Hello from Newport State Park in Door County, Wisconsin! I visited recently for a two-night stay to try out my new backpacking gear, as well as some of the oldest gear I have (my spindly old legs), all to make sure I’m ready to hit the trail this season. Here’s an obligatory selfie at the park:

This was my first backpacking trip in forty years, give or take a couple years. The last time I went backpacking was (if memory serves) in 1986, when I hiked a bit of the Pennine Way while I was stationed by the Air Force in the United Kingdom. I never intended to give it up. I still went camping. I just stopped backpacking. I don’t know why.

I was recently motivated to start backpacking again because there are some places I want to go camping where they don’t allow car camping. Newport State Park is one of those places. All of the camp sites are far from the parking lots. If you want to camp there, you have to find some way to carry all your gear to your site. It was kinda the perfect place to test my rusty old backpacking abilities.

I drove up on Tuesday morning, arriving a little after one o’clock (it’s a four-hour drive from Madison to Newport). It was a mostly sunny day with a bit of a chill in the air, about 48 degrees but in the sunshine it felt surprisingly warm, especially after I started hiking. From parking lot # 3 I headed south to make a big loop around the southern half of the park. A quick glance at the map indicated I’d have to walk about two miles to get to the shore. I’d have to walk a little more than two miles to come back up the shoreline and then another two miles or so to get to the camp site I had reserved for my first night in the park. My goal was to walk at least six miles a day on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. I ended up walking 8.3 miles on Tuesday and 9.7 miles on Wednesday. Guess these old man legs still work after all!

The trail leading away from the parking lot looked like a maintenance road, wide with two ruts and a center strip of grass, very easy to walk. The park map I picked up from the welcome station indicated this was an “off-road biking and hiking” trail. These trails (marked by a thick red line on the official park map) were very wide and flat, very easy to walk. Hiking them was almost like walking on a graded road. Some of theme were even paved with pea gravel! They were almost too easy to hike. I caught myself walking way too fast over and over, and had to remind myself to slow down and take it easy. I had all afternoon and evening to look around, after all.

There were also trails for hikers only (dotted black lines on the park map). I suppose the really hard-core mountain bikers out there might have been able to make their way down these trails, but I’m pretty sure that would be frowned upon. These were well-traveled trails and not too difficult, but most were narrow and very rocky. I preferred them to the wider, flatter trails, mostly because I like the way they wandered this way and that through the woods. The wider biker/hiker trails looked like straight-line avenues.

I walked down to the southern shore of the park to check out the camp sites there. I had booked site # 12 for Wednesday night and wanted to see what it was like, but someone had already set up camp there and I didn’t want to intrude. I checked out several of the other camp sites in the southern half of the park and although most of them were okay, more than a few of them had the worn-out look of camp sites which had seen too many campers who didn’t care there were other people who might want to visit a clean, unmolested site after them.

I want to spend another minute or two on this. And this is me just venting rather than trying to be persuasive: Just because you brought an axe on your camping trip doesn’t mean you have to chop down a tree. Chopping down a tree doesn’t make you a camper. When you leave the tree lying where it fell, it makes you an asshole. And chopping halfway through a tree, then giving up makes you lazy AND an asshole. And if you’re that special kind of 24-carat solid gold asshole who just randomly chops into a standing tree to cut the bark off or to leave your mark or because you’re bored and you need to swing an axe, I hope someday you’ll be able to find at least a moment of joy in your barren, empty life but, frankly, I’m not optimistic. Rant over.

After making a big loop around the southern half of the park and circling back up to parking lot # 3, I kept going up the main path toward the northern half of the park. I took Fern Trail from the parking lot and was surprised to find myself on a wide, evenly-graded trail paved with gravel that led to a near-new boardwalk that wound this way and that through the woods. I’m not sure how long it was in feet and inches, but it took me somewhere between five to ten minutes, walking at a moderate pace, to walk from one end to the other. It was possibly the longest boardwalk in a state park I’ve ever walked along, not counting the duckboard walkways in parks like Big Bay State Park or Kohler-Andrae State Park. This was a raised wooden platform, two to three feet above the forest floor on stilts, wandering through a marshy area with standing water that was several inches deep in places.

At the other end of the boardwalk, the Fern Trail joined up with the Europe Bay Trail, which went on for another mile before crossing a county road. Beyond that, I was in the extreme northern part of the state park, a slender limb of land between Lake Michigan and Europe Lake. My camping spot for the night, site # 16, was on the Lake Michigan side, but I wanted to see what the camp sites on Europe Lake looked like, so I kept going. And I’m so glad I did! The camp sites there are gorgeous! I liked site # 14 so much that I changed my plans and booked the site for Wednesday night.

