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The woods and waters of north central Wisconsin offer some of the best vacation opportunities in the Midwest.
Stretching from Hayward in the west to Minocqua in the east, you will find fishing, boating, swimming, hiking, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing and Friday fish fries.
There's also a little bar at nearly every intersection — sometimes, two.
In a little village in northern Wisconsin, muskie probably is still king.
Back in 1971, city boosters got the U.S. Patent Office to make Boulder Junction the official Musky Capital of the World. After all, the surrounding two counties have the world's densest concentration of lakes, and they still yield 4-foot fish.
But times change. Now, this former logging town deep in the middle of state forest has gained fame as a playground for another kind of trophy hunter.
In 1920, northern Wisconsin already was a playground for people from Chicago.
And when Prohibition flung open the door to organized crime, its remote lakes and forests became even more attractive to a certain kind of Chicagoan.
Al Capone had a fortified summer home on a lake near Hayward, to which hydroplanes flew whiskey from Canada. His lieutenants
frequented the saloons and brothels in Hurley. Rival Roger Touhy vacationed in Minocqua, fishing with a machine gun.
When we’re stressed out, a lot of us think: Gotta go to a spa.
Not a day spa, where you’re anointed, kneaded and tossed back into the cold. No, a destination spa, where you lounge around in white robes and relax until you’re half paralyzed.
Not many of us can afford that kind of spa . . . unless it’s in Paul Bunyan land.
In a remote corner of Wisconsin, a trove of waterfalls lies buried in forests barely trod since the lumberjacks moved on to Minnesota.
They’re not Wisconsin’s largest waterfalls, or the easiest to find; those can be found on the lower lip of Lake Superior, in Pattison, Amnicon and Copper Falls state parks (See Waterfalls of northern Wisconsin). But there are lots of them in this undomesticated forest, so thick with headwaters it’s known as the cradle of rivers.
When the last glacier scraped through, it left a rocky landscape nicked by small lakes and veined by streams. Today, it’s Nicolet National Forest, 657,000 acres forsaken by the lumber barons, acquired by the federal government during the Depression, overgrown with hardwoods and now the domain of whitewater rafters, canoeists and fishermen.
Whitewater paddlers are, by definition, thrill-seekers.
That's why they seek out the northeast corner of Wisconsin, "the cradle of rivers.'' The big Wisconsin River starts there, as do the Wolf, Peshtigo and Menominee, three of the Upper Midwest's best-known whitewater rivers.
On the Wolf River, Bear Paw Outdoor Adventure Resort has been a whitewater hub since 1994, selling gear to expert wranglers and teaching novices how to handle the rapids, which froth and churn over knots of boulders dropped by the last glacier.
In northeast Wisconsin, winter can be almost shamelessly beautiful.
Not only is the snow plentiful, it’s that photogenic, see-me-sparkle kind of snow that looks so good draped on pine boughs. Skiing the Escanaba Lake Trail near Minocqua one February, exchanging hellos with passing skiers, all of them smiling, I had the feeling I must be in a magazine shoot.
"It doesn't get any better than this,’’ said Joan Barnett of Golden Valley. “Except if there were a mountain peak.''
The first time I saw Rib Mountain it was nighttime, and I was driving toward Wausau from the north.
Looming over the Wisconsin town was a massive hulk lined with white lights, rising from the surrounding plain like a landing strip set on edge. It was a spectacular sight — and still is, day or night.
This billion-year-old quartzite ridge, one of the oldest on Earth, was thought to be the highest point in Wisconsin until Timm's Hill, near Ogema, was surveyed at 12 feet higher. Timm's Hill, however, blends in with its northwoods landscape; Rib Mountain sticks out like a mile-wide rib cage.
In the wilds of northeast Wisconsin, winter always looks like winter.
It's the kind with snow — snow that comes early, stays late and blankets the forest in heaps, supplying reliable skiing and snowshoeing to people from less-blessed locales.
But in 2003, the heaps of snow didn't come there or virtually anywhere, and skiers were desperate. So was Pete Moline, who runs Afterglow Resort on a lake near the Michigan border. With no snow, he had no skiers and no livelihood. Then, he decided if snow wouldn't cover his trails, he'd bring it there himself.
To the uninitiated, the vast expanses of forest around Eagle River, Wis., look like a lot of nothing.
It's rocky, useless land, forfeited to the government during the Depression, and hardly anyone lives there — Eagle River, pop. 1,400, is Vilas County's only city.
This empty forest, however, draws thousands, and on winter weekends, it's not so empty. Snowmobilers, skiers and snowshoers
come to these woods — to the east and north lie the 657,000 square acres of Nicolet National Forest, and to
the west, the 220,00 acres of Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest.
