The following blog is an excerpt from “Treading New Trail” by the National Park Foundation.
Their tents from the night before fill the grassy area, layered with frost on the chilly fall Wisconsin morning. The group of around 100 volunteers is building the start of a 19-mile reroute of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, which spans 1,200 miles across Wisconsin’s geologic and glacial features, connecting landscapes, communities, histories, and cultures.
Over many years, the need for a reroute grew from a seed of an idea to lines on a map, and now the start of a physical trail. It’s been coined “the Dreamer Route.”
“Which makes me the dreamer,” Nash says, emotion apparent in his voice as his dream is finally becoming reality with volunteers laying new trail on the ground.
The goal of the reroute is to move the trail away from a segment along an old logging road and a less interesting footpath to instead pass through forests, cross streams, and meander past remarkable geologic features like a rock field and canyon shaped by glacial flows from the last Ice Age. Supported by grants from the National Park Foundation, the soon-to-be-built footpath will be the newest section of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, which was created to highlight the edges of the last continental glacier in North America and the unique landscapes that were formed as the glacier retreated.
Nash has long known about this possible route for the segment of the trail. In fact, it’s practically built into his family history. His mother was born nearby in northwest Wisconsin and, while dating in the 1940s, his father took her to Gundy’s Canyon – one of the geologic features the trail reroute will pass by. Carved by glacial outwash, the canyon is shaped by a steep rock ledge with a stream running through it. Nash first visited the canyon at 8 years old. But it was when he came home from military service in 1981 that he noticed a path through the woods and learned it was the newly designated Ice Age National Scenic Trail, which Congress had recently authorized as part of the National Park System in 1980. Nash had been hiking that neighborhood trail long before it was nationally administered.
Continue reading ” Treading New Trail” and the National Park Foundation’s blog.
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