You’d be surprised how much information there is on the Internet about albino squirrels.
Maybe you’re wondering why I’d be looking for information about albino squirrels. Simple: I saw one a couple of weeks ago while we and our friends Dave and Karen and John and Laurie were out on one of our jaunts on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.
And it wasn’t just me seeing things; Marilyn and David saw it, too. We were in the middle of a 7.5-mile walk starting in Verona and passing through the beautiful University Ridge golf course when the squirrel crossed our path and scampered up a tree.
So, OK, it wasn’t really white; it was more “blonde,” but when I looked up albino squirrels on the Internet, I found out that a blonde squirrel is one of a variety of types of albinos. But I really don’t want to write a column about albino squirrels. I want to write about the Ice Age Trail, this national treasure right here in our state.
The Ice Age Trail stretches nearly 1,200 miles from Potawatomi State Park in Door County to Interstate State Park in Polk County. It’s the only National Park Service scenic trail that is contained in just one state.
The home page for the trail alliance says this: “A mere 15,000 years ago during the Ice Age, much of North America lay under a huge glacier. Mammoths, saber tooth cats and cave lions roamed the earth! Some of the best evidence of this glacier is found in Wisconsin such as the state’s many lakes, river valleys, gently rolling hills and ridges. The nearly 1,200-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, established in 1980, traces the glacier’s edge.”
I’ve written about our excursions on the trail at least twice before in the 10 years that our group has been walking on the trail. Ten years? And we’re not finished? Nope. We do short sections of about eight miles several times a summer, and we missed a year when one of our hiking crew wimped out just because he had knee surgery. So we’ve walked 32 times for a grand total of about 250 miles.
At our current pace, we’ll finish the trail in about another 40 years or so. I’m 75 now, so I probably won’t make it. We didn’t begin at the beginning, and we probably won’t end at the end. We started in Sheboygan County because much of the early part of the trail is not completed, and we’d have had to walk a lot of pavement. So our walks have taken us down the east side of the state down past Janesville, and now we’re working our way back up through the central part of the state.
But out walks are not about finishing the trail, they’re about finishing each little segment and having a wonderful time sharing Wisconsin’s woods, hills, valleys, wetlands and prairies with good friends. We are seeing some of Wisconsin’s most beautiful scenery, which many other Wisconsinites will never see.
In all of our treks, we have seldom seen other hikers. And that’s too bad because the trail is a unique resource. More than 12,000 years ago, an immense flow of glacial ice pushed its way south over Wisconsin and sculpted a landscape of remarkable beauty.
And then, as the huge glacier retreated, it left behind a variety of unique landscape features: the kettles, moraines, drifts, drumlins, eskers, savannahs, etc., that make up our part of the state.
One of the neatest things about the trail is that it is developed and maintained completely by volunteers. The Ice Age Trail Alliance is a volunteer- and member-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create, support and protect this 1,200-mile footpath, which traces Ice Age formations across Wisconsin.
Ice Age Trail Alliance staff and volunteers work cooperatively with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the National Park Service, local governments, businesses and private landowners to shape the Ice Age Trail into one of the premier hiking trails in the United States.
Sometime, when you seem to have nothing to do, take a walk on the trail. You’ll see some beautiful Wisconsin landscapes, and you just might see an albino squirrel!
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