Hike 2: Madison Segment - Lessons Learned

Since the last hike, there have been some developments in Casa de Hiker. The Hikeress was out of commission for a few weeks with a neck injury. And, we picked up the Ice Age Trail Atlas and Ice Age Trail Companion Guide at REI. I'll get to this later, but it's a good thing we did.

Today's hike was a 6.3+ mile jaunt from Highway PD to Woods Rd through University Ridge Golf Course.

The weather was fine for a fall morning: 55 degrees and overcast. It was supposed to rain, but unlike last time, the rain actually held off today. The 6.3 miles took us approximately 2 hours or so. We crossed Hwy PD (the walk button at the jogging trail, though not, technically, part of the Ice Age Trail, works very effectively at stopping traffic to cross PD), hiked down the hill to Raymond Rd, attempted to cross Hwy M, got through University Ridge, and made it to Woods Rd.

During the course of the two hours you have some time to think about things, like:

- thankfully I dressed appropriately today

- I did not wear the right shoes (note to self and others: combat boots need more padding in the soles)

- How, with one car, are we going to hike this whole damned thing (without two cars we have to hike every segment as an out-and-back - essentially hiking everything twice)?

- Who the heck marked this trail?

Luckily we had actually read the Companion Guide before heading out today. The trail at Hwy M is not exactly intuitive.

This is from the trail looking at Flagstone Dr. The stop sign is HWY M. It is not clear here, at all, what direction to go. It seems relatively obvious that we need to cross M, however, there is no obvious place to cross. Moreover, there is no Blaze on the other side of M. We thought we had basically two options:

1) Cross Hwy M and go to the left to the driveway for the Noer Turf Grass Facility

2) Walk through the allotment to the right, to a safer place to cross Hwy M

If we didn't know that we were supposed to be crossing Hwy M, we would have no idea where to go. The Hiker thought that we should go to the driveway; the Hikeress, after success with the walk signal on PD, thought we should find a safer place to walk. It turns out the the answer is to eschew safety, run out into traffic, and go to the driveway for the Noer Turf Grass Facility. 

Lesson learned. Safety is for losers.

It did, however, give us pause to consider that if the trail marking was this questionable in a populated area like Madison, the prospects for the lumber trails in Northern Wisconsin were dim indeed.

The rest of the hike was relatively uneventful.