so you can volunteer and drop off cookies.

One man told me I hate hiking but I love to build trail. So maybe you’re a handyman and you love to build boardwalk. There’s a lot of ways that we can get involved and keep building the trail and then get the word, spread the word out about it, make it even a greater gem than it already is. I will talk a little bit about my journey on the Ice Age Trail. So, why did I do this? A lot of people would say to me, what the heck? Are you crazy? What are you doing out hiking? Well, I actually had a friend, Jason Dorgan, some of you may know him. He’s from this area. In 2007, he was a big Ice Age Trail backer and a big runner. He decided I’m going to try and set a record, a speed record on the Ice Age Trail. That’s what a lot of people were doing on the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest.

No one had tried to do it on the Ice Age Trail. And he knew that when you do these speed records you bring attention to the trail. So he thought, I want to help this trail grow. He was talented at doing this, so he went out and he through-ran, as he calls it, the trails in 22 days. He averaged about 50 miles a day And I knew this was going on when he was doing it, but I didn’t know because my oldest child was about to graduate from high school. He was doing this in April-May, and I was busy with that and a bunch of other things. And I would get these emails because I’m part of a running groups he’s in. It’s like, Jason’s here, now Jason’s in Lodi, who wants to meet Jason at the end? And I thought, I knew he was doing something but I didn’t know what. Well, five years go by and it’s the end of 2012 and I’m on some group run and Jason’s talking about, reminiscing about his record-setting run.

And I said, “Now what did you do again? Explain this to me.” Well, as he’s talking about it, by then my kids are out of the house and I had started doing a lot of hiking over those years and writing about hiking. And I just got so excited. I had just done a ton of work on this Camino de Santiago in Spain. I had written a guidebook about. I’d been hiking that over and over. And it’s like, oh, my gosh, I’ve got a trail that’s twice as long, twice as exciting, and it’s in my home state. It’s right in my backyard. I don’t have to go overseas. And I thought, I want to do this too.

I want to hike it. And I thought, and I like to run, so, you know, let’s see. So I went on the website that night, and then I got really excited because I saw only three women, this is like December 2012, only three women had done what’s called through-hike, and that is when you hike the trail from start to finish in one attempt. And I thought, ooh, too bad I couldn’t have been number one. [laughter] I know, I’m a competitive runner. So then I looked at the times and I thought, I can tell none of these people was trying to set a record. I mean, I never heard of a record-setting attempt other than Jason’s, and I could just tell from the number of days that it wasn’t any record-setting pace. So I thought, well, I’m know I’m kind of old to set these. I can’t do 50 miles a day, but I thought I could do maybe 30 to 35.

And then I’d have the women’s record, and that could be really cool because if you’re into any kind of competitive sports or running, by the time your, if I was 50 at the time, 51, you don’t set any records anymore. So I’m like, oh, I could have this record too. And then I thought, that’s still, I calculated it out, that’ll be like five weeks, though, and I can’t really take five weeks off of work. But I thought, well, if I didn’t know about the Ice Age Trail and I’ve been writing all about Wisconsin travel for that last 15 years, 20 years, I bet a lot of other people don’t know about it, too. So I started asking around. Have you ever heard of this? Do you know what this is? And it was kind of like me. People either knew nothing about it, had never heard the name, or they had heard about it, but sort of thought they knew it but they didn’t really. So I went out and I got a bunch of article assignments. And I said to my husband, you need to crew me.

Well, no, first I was going to do it on my own. First I was just going to hike and have someone pick me up at the end of the day and go to a lodging, a friend’s house or an inn or something like that. But Jason said, no, if you’re going to try to set a speed record, you have to have a crew with you. And in running terms that means somebody who’s with you all the time. So you head off on a trail segment and it might be five miles and someone’s going to meet you there. When you finish this day, do you need more water? Do you need snacks? Do you need a change of shoes? Whatever. And so I agreed, and I put together this crew of family and friends who agreed to be with me. So someone was with me on the trail every day. And I kind of calculated out where would 30 to 35 miles be a day, and I found friends and family who said I could stay with them.

And when I didn’t know anyone in an area, I booked a room at a motel or something. And I set out in the very end of August of 2013. Mostly it was in September, but a little bit of August, a little bit of October. And I decided to start in St. Croix Falls, Interstate State Park, because I was thinking, that’s up north, it’s the end of August, it’ll be cool up there, and then I’ll, you know, I’ll be hiking, I’ll be hiking south. And so maybe, you know, I’ll have the best weather because I hate hot weather. I love Wisconsin. I love winter. So the day I started off this lovely day at like 6:17 in the morning, it was projected to be a high of like 95. [laughter] It was like 90% humidity, and it’s like you gotta be kidding me.

