Just one week after volunteering to help build new trail for the Ice Age Trail Alliance in the Blue Hills of Wisconsin, just northeast of Rice Lake, I went back up nort dere this weekend to check out the seasonal opening of the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum in Spooner, Wisconsin. I learned about the museum while I was at Canoecopia, the largest annual canoe and boat show in the Midwest, in March, where they exhibited a pair of beautiful wooden canoes built by volunteers who run the museum. To open the museum each year on Memorial Day weekend, they invite people to bring their wooden canoes, boats, and kayaks to Spooner to show them off.

I penciled the date on my calendar and planned to drive up on Friday, stay overnight, and visit the museum and boat show on Saturday morning. I wanted to camp nearby, but it’s just about impossible to reserve a camp site on Memorial Day weekend unless you do it a year in advance. I didn’t plan ahead that far. Instead, I found a vacant room at a bed and breakfast in Birchwood, about half an hour away from Spooner, and stayed there Friday night instead.

I left home at about eleven o’clock and arrived at the Murphy Flowage County Park, just south of Birchwood, at about four o’clock. The Ice Age Trail runs through the park and I had plenty of time to explore parts of the trail segment I hadn’t had the energy to explore while I was here during the trail-building event. After a day spent moving rocks and dirt, all I wanted to do after a shower was relax with a beer and listen to camp stories!

First, I wanted to walk the loop around Hemlock Creek, following the IAT along the north bank of the creek for about a mile and a half, then crossing over to follow the south bank back to the county park. The creek is home to so many beavers that keep the waters dammed up, that they turned the small creek into a wide river with extensive wetlands surrounding it. The trail is well-placed to offer more than a few gorgeous, expansive views of this beautiful creek.

Although the trail is carefully marked and well-maintained, it didn’t appear to be heavily trafficked. Grass grew thick on the trail tread and I crossed paths with no other hikers. Which is not a bad thing; I prefer to have the trail to myself, but I expected to run into a lot more people on Memorial Day weekend.

After finishing the loop, I wanted to walk at least a mile or so of the IAT from the park. There was a short stretch of old trail running south from the park. After a pleasant walk of about half a mile through thickly-wooded hills, it conntected with the new trail from a branch one of the volunteer groups worked on last week. I hadn’t worked on the trail this far north, so it would all be new to me.

I walked about three-quarters of a mile along trail that had been cut last fall, which mostly followed the banks of a no-name lake way back in the woods. The trail came to the end of an 800-foot-long boardwalk through a tamarack bog built by volunteers last October. I had walked this boardwalk last week when our trailbuilding crew finished work a few hours early. We walked down to the boardwalk and back, then took a late lunch before heading south to work on a different section of the trail. Even though I had already seen the boardwalk, I walked it from end to end once again to get another look at the trees and plants growing in the bog.

By the time I got back to the county park, I had walked five and three-quarters miles in about two and a half hours and was ready for a rest. I brought my supper with me, a thick turkey sandwich I got from a deli just a couple blocks from our house. I found the picnic bench closest to my minivan and tucked into my sandwich, washing it down with some Gatorade. Gotta keep up those electrolytes.

Volunteers build a boardwalk through the tamarack bog:

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