I’m a bit behind in sharing about our #50HikesWi project this summer. Turns out, we are hiking at a faster pace than I can blog!
We went camping for the Fourth of July, and after kayaking down the Kickapoo River on Saturday morning, decided to further torture ourselves with a second hike from our book.
Wildcat Mountain State Park – Hike #27
Wildcat Mountain State Park is one our favorite camping spots. We’ve been there a half a dozen times, and had never taken this trail down through the valley and back up. And I mean UP. We had about six people from our camping crew and the only one itching to run back up the hill was the tiniest of the bunch: a rat terrier named Snickers.
(all iPhone photography here, so apologies of the low res)
This one was a pretty straightforward hike, except that a friend spotted a random 60+ year old parked in the middle of the ravine.
So maybe it wasn’t so straightforward after all.
Jersey Valley County Park – Hike #26
Our second hike of the weekend was also in the Kickapoo Valley, at a park that we found the dead end of a county road that skirted the ridge and then dove down between two corn fields to this lake tucked deep in the valley.
This hike was also hilly – it essentially skirted the whole lake, up through the woods on the right hand side, around the back of the lake, and then back up the hill and down again on the left. It was a good hike, but at least in July the forest was so think that you really couldn’t see anything for most of the trail other than the trail itself.
Except that we did see a juvenile Bald Eagle, so that was cool. He’s sitting on a tree in the photo below.
The Jersey Valley hike would probably be lovely in the fall – and less buggy, too.
Next up: the hilarious, almost-disastrous hike we took in late July at Governor Dodge. It taught me more about my personality than most anything else in life.
What about you? Have you gotten out to explore any new-to-you places in your neck of the woods lately?
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