I think I changed entire outfits, my entire outfit three times. [laughter] And it was so gross! And, actually, that whole time I was hiking, I would say until, the very last week, it was hot almost every single day. I had a whole week of 90s. There were a lot of 80s, a lot of 70s, and 70s might not sound bad if you’re doing something else, but if you’re out hiking and running, that’s pretty warm. So that was probably the most challenging part for me, was just the weather. And I did the trail again a couple years later at the same time and it was just as hot. So, I don’t know. But the good thing about hiking the trail in the fall is that you don’t have ticks. That is one thing with the Ice Age Trail.

You do have to be aware if you’re hiking in the spring, which is another good season, that there are a lot of ticks. And one section was actually closed for a couple weeks because the tick count was so high in there. The Ice Age Trail Alliance, if you’re ever interested in hiking, they have an annual conference every year, and they have a hiker panel on it every year where people will talk about their experiences. It’s a Q&A kind of thing, and you can learn a lot. So my friend Jason had said go to that before you do this. I had already started. I had gotten these article assignments. I had gotten people to crew me. I was well into planning when this conference was in April.

So, again, I started this idea December, this is now April, I’m planning to do it at the end of August, and one guy on the panel was talking about how he had hiked last spring. And he said it was tick season, and he said he just kept, he had hundreds on his arms, and he would just be brushing them off like this. And my palms started sweating. [laughter] And I didn’t know what tick season was because, again, my parents, we’re from Chicago originally and that’s just not our thing. It wasn’t our thing. So we never went camping or anything like that. But I just, my palms were sweating and I’m thinking, all right, I’m going to have to cancel all my assignments, I’m canceling this hike, I can’t do this. You know, I can do a lot of things but I can’t do ticks. And by the end of the, yeah, he said he finally stopped doing it. So he hiked all day with these sleeves of ticks, and then at the end of the night he would brush them off.

So I’m like almost gagging too. Then somebody asks a question, you know, when’s tick season? And they said spring and it starts dying out in July, and it was like, oh, thank God because I thought I really was going to have to cancel my hike. But that is one thing about the spring. So I headed off on my merry way. I’m going to go back one minute too. When I was talking about through-hiking and through-running and records, a couple things I want to say. So, through-hiking is starting a trail and hiking it through to the end in one attempt. Now, that doesn’t mean you can never get off or never stop hiking. Many people will take a day, a rest day a week.

Some people, you know, if you have a wedding and you just can’t find a convenient time to schedule your hike and you know it’s going to take you two months or something, you might get off on a weekend to go to a wedding or a graduation or one set of hikers took off a week when I got, that week that it was the 90 degrees when I started. This group of hikers, two hikers took off because it was just too hot. And in many trails, the bigger long distance trails, like the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest, and even the Florida Trail, which is about the same size as ours. They give you a year. They say if you do this trail in 12 months, you’re considered a through-hiker. So I’m actually through-hiking the Florida National Scenic Trail right this very minute because I hiked a bunch in January and March and May, and then they tell you not to hike until November/December because it’s just too hot and buggy down there. And so if I decide to go back down there, which I’ll probably have to go in the holidays which will be hard, but if I can go there and finish by, I think I started January 7th this year, in one year I’ll be considered a through-hiker. And the Ice Age Trail doesn’t quite– They don’t really have rules. So I suppose technically if you hiked from one end to the other over years, you could say I’m a through-hiker, but the general understanding is that you’re going to be doing this– Try to do it in one attempt and within a year.

Section hikers, that’s you can hike the entire trail in sections. And you can get a wonderful thousand-miler award and get your name in stars or in lights. All kinds of things. And that’s what most people do. So if you decide, hey, that’s going to be my goal, especially maybe your two young children there, grandchildren, who are starting to hike, you can, they have great, the Ice Age Trail Alliance has wonderful materials. They have a map, a huge map of the state and the trail. You can put the dates you’re hiking. You can go out and hike a section at a time and just tick it off, and whenever you’re finished, whether it’s, two years, five years, 20 years, you can fill out a little form on the Ice Age Trail Alliance website and submit it and you get your designation as a thousand-miler. So that’s what most people.

