Farewell Party

If I keep my fingers well and truly crossed, and maybe if I do all my chores and finish my brussels sprouts and promise not to stick my tongue out at my sister, there’s a possibility that Home Depot Girl might be able to hang up her orange cape forever. I’ll find out in May whether I have an alternate employer, to start sometime in July-ish (although nothing’s gonna stop me from being on Pewaukee Lake for the Fourth this year).

If this happens, I’d like to give HDG a farewell party. I’m thinking of having the theme be “endangered animals.” I could bring HDG to the middle of some deep, dark woods and release her into the wild, never to be seen again.

This requires taking off the month of June and planning a long-distance tramp. But where to? Which woods or hills would you, gentle reader, visit if you had three weeks to kill? Am I forgetting anything critical, like an appointment I penciled in three years ago for June 15, or the fact that without a timely intervention, I will be tramping pantsless? (Which is true. There’s an inopportune hole in my current pair. I imagine hoards of ticks crawling through and writing to all their friends about how they found a nice, cozy spot in the shade on the banks of an artery, and that they’re thinking of building a tick hotel with maybe an amusement park and guided tours to my ankles.)

Ice Age Trail
St. Croix Falls, WI (just opposite Taylor’s Falls, MN) to Kettle Moraine State Forest to Sturgeon Bay

It was many, many years before my first real tramp, when I naively assumed that a lively day hike was the epitome of outdoors enjoyment, when I was first introduced to the Ice Age Trail. Mom and I would hop on our bikes and spend a day on the Glacial Drumlin Trail for sundaes at LeDuc’s. En route, where the bike trail skirts the north edge of Kettle Moraine State Forest,a wide, inviting path is mown through a grassy field and disappears tantalizingly into the trees. My bike, although willing and loyal on pavement, balked at the wildly uneven ground on the path, so its origin and destination remained intriguingly mysterious. Mom told me once that it was the Ice Age Trail and that it meandered all over the state, from top to bottom and side to side, following the southern extent of the glaciers. If you started walking, you could keep going almost forever. How gripping to a Covault, to whom turning around on a trail is considered an admission of defeat and often requires multiple dire warnings of slow and painful deaths to hikers who proceed. I vowed someday to follow that broad, sunny, seductively welcoming path into the woods, not stopping until I ran out of trail.

It turns out that my imagined trek wouldn’t have been as epic as hoped. At present, according to its website, the IAT looks more like a dotted line than a solid trail. Longish stretches cross state forests (including Kettle Moraine) and jump through state parks, but between these scenic stints are many miles of roadwalks and shortcuts through towns. The trail seems to beg for forgiveness by passing miniscule county and city parks on the way, like a desperate tour guide in a land with no word for “tourist.”

I think my ten-year-old self would forgive me for skipping over the IAT, for now. There are bigger mastodons out there to spear.

North Country Trail
Eastern New York State through the Fingerlakes Trail to Ohio’s Buckeye Trail, up Michigan and across the UP, over Minnesota and ending in the middle of North Dakota

I didn’t realize until a year or two ago that it’s possible to walk home from Ithaca on trails. Within 20 minutes’ drive of Pleasant Grove Road, I can find trail markers bursting proudly with the compass-rose-cum-northstar emblem of the North Country Trail along with a tiny map of the seven states I could cross if only I kept walking. The NCT tries its best to cross half the country, taking advantage of many established trails along the way, but there’s also plenty of roadwalking between public lands. Since I’ve already seen most of the Ithaca-area NCT where it coincides with the Fingerlakes Trail, I was considering jumping ahead to the UP to see what the land of Blackjack looks like in summertime. The NCT wanders through the Porkies and through Ottawa, Hiawatha, and Superior National Forests, finally jumping the Lakes at the Mackinaw Island Bridge. I’m told the bridge is quite impressive. I’ve been there once. My sister and I oohed and ahhed at the pea-soup fog as our severely disappointed parents described the stunning vistas allegedly surrounding us.

Other pluses include a relatively peaceable bear population (as opposed to that of the Adirondacks, which essentially behave like a fat breed of dog and expect to be fed like one) and the perhaps tenuous possibility of pressuring friends and family into chauffeuring me to and from trailheads. There’s topography but not in the extreme, and the Northwoods always seem serenely inviting, even in winter.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell, without buying the various guidebooks, how much of the NCT is physical trail and how much is either roadwalk or even a dotted line gestating in someone’s imagination. Plus, as long as I’m in the East (and who knows how much longer that will last), I might as well see the Eastern sights while they’re relatively convenient. And it might be easier to cut my long-distance teeth on a more established trail.

Appalachian Trail
Georgia to Maine

This is the obvious choice. It’s solid trail for as long as I have time to hike. Ammenities include huts and latrines and a plethora of information on the quirks and how-tos of each mile.

But I hesitate to step on Andrea’s bootlaces. That’s her and Tony’s quest, later this year. (Happy tramping, sister!)

Long Trail
Crosses Vermont from Maryland to Canada, coinciding with the AT for the southern half

It takes 270 miles and about 30 days to cross Vermont the long way. The Green Mountains, like all mountains in the East, stand in remarkably narrow ridges, leaving little room for multiple north-south trails and therefore little opportunity for loop hikes, requiring creativity for trailhead and trail-end transportation.

Still, mountains tend to make for good scenery, and there are plenty of huts along the way. But there might also be plenty of people, of course.

Northville-Placid Trail
Northville, NY through the Adirondacks to Lake Placid

It borders on criminal negligence to have lived in New York State for as long as I have without having climbed Mt. Marcy in Adirondack Park. (It’s not precisely clear to me what sort of “park” it is. It’s not national, nor state, nor local. It’s just a big green blob on the map, as if an intern at the cartographer’s spilled a glob of green ink and then wrote “Park” on the splotch, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder to make sure that his mentor was still busy in the next room. Due to its ink-drop origin, this area has one particular bonus: it’s round. This opens the possibility of multiple north-south trails, meaning a loop might be made. I’m still researching the reality of this possibility. I haven’t yet found a trail map of the whole park. It’s too big.

But nowhere is perfect. Possibly because of the legions of outdoors enthusiasts who make their Mt. Marcy pilgrimages in summer, hiker-bear relations have been deteriorating recently. At least one clever bear has figured out how to pop open the bear-proof food canisters of the model I took to Shenandoah. Bear canisters are required and must be a park-approved model. And I’m terrified of any bear not behind bars in a zoo. Maybe some bear exposure is exactly what I need to put this fear to rest. But is it worth the price of several days’ worth of food and a chewed-through set of Tupperware-on-steroids?

Anywhere Else?

This weekend I’ll visit EMS and chat with Cornell Outdoor Education, and maybe post to the Cornell Outing Club list for advice. We’ll see. Any suggestions or comments from the audience?

	Solid Trail	Loop	Easy Trailhead Transportation	Low Bear Density	Low People Density
IAT			X	X	X
NCT	?		?	X	X
AT	X		?	?
LT	X			X	?
NPT	X	?	?