For this morning’s walk, I didn’t want to travel very far from the Madison area because the weather was yuck, but I did want to do more than stretch my legs. I wanted to hike at least five miles, and the one place I could easily hike that far which was only a short drive from my house was the UW-Madison arboretum.

I parked in the lot for the southern half of the arboretum, just off the beltline. The lot has room for about half a dozen cars and it was empty when I got there this morning. When I hit the trail I headed straight for the farthest corner of the arboretum with the idea in mind to check out the Knollwood Conservation Park, connected to the corner of the arboretum by a trail crossing the street. Knollwood is probably a much nicer place to hike in in the warmer months when there’s some vegetation to admire, but then so is the arboretum. I’ll have to revisit Knollwood after everything begins to bud out in the spring.

Circling back to the arboretum, I took a bit of a roundabout way to get to the pedestrian tunnel under the beltline to cross into the northern half of the arboretum. I was using today’s hike to check out Organic Maps, an app I downloaded for my smart phone, coupled with another app, All Trails. I’m looking for a suitable app that will help me keep track of my wanderings, and these two get a lot of praise from the hikers I follow in social media. What I immediately liked about it was that it shows me the hiking paths through the arboretum and it records my hike and tells me how long it was. This was only the first time I used it so I don’t know enough about it yet to decide whether or not I want to keep using it, but it’s more useful than Google maps for these two features alone because Google doesn’t do either of these. (It can record a route, but it has never accurately recorded any hike I’ve ever taken through the arboretum.)

I crossed under the beltline to get to the northern half of the arboretum for two reasons: I wanted to make today’s hike as long as I could, and crossing from the southern into the northern half made it easy to double my steps, but also because there are no toilets in the southern half of the arboretum and I knew I would need to pee before this hike was over. In fact, I headed straight to the porta-potty as soon as I came out of the tunnel. Yeah. I said porta-potty. The arboretum is a lovely place to go for a walk in the city, but the bathroom facilities suck. There’s a visitor center with a really nice bathroom but it’s not open until noon on the weekends, so on my morning walks I have to pee in the porta-potty.

When I discovered there was a tunnel between the two halves of the arboretum, I had to check it out. That was two or three years ago, and I have only used it once since then because I don’t like it. It’s narrow and dirty and it doesn’t have any lights. Walking through it is not a pleasant experience on the best of days. On this very cold, overcast day it was about as unpleasant as I’ve ever experienced it. The only up side to using it is that I could cross from one half of the arboretum into the other without getting in my car and driving for five minutes.

After my rest stop, I looped through the Lost City Forest to make my way to the Gallistel Woods. It was right after I got there that I came face to face with a bald eagle. I first noticed it when I was still about twenty feet away. It was sitting on a log watching me. I’ve never seen a bald eagle on the ground before. The ones I’ve seen were always in the trees or circling overhead. Unsure what to do, I froze for several minutes and waited. It didn’t move or seem at all frightened by me. It just stood there, keeping an eye on me.

After watching it for several minutes, I slowly got my phone out of my coat pocket and took several photos of it. It still showed no signs of taking wing, so after putting my phone away I slowly continued along the trail past it. When I was closest I was no more than four feet away, probably the closest I will ever be to a bald eagle in my life. It would have been best to take a really good photo at this point, instead of the crappy low-resolution photo I got from twenty feet away. Live and learn. It still made no move to go anywhere. It just stood there, watching me as I passed by.

There was a man about my age further down the trail, watching the eagle just as I had done. I stopped and talked to him for several minutes. He believed it had to be injured or sick to stand on the ground unmoving for so long.

After leaving, I make a loop through the woods on the south shore of Lake Wingra, stopping briefly at Big Spring for a short break before moving on. I circled back to the Gallistel Woods to return to the visitor center to use the porta-potty again before crossing under the beltline through the tunnel to return to the southern half of the arboretum. I had to make a detour into the woods to get around a closed trail and return to the parking lot. From beginning to end, my hike covered 8.1 miles and took almost three hours to complete.