My camp site for Tuesday night was okay, a worn spot between a couple of sand dunes on the Lake Michigan shore. I hung my hammock between two trees in the lee of a dune. I probably should have hung it in the woods behind the dunes, a little further from the shore. The dunes plus the trees might have provided more of a buffer from the brisk winds off the lake. Keeping warm after the sun went down quickly became a challenge. Temps got down into the twenties overnight so it was a very good thing I brought my down-filled quilts. They kept me toasty warm until about two or three in the morning when the temps were coldest. Toasty warm was just a memory after that. The best they could do from then on was keep me from freezing solid until morning.

I rolled out of bed as soon as I saw it was daylight. The sooner I was stomping around with a 25-pound pack on my back, the sooner I would get warm, right? It seemed like a good idea, but it never quite happened. Even after the sun was high in the sky, temps stubbornly stayed in the low 40s, so I never did feel warm until I built a camp fire later that evening. Wednesday morning, the best I could do to warm myself up was boil water to make a bowl of oatmeal, then wolf it down while it was still scorching hot. My hands remained numb all day, even while I was holding my steaming bowl of oatmeal.

After cleaning up from breakfast, I broke camp, stuffed all my gear into my pack, saddled up and hit the trail again. I took the red-line Hotz trail south to Europe Bay road, where I found what looked to be the old entrance to the northern part of the park made of rounded stones. This is the way lots of state park features were made way back when I was a boy, and it made me a little nostalgic for the way state parks used to look. The gate doesn’t appear to be used now but you can believe I walked through the pedestrian entrance, just so I could say I did.

After crossing the Europe Bay road, I rejoined the Europe Bay trail (the western side this time) until I got to the group camps where I planned to stop for a drink and a fig bar. I had a few swigs of water when I got there but I didn’t unburden myself of my pack because I was still pretty freakin cold. I pushed on to the parking lot where I planned to grab some tea bags from the stash in my van, but that didn’t work out either because the wind off the lake made it even colder there than it was in the group camp. I didn’t get to enjoy that tea until later that morning when I stopped for lunch in a camp site for bikers which appears to be largely out of use.

The flies joined me for lunch. They joined me every day I was there. There must have been a hatch-out just before I arrived. When I was hiking along the southern shore of the park Tuesday afternoon, they moved through the air in dense clouds I could see from twenty feet away. Everywhere I went in the park, these little flies were all over everything. When I dropped my pack to rest or have a bite to eat, there would be dozens of flies all over it and all over me, and they would not be shooed away. If they were on something I could shake, like my jacket, then I could shake most of them off, but when they landed on my pack or my trousers, and I made the mistake of trying to brush them off, I ended up with bug guts. They were not the most durable creatures I’ve come across.

After lunch, I rucked up and started hiking out to the Lake Michigan coast to walk the Lynd Point trail. I spent about an hour walking the coastal trail. I don’t have many snapshots from Wednesday because I didn’t want to take my gloves off for very long. My hands were so cold all day and I lost sensation in my fingertips more times than I care to recall.

I finally set up camp at site # 14 on the shore of Europe Lake shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the first things I did after hanging my hammock was gather dry wood for a fire. There wasn’t much dry wood within eyeshot of the camp, but if I walked up the trail a hundred yards or so I found lots of fallen twigs and small branches. When I had an armload of them, I dragged them back to camp, then went out to gather more. I had a pretty decent pile within an hour or so.

I didn’t want to start the fire until about an hour before sunset, so I could get warmed through before turning in for the night. Not a problem, though. Temps had warmed up a bit. I boiled some water for my instant dinner, filled my belly with curry ramen, then cleaned up and put everything away before going on a walk on the trials along the lake shore. Found a nice spot to watch the sun go down over the lake.

Just before the sun touched the horizon, I went back to camp and started a fire. Some considerate camper left me a pile of white pine off-cuts from a woodworking project, and the sticks on the top of the pile were dry enough to get a roaring fire going. With a nice hot bed of embers built up, I slowly fed my collection of dry twigs and branches into the fire pit and kept the fire going until it got dark. After it burned out, I crawled into bed and was toasty warm all through the night.

I heard a lot of critters strolling through my camp site during the night. From the noise they made it sounded like they were right next to me, but never saw one even though I had a good look around each time I rolled out of bed to relieve myself.

The last time I got out of bed, at about five o’clock, the sky was bright enough to see without a light. It wasn’t raining yet but the rain was definitely coming. I could see clouds moving in, and the updated weather forecast called for rain all morning. Pack up in the rain is really no fun at all, so I broke camp while everything was still dry and hit the trail. I walked about a mile before I stopped for a bite to eat on a convenient bench, then pressed on, hoping to get back to the van before the rain started.

I still had about a twenty minute walk to the parking lot when I crossed paths with a porcupine! He was shuffling through the leaves beside the trail about a hundred feet away when I saw him. Porcupines always surprise me because, like raccoons, they’re bigger than I expect them to be, just a little bit smaller than a German shepherd. As soon as he realized I was coming, he headed for a nearby tree and went straight up it.

I made it back to the van, had another bite to eat, and was just finishing a brief tinkle when the rain started to fall. Had to turn the wipers on as I was driving out the front gate of the park. Talk about good timing!