And if you section hike, you can do it in any order that you like. You don’t have to go in sequential order. And then, onto the record-setting fast packing, the one thing I wanted to mention about that, when Jason talks about his through-run or I say I ran the trail, no one, no matter how talented, ever runs an entire trail like that. So there’s just another speed record set on the Appalachian Trail. What that means is you run when you can, and when you’re running it’s very slow jogging. It’s not like running a 10K race where you’re going six-minute miles. You’re jogging slowly. But there’s some spots where you just, physically the terrain is such, you can’t run. There’s some pretty big boulders in a section called Grandfather Falls.

There’s bit boulders in the Dells. You have to walk up those. And just in general, even if you are running, say, a shorter, maybe a 10-mile trail race, the thought in those is that you go faster in the long run if you walk up the hill. So even your winners of those races will generally walk uphill when you’re on trail. So some people just have this image of, you know, how could you possibly run? You’re not really running all the time. Jason estimates, when he did his 50 miles a day, that he was running 60% of the time and walking 40%. I would say my figures were actually flipped, walking 60% and running 40%, because I had some other issues with some foot problems and things where I couldn’t run for a number of days and I could only hike. So that’s what that means, if you’re curious. And, also, in the world of these speed records, you don’t have to run them at all.

There’s two trains thought of there. They attract, the people who try these either are good at ultra running, which is anything over a marathon distance, so over 26.2 miles. So they will try to run as much as they can. And they’ll stop, they’ll maybe only be out on the trail 10 or 11 hours a day. The other theory is that I’m going to hike it all because it’s not as exhausting, but I’m going to hike for up to 16 hours a day, which I can’t imagine just being on my feet that long. So when you hear about these speed records, that’s what people are generally doing is one of those two methods. One thing I learned about our Ice Age Trail that’s so great compared to some of the others is that we have a lot of variety in our landscape. The Appalachian Trail, which is so famous and I’m sure is beautiful from what I’ve seen, a lot of the hikers call it a big, the long, green tunnel because you’re in the woods a lot. We have a lot of prairie.

We have, we see the beautiful woods. We have a section where you’re walking along Lake Michigan. And then all the cities and towns too, the communities that you’re going through. So I know I’m getting close to my time limit here, so I’ll just do, these are just prairie on the left and some of the forest land on the right. A lot of glacial lakes, of course, those are beautiful. There’s some farmland that, this picture on the left– It doesn’t really do it justice, but this was one of the most spectacular sites. I popped out of the woods and I found myself on the top of this hill, and a farmer had mowed this trail and it was just winding like a ribbon down. And there are these little grasses on each side that were kind of waving, and I made it like, I felt like I was royalty. Like walking down some special path.

It was just really incredible. A lot of pine forests. Those are lovely. More prairie and woods. And then, on the right is where it goes on Lake Michigan, along Lake Michigan two miles. One year the water level was so high you had to actually walk through pretty deep water and a lot of bramble, and that was kind of difficult. In general, the Ice Age Trail is blazed yellow with painted on or plastic blazes. Sometimes they have some old signage. They’re trying to make it uniform so it’s just the yellow blazes, but the little brown sign on the left, those were some freebies from the federal government.

So they had used them a lot in the past, but it doesn’t look like it blends in here, but really they kind of blend in with the tree trunks and it can be hard to see. They started using some on the right years ago, but that’s kind of like the snowmobile signage. I got mixed up on that once. Snowmobile signs are generally rectangular and not square, but I didn’t know that and so I think it was my second day on the trail and I thought, well, that’s the only thing I see so that must be the Ice Age Trail, and that got me lost. On the right, the yellow sign in the bubble, that was an old Ice Age symbol. It has Wisconsin in the middle. The triangular shape around it that’s kind of rounded, that is the shape for the National Scenic Trail. Some guy in Florida called it a pregnant triangle. So there’s the standard blaze on the right.

They don’t usually use too many arrows like you see on the left. Now, on the left, it’s not a great picture. That is the current Ice Age Trail sign. It’s got the woolly mammoth in the middle and a little bit of blue behind it, and each segment that’s currently developed, as opposed to the road walks, they have a name, which is nice, and they generally have these nice, big, wooden signs on either end. So it’s easy to find where they are. Every once in a while they don’t. They have a thin Carsonite post, and that can be a little confusing. I know we’re out of time, so I won’t get to my signs of the glacier. But I want to say thank you so much for having me here, and I hope everyone will enjoy the trail.