![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
On a summer day on Chequamegon Bay, there are few sights more enchanting than the sailboats bobbing around Bayfield.
With the Blessing of the Fleet in June, the tourist season kicks into high gear. Ferries chug nonstop between Bayfield and Madeline Island. Excursion boats head for the other Apostles. Sailboat captains take out novices and teach them how to hoist a jib.
Once, these waters were full of cargo boats, ferrying brownstone and lumber and herring to cities in the East. Bayfield hummed with industry, and town fathers hoped it would become another Chicago.
It's funny how a simple stretch of frozen water can trigger so much anticipation.
The Bayfield Peninsula, on the northern tip of Wisconsin, is in summer a playground of sand, water and woods, beloved by tourists.
In winter, the playground expands.
Along the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, everyone waits for a big freeze.
Only when temperatures stay low for a long time will the edges of Lake Superior freeze enough for people to walk out to the mainland ice caves, whose beauty is renowned. Even when ice is sufficiently solid — and it was only once in the last three winters — wind may suddenly split it, and snow may block the access drive. So when park rangers say it’s okay to go — well, then you’d better go.
Borrowing a pair of snowshoes from the innkeeper at the Fo’c’sle B&B in Cornucopia, I drove four miles east to Meyers Road, parked near the lakeshore and started picking my way over the lumpy path. The whole world was white, except for the frosty blue of the sky, and it was hard to tell where lake ended and shore began — especially since a 4-foot-high wall of snowy boulders sat where I thought lake should be. Then I passed Craig Mealman of nearby Russell Township, who explained that the “boulders’’ were blocks of ice pushed toward the shore by wind.
In Ashland, Wis., the ghosts of the past appear in living color.
Once, these lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks and lieutenants lived only in the history books. Now, they're painted onto Ashland's walls, where they serve as backdrop to shoppers, college students and tourists going about their business downtown.
The first mural, painted for Wisconsin's sesquicentennial in 1998 by local artists Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen, featured the snowshoe-clad figure of pioneer Asaph Whittlesey as well as editor Sam Fifield, Ojibwe Chief Buffalo and other characters from the town's early days.
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 a blizzard, nothing is better than holing up with an expert cook, a bottomless cookie jar, a steam room, a big hot tub and one of the best ski-trail groomers in the Midwest.
One January, the stars aligned in the heavens and I found myself in the best possible place to be during a blizzard: Maplelag. This ski resort in northwest Minnesota is renowned for many things — all-you-can-eat meals, personable owners, hundreds of stained-glass windows and signs from defunct train depots — but it’s most famous for its ability to conjure a bit of snow into world-class ski tracks when the rest of Minnesota is bare.
On this weekend, however, no alchemy was necessary. As my husband and I drove west, snow began to fly, and by the time we nosed the car into Maplelag’s drive, a foot had fallen. Another foot was on the way, making trail-grooming wizard Jay Richards the happiest man in the Great Northwest.
Even if it weren’t official, Timm’s Hill would be the high point of any Wisconsin hiking trip.
Timm’s Hill, a big pile of rock and gravel deposited by the last glacier, is Wisconsin’s highest point at 1,952 feet above sea level. I went hiking there expecting, well, a big pile with a nice view.
Which it was. It also turned out to be in the middle of an intriguing pocket of forest, settled by Swedes, Finns and Germans stubborn enough to handle the rocks sprinkled over the hills like salt on a pretzel. They were folks who liked to be outside, hiking, sliding and skiing, and it’s thanks to them this area now is a trove of trails.
Over the years, my children have logged many crossings of the St. Croix River.
Like all who are young at heart, we love traveling in Wisconsin. Not only is it beautiful, but it also tends to produce people
who remember how much fun it was to be a kid — Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caddie Woodlawn, whose adventures were recounted
in famous children's books; the Ringling brothers, whose fledgling spectacles in Baraboo grew into the world's biggest circus;
and Tommy Bartlett, whose water-ski thrill show helped turn the Wisconsin Dells into Kid Central.
Thanks to them, it's really fun to be a kid in Wisconsin.
Deep in the forests of Wisconsin, and Potato River Falls was nowhere to be found.
A sign pointed to an observation deck, from which I glimpsed a bridal-veil falls in the distance. But the path down the Potato
River led only to a cobblestone beach.
Finally, I left the path to climb down a steep hillside, slippery with clay and choked with the roots of spruce trees that flecked my hands with sap.
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.
In Bayfield, Wis., the apple has mushroomed.
In 1961, the apple was the object of a small village festival. Today, it draws 60,000 people to a fall blowout featuring all things apple — fritters, sundaes, dumplings, pies and apple-cheeked children.
