Today’s hike was along the bike trails in the Blue Mounds State Park. I didn’t set out to hike the bike trails today. I originally planned to hike the hiking trails, but apparently they are mostly traveled by cross-country skiers in the winter, and I certainly didn’t want to mess up their trails. The bike trails are marked with signs indicating those trails are for snow shoers, so I tramped along those instead because I was on show shoes. I ended up walking a route that was a loop about three miles long. Seemed a lot longer than that, probably because I was shouldering a twenty-pound pack so I could test my stamina. As I expected, being cooped up in the house all winter hasn’t done me any favors. I was well and truly knackered by the time I got back to my car.

There are four trails in this part of the park, easily reached from a trail head at a very generously-sized parking lot. There were maybe half a dozen cars when I got there, and maybe ten or twelve when I left. Most people appeared to be skiers, but a few had mountain bikes with fat tires. The trails I walked had plenty of fresh tire tracks but I never crossed paths with a biker. I did see lots of skiers, just not on the bike trails.

After walking down from the trail head, I turned south along a path used by skiers and after about ten minutes came to an intersection with the white loop of the Gneiss trails. I walked north up the outside of the white loop, then up the outside of the green loop before joining the blue loop. These were not at all like the wide, flat hiking trails at Blue Mounds. Mountain bikers want lots of hairpin turns, it seems, and if the trail must go straight, then there has to be a steep ramp or a sharp drop-off somewhere along the way. I was very glad to be wearing snow shoes, so I could walk these slippery ups and downs and round-and-rounds without having to worry about my feet slipping out from under me and face-planting over and over.

The weather was cold enough that I wore my thermal long johns, and when I started out I was bundled up in a jacket with a quilted liner and wearing insulated ski gloves, but after a mile or two I was warm enough to shed the coat, liner, and gloves, and walked the rest of the trail in shirtsleeves and a pair of knit wool glove liners. Never got warm enough to take my hat off, though. We were supposed to get clear skies and sunshine, but in the two hours I was hiking, the overcast never burned off.