I knew if I wanted to take a hike through the UW-Madison arboretum, I would have to get there before the sun had been up long enough to melt the ground and turn every trail into a slippery quagmire of muck, which was already starting to happen by the time I left at 10:00 this morning. That’s why I was dressed and out the door by seven.

The other thing I realized, as soon as I got out of the car and hit the first trail onto the Curtis Prairie, was that I should have bought crampons for my shoes a long time ago. As grateful as I was that the trails were still frozen from the low temps the previous night, it quickly became apparent that the ice covering most of the trails I would be walking along this morning was very slick in a lot of places. Even where tracks laid down by hikers (and turkeys!) the previous day roughed up the ice a bit, there was enough smooth ice in and around the tracks to make my feet slide right out from under me if I wasn’t careful, and sometimes even if I was.

Even so, it was a good day, clear and sunny, to walk in the woods, and I ended up hiking for about two hours, first in the northern half of the arboretum, then in the southern half. I drove around to the southern half instead of walking through the tunnel under the beltline because I don’t like using the tunnel much, and because I meant only to stop and check out the trails in the pines to see how muddy it was, but the trails were so easy to walk there and the day was so nice that I kept on walking almost all the way to the back, but not quite as far as the Cannonball Path, before taking a shortcut trail through the woods and heading back. The last quarter mile or so of today’s hike was north up a muddy access road. Things were getting pretty sloppy by then.