On northern Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, Apple Festival is nearly as revered as motherhood.
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.''
At B&Bs, every good innkeeper knows that the quickest way to a guest's heart is through the stomach.
Guest like hot tubs, too, though many don't use them. Elegant decor is appreciated, though many people (well, men) barely notice it.
But everyone eats — and remembers — a great breakfast. That's why B&B proprietors knock themselves out providing one for guests.
Ah, the smell of Coppertone in spring.
Leaning back on a chairlift, basking in sun bounced off acres of snow, my friend Shar and I were getting quite a tan — on St. Patrick’s Day.
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with its towering stacks of snow, is a good place for skiers to be in the spring. As of March 6, there were 17 inches on the ground, and the Ironwood area has had 127 inches this season. That's not so much, though; by this time last year, it had had 164 inches. The average is more than 200 inches, courtesy of winds out of the Canadian Rockies, which, when they hit land after whipping across Lake Superior, dump enough to make the western U.P. one of the snowiest spots in the nation.
In Wisconsin, nonconformity is cast in concrete.
In the middle of the last century, a motley collection of ordinary folk — a dairy farmer, a car dealer, a tavern owner, a
factory worker — took a sharp turn away from the ordinary. Out of the blue, they began to fashion fairy-tale characters,
castles, temples and historical figures out of concrete, adorning them with bits of glass, crockery, porcelain and seashells
and toiling until their yards overflowed with figures.
Why? Because they felt like it. Long before the New Age dawned, they had learned to follow their bliss.
One hundred years ago, the white-pine forests around Hayward were the domain of a special breed of man.
They were swampers, sawyers and skidders. They were deckers, chainers, undercutters and riverhogs. They were dwarfed by the colossal trees they had to wrestle out of the forest, and their lives hung on their own brawn, nerve and dumb luck.
Six days a week they worked, dawn to dusk, all winter long. In spring, they'd roar into Hayward for whiskey and wild women; their brawling earned the town a reputation reflected in a train conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!''
In the north woods, only the passage of time creates a classic.
There's nothing like the feel of a vintage lodge. Whatever it comes from — the burnished logs hewed by ax, the hearths made of stones picked from local fields, the faint fragrance of aged pine and cedar — it can't be ordered from the local furniture store.
Jim Kerkow and Craig Mason know, because they own a furnishings business and they love old lodges. They were building a cabin near Hayward, Wis., and staying at nearby Spider Lake Lodge when its owner pointed out the obvious.
The sky was clear, the wind was still and Lake Superior was as placid as a lily pond.
It was a miracle that wouldn't last. That's why it was torture for the dozen of us to sit through a long kayak safety course on the sandy beach of Bayfield, Wis., forming a ''human knot'' to foster cooperation in case of disaster and listening to trip leader Hovas Schall's horror stories about the big, mercurial lake.
''Kayakers play a game with the weather, and the weather always wins,'' she said darkly. "Sea kayaking is a dangerous sport.''
Up north, there's a lake cabin with my name on it.
I don't own it, and I never will. But for a week in July, it's mine.
Only a generation ago, most middle-class folks in this area could think of nothing better than renting a little housekeeping cabin on a lake.
If you'd like a peek into one of the world's most bizarre courtship rituals, there are places still available in viewing blinds in the grasslands of central Wisconsin, where glacial Lake Wisconsin left a vast sand plain.
"That large flat bowl in the middle of the state happens to be fabulous habitat for prairie chickens,'' says naturalist Amy Thorstenson of Golden Sands conservation council in Stevens Point. "It's the last stronghold on the east side of the Mississippi.''
During the council's annual Prairie Chicken Festival in April, there's viewing in blinds around Stevens Point and Wisconsin Rapids. So why should anyone get up at 4 a.m. and sit in the cold for three hours just to watch a bunch of chickens hop around in the grass? Because male prairie chickens are the goofballs of the bird world.
More than any other river in Wisconsin, the Bois Brule has a pedigree.
They call it River of Presidents, but it also attracts senators and millionaires. Named for pines charred by lightning strikes
— “burnt wood’’ in Ojibwe, then French — it rises from conifer bogs near Solon Springs and flows
toward Lake Superior. Its cold, spring-fed currents harbor trout, and well-heeled fishermen discovered the river long before
loggers moved in.
They built the first lodges in the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant came to visit, followed by Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. In the 1890s, St. Louis oil and rail tycoon Henry Clay Pierce amassed 4,160 acres along the river and built a fishing retreat.
In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.
The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.
Then came the guys with slide rules. The son of the city engineer spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college. Seymour Cray co-founded Control Data in the Twin Cities but in 1962 returned to Chippewa Falls, where he opened a lab, putting the locals to work on the world's first supercomputer.
