Entry for July 6, 2008 - Cross Plains, WI - Ice Age Trail

My goal today, get in 5-6 miles of walking and be home early in the afternoon and avoid getting stuck in the "end of weekend" traffic jams on the freeway.

I chose someplace reasonably close to home that I can take county roads to get to. Cross Plains, Wisconsin is located along US highway 14 to the west of Madison. There is a geocache in Festge County Park that I logged about 4 years ago, and I decided to get another 'cache that looked to be near that old one.

I'm have a passing familiarity with this park, stopped a few times to have lunch while working. I thought I knew the place to park at and connect to the trails, and ignored programming the recommended parking spot into my GPS receiver. That wound up biting me in the @$$ on this day.

I arrived at the park at 9:30 am and started navigating. The GPS said this new geocache was only about 9/10 of a mile away as the crow flies.

Walking trails are kind of wild, as I sort of remembered.

Well, all my navigation skills just kept bringing me to dead ends. Either the trail would just stop, or in this case, ran into a corfield (private land). Geocaching guidelines prohibit trespassing, but I have more than a little experience treading lightly in cornfields. I tried walking the perimeter looking for another trail going into the woods that my receiver kept pointing too.

As I was doing this I decided to try programming the recommended parking coordinates into my GPS and see where it was on the map. Well, it was obvious I would just have to walk back to my little red oIIIIIIIo and drive to the right spot. I did something stupid like this last year, at least I figured it out earlier and corrected fast enough to salvage the day.

Drove to the correct parking, an entrance to the local segment of the Ice Age Trail. Never knew it was here.

Well, this is a much nicer walk!

This segment takes you up one bluff, down into a valley to cross over to the bluff I was walking on earlier (opposite side though)

The trail also crosses private land, but has an easement agreement with the non-profit organization that owns it.

The slopes get steep here.

This will be a million-dollar view in the autumn.

There is my excuse for doing all this walking.

I traded in the traveling geocoin that I grabbed in Burnsville, MN 2 weeks ago for this "travel bug". It has a tracking tag attached, and I will check on it's mission goal later. The log says it was placed here yesterday.

Since it was so exposed when I found it, I foraged for some extra camouflage and hid the geocache better.

This is a point-point trail that does not loop back, so I just kept going on and tried to feel for an appropriate point to stop and walk back. I at least went on long enough to find this sexy-looking alligator.

I remembered to take a picture of the valley between the bluffs on the return trip.

Back to parking.

I at least hit my target 5-6 miles of walking today, with some good elevation change (over 100 feet) during the journey.

Here is the walk overlaid on a topographical map

... and overlaid on USGS aerial photo.

It actually was a more picturesque walk than I was expecting. Only 1 find, but if I did this for the numbers, I would never enjoy the journey so much.