After almost a week of near-zero weather, the temperature when I got up this morning was a much more bearable 14 deg F! And it was supposed to get up to a balmy 20 deg F! We’re having a heat wave!

I haven’t been out and about much in the past week due to the very cold temps, and it was honestly making me a little stir-crazy, so when the weather forecast this morning said we would expect sunshine and twenty degree temps, I layered up and headed for the hills to do a little tramping around in the woods near Palmyra WI. The next segment of the Ice Age Trail I wanted to check off my list was Stony Ridge, just a few minutes down the road from Palmyra. There were a lot of other trails looping through the woods I could use to make a loop out of today’s hike, instead of just walking out and back the way I usually do.

Last week, I finished a hike of the Blue Spring Lake segment in the parking lot of the Emma Carlin Trails. I went back to the parking lot today to pick up where I left off. A fresh inch or two of new snow had fallen overnight and a frisky wind was blowing it around, so I strapped into snowshoes before setting off.

I wore three different layers of wool and fleece, with a nylon overcoat for a windbreaker, but I was still miserably cold for the first mile and a half because I was entirely out in the open! The trail wandered across acres of open fields, where I was lashed by a stiff wind for nearly an hour before the trail led me into the shelter of thickly-wooded hills.

Hiking through the woods made a huge difference on this very windy day. I also had to climb one hill after another, so I was toasty warm before I got to the end of the second mile of today’s hike, which was about six miles long, give or take. I was trying out a different smart phone app, All Trails, for the first time, which said today’s hike was 6.13 miles long. The app I had been using, Organic Maps, told me the hike was 5.7 miles long, a difference of about 2,100 feet — almost half a mile! Seems like a big discrepancy. In its favor, All Trails lets me plan a hike on my desktop computer, then send it to my smart phone app, a feature which appeals to the gadget geek in me. I’m going to doink around with it for a month or two, see if it’s worth the trouble.

Snow shoes and a pair of gaiters were an absolute must on this hike — I was glad I decided to put them on before starting. Some parts of the trail would have been doable in boots, but quite a lot of the trail was buried in snow deep enough that it would’ve gotten into my boots and taken a lot of the fun out of the last couple miles. Also, I doubled back to the car on ski trails that wound through the hills, and a few of those hills were steep enough that they would have been very difficult to climb without the cleats built into my snow shoes.

The ski trails, by the way, were very well maintained. It appeared to me they’d been groomed that morning, and in fact I spotted a trail groomer growling through the woods at one point in my hike. I saw plenty of fresh ski tracks in the snow, so I knew I wasn’t the only one out there this morning, but I saw only two skiers, both times in the distance as I tramped along a different trail from theirs. I have a deep, abiding respect for cross-country skiers. It looks like a lot of fun, but it also looks like more work than I could muster, especially going up the hills.

Although I saw lots of fresh tracks in the snow, indicating there were more than a few other hikers, young and old (and canine), I didn’t lay eyes on any other hikers at any point in my three-hour hike today. It wasn’t exactly a lonely hike; I was always within earshot, and often within eyeshot, of a busy road. Houses often loomed from behind the trees.

This would be a good place to return to in the summer, to check out the trails while the trees are in full fledge.