To most people, Superior, Wis., is nothing more than a series of traffic lights to endure on the fast track to the Apostle Islands or Upper Peninsula.
It's sprawling, ugly and utterly devoid of interest.
Or is it?
From the beginning, Hayward has been a rough town.
It sprang up in Wisconsin's north woods along with the logging camps, and its saloons and brothels gave it a reputation that was reflected in a rail conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!"
After resorts replaced logging camps, muskie wranglers joined lumberjacks as mythic figures. The fishing feats are enshrined at the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame, home of a 143-foot fiberglass muskie, but the lumberjacks — many of them graduates of the Hayward Log Rolling School — still are chopping, sawing and birling for tourists at the Lumberjack Bowl.
Over the centuries, waves of history have buffeted Madeline Island and given it as many variations as a Lake Superior agate.
This wooded island off Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, the largest of the 22 Apostle Islands, exerts a magnetic pull.
The Ojibwe came from the east, led to "food that grows on water'' — wild rice — by a cowrie shell in the sky, according to their origin mythology,
Just two miles from the start of the Bois Brule, another famous river flows in the opposite direction.
It's the St. Croix, flowing out of Upper St. Croix Lake and toward the Mississippi River. The two rivers are separated by a continental divide but became an important water highway for Indians, explorers and fur traders. Today, their two-mile portage trail is part of the North Country National Scenic Trail and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
On the western edge of Upper St. Croix Lake, 23 miles from the town of Brule, Solon Springs is a small resort village that makes an excellent weekend getaway. Right in town, Lucius Woods County Park has camping, a sand beach, a playground, a nature trail and a splendid bandshell where regional and national acts perform on Saturday nights in summer.
When the last glacier melted out of Wisconsin, it left a gift to future generations.
It wasn't much at first — boulders, heaps of gravel, water, chunks of ice trapped under rubble. But over time, the ice seeped away and created kettle lakes for fishermen. The raging meltwater stripped away softer rock, leaving walls of volcanic rock for climbers and scenic river gorges for canoeists.
The heaps of gravel grew skins of greenery and, with boulders carried down from Canada, created a dramatic landscape.
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.
In the forests and lakes around the northwestern Wisconsin town of Cable, the reds, oranges and yellows of fall are mere gilding on the lily.
This landscape, much of it part of Chequamegon National Forest, is beautiful in any season. In winter, cross-country skiers glide along forest paths and the 52-kilometer Birkebeiner trail, on which North America's largest and most famous Nordic-skiing race is held each February. In spring, the mountain-biking season starts, culminating in September with the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival, the nation's largest.
But fall is for lingerers. It's hard to move fast when there are so many glowing colors to gape at.
When people think of bicycling in Wisconsin, the famous Elroy-Sparta State Trail often is first to pop into their minds. But
the state has added many, many trails since the Elroy-Sparta debuted in 1967, and it's time to try them.
All of the trails listed below use finely crushed limestone, except as noted. They're suitable for touring bikes, though a wider tire is better. Chip-sealed trails are like asphalt but softer, and can be nearly as smooth because they don't become pitted.
On state trails, passes are $4 daily, $20 annual; passes also are good in winter on ski trails. Rates on county and city trails vary; many are free, including the Interurban and Oak Leaf.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.
Lucky Wisconsin — it has not one Great Lake, but two.
That means it's got lots of scenic coastline, lined with cliffs, beaches, islands — and lighthouses.
To many, lighthouses are irresistibly romantic. In a harsh environment, they were outposts of civilization, and their keepers often became heroes, saving the lives of shipwrecked sailors.
In Wisconsin, people build whole trips around the roads less traveled.
Their destination? Nowhere. And on one of the state's lovely Rustic Roads, nowhere usually is enough.
Across the state, brown-and-yellow signs point to lightly traveled roads that preserve remnants of the past — piebald llamas (R-92, south of River Falls), an 1870 lighthouse (R-38 in Door County), Amish farms (R-56, south of Ontario).
A century ago, in the Apostle Islands, only seven puny shafts of light stood between sailors and catastrophe.
Lake Superior has been called the most dangerous body of water in the world, an inland teakettle in which any tempest can be deadly. Storms gather fury over 200 miles of open water, and heaven help mariners caught between wind and rock — heaven, or a lighthouse keeper with sharp eyes.
During a ferocious storm in September 1905, Outer Island lighthouse keeper John Irvine saw a lifeboat leave the foundering schooner Pretoria and then capsize offshore; five men drowned, but the 60-year-old keeper was able to pull the remaining five ashore.
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.