Tim usually comes over for dinner and a game on Saturday nights, but this Saturday Barb was not feeling well enough to receive guests. She had a bit of a tummy bug that kept her up half the night and as a consequence she spent most of Saturday curled up in bed, sleeping off the aftereffects. I called Tim to let him know.

Just before the time we would usually meet for dinner, I headed up the street to hike through Woodland Park, a hill thick with oaks and high grass along Monona Drive, although this time of year the oaks are all bare-limbed and the high grass is sparse and brown. I wanted to make the widest loop possible around the parks, so I skirted around the northern edge of Woodland Park to come out on the other side of the hill, where I could cross into the Aldo Leopold Nature Center.

The nature center building is geared mostly toward kids, but the grounds are open to the public, or I’m pretty sure they are. I’ve been hiking through the park for years and nobody has ever given me the side-eye for it, so I’ve kept doing it. The park is mostly high grass bounded by lines of mature trees to the north and east along the borders of the park. The southern border is a wetland with very little in the way of trees.

There’s no fence or gate between Aldo Leopold and Edna Taylor, just a line of trees marking the border. There are two large ponds in Edna Taylor and many more smaller ponds surrounded by wetland, which is thick with cattails. Canadian geese love the large ponds and are usually pecking in the dirt along the trail that runs atop the causeway between them. A modest hill wooded with mature oaks rises to the east beyond the wetlands. There are effigy mounds at the top of the hill, but the path to them has been closed so you can’t get to them until they figure out where to re-route the pathways to better protect the mounds.

I walked into Edna Taylor along a path I hadn’t used before. Although it was clearly a well-used path, it came to an abrupt halt just a dozen yards or so from a small pond, at a sign that read, “This is not a trial.” So, I bushwhacked over a small hill where a controlled burn had recently cleared away the undergrowth, easily joining a trail I normally walked between one of the larger ponds and two smaller ones.

Just beyond the ponds, I made a loop through the oak forest before coming back to cross the park along the causeway between the two large ponds. Canadian geese stopped pecking at the dirt to hiss at me as I walked by, giving them as much room as I could on the narrow path. After exiting the park, I walked west along Femrite Drive, then turned into a parking lot behind an apartment block to see if I could re-enter the park. There were several gaps in the cyclone fence big enough to push through, but they were definitely not kosher so I continued on until I finally found an opening big enough to drive a golf cart through. It may not have been an official entrance, but it was clearly well-used so I didn’t feel too bad about crossing back into the park through it.

I cut across the corner of Edna Taylor to get back into Woodland Park, and climbed directly to the top of the hill along a path that took me around the base of the water tower, then switched back through a hairpin turn to come down the west side of the hill and cross Monona Drive. It seemed like a big loop but it was just 2.9 miles out and back.