Everything I Wish I Knew Before Hiking the Ice Age Trail

We thought it would be quick and easy, done with so little time and effort that we might barely remember it by the time the holidays arrived.

In early October, my wife, Tina, and I left our home high in the Colorado mountains just before winter arrived. Our goal was to hike across Wisconsin—straight west, then down toward the Illinois border, and back up into Door County—via its 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail (IAT), finishing before winter slammed into some of the United States’ northernmost woods. The altitude and elevation gain were low, the temperature perfectly mild for major-mileage days. We assumed that, by the time Thanksgiving arrived, we would be back home with our cats and woodstove, our seventh National Scenic Trail thru-hike secure.

And while that did indeed happen, I am still struck by the surprising difficulties of, well, not the trail exactly but everything around it—the food, the weather, the route, my own schedule. It was the friendliest long-distance trail I’ve ever encountered, but two months later, I am still recovering physically and mentally, trying to shake the hurdle of something that seemed like it should be simple but was decidedly not. Here are the lessons I’ll remember from it on my next thru-hike.

If you see a salad, eat a salad.

I could have kissed the cook at Bon Ton Tavern, a wood-lined pub in the little lumber town of Luck, Wisconsin, not far from the Minnesota border. When he brought us piled-high burgers on plastic trays a few days into our eastbound IAT march, he also toted a Budweiser six-pack carton stuffed with condiments—the usual, plus gigantic bottles of ranch and barbeque sauce. I must have eaten an extra 1,000 calories of sauce alone, Tina looking on with rightful concern about my cardiac health.

Just as I started to realize that having vats of that stuff on hand is standard operating procedure in almost every restaurant and bar across rural Wisconsin, I began to realize, too, that my behavior wasn’t sustainable. I am a native Southerner who thought he understood fried food until walking across Wisconsin, where the dietary staples—cheese, jalapeno peppers, potatoes, every meat you care to mention—are battered and deep-fried into submission and served alongside cheap and endless domestics. My nutrition was as bad there as it had been when I was a mid-20s lush living in a rock ’n’ roll house and eating only fast food. Were I not now sober, it would actually have been worse than during those salad-less salad days.

By the time we reached the end, we were eating unadorned boxes of greens like rabbits who had not been fed in days and walking extra miles through towns in search of them. We were wishing we’d mailed ourselves some health-food reinforcements, even if they were just supplements we sprinkled atop the parade of cheese curds.

Road walking is an art, not a science.

After finishing the Florida Trail, I thought I knew road walking. I’d done marathons on asphalt, sprinted ahead of small dogs in hot pursuit, and been chased in a truck by a man very mad that I’d peed somewhere in the vicinity of his yard. But just less than half of the IAT is currently made up of road walks, euphemistically dubbed “connecting routes” in the patois of Midwest nice. While many of these miles are on country roads with minimal traffic, some of them are on the narrow shoulders of major highways crowded by drivers very confused by dirty folks carrying backpacks, wearing blaze orange, and possibly scowling. So safety first: Wear bright colors. Throw on a headlamp when the sun is low. Make eye contact with as many motorists as possible. Be mindful of blind curves.

If you’re moving at three miles an hour, you’ll be walking on roads for 170 hours, or a solid week. You’ll need to find ways to keep yourself entertained or else lose your mind in a slow-motion case of white-line fever. I discovered new methods as I walked. I mainlined a series of detective novels by Canadian charmer Louise Penny, since audiobooks are better than music during road walks, as you can keep the volume low. I motioned for tractor-trailers to honk their horns as they barreled along with cattle, gas, and milk. I monitored traffic to see which color of pickup Wisconsin drivers seem to favor. (White, natch!) And at one particularly low moment, drifting through the hinterlands of delirium, I found an inflated basketball in a ditch and dribbled it for six miles. Find your own way to hold it together.

It’s going to rain.

On the second night of our hike, the forecast didn’t call for rain, and the skies had been clear all day. We piled our sleeping bags on top of our sleeping pads on top of our ground cloths, with the as-yet-unused tent stuffed into a backpack’s bottom. When things got misty a few hours after the sun set, we reckoned it was only fog rolling in, not a rainstorm that would last for the next 16 hours and soak almost everything we carried. Our bad decision to cowboy camp and not see the mist for the foreshadowing that it was sent us scurrying like wet rats back to the comforts of town—a laundromat, a shower, a bed—and cost us a day on the move.

It was also the leading edge of what became an IAT fundamental: It’s going to rain a lot. We’d dealt with thunderstorms high on the Continental Divide Trail, near-tropical downpours on the Florida Trail, endless afternoon showers on the Appalachian Trail. But the Wisconsin fall was particularly punishing, the rain always accompanied by temperatures slightly too high to shift it into snow. Not anticipating that, I’d planned poorly, bringing a rain jacket that desperately needed to be waterproofed again (thank you, Nikwax and fast shipping) but not bringing my usual electronic stuff sacks. On the bright side, I have a new iPhone now, a replacement for the one waterlogged by the falling waters of Wisconsin.

The need for rest is real.

Before we arrived in Wisconsin, I’d never hiked with a hard deadline. But when we left the state’s western border with Minnesota, I had a flight to Florida already booked in about six weeks, so as to rendezvous with a touring Australian band before they headed home. This meant that every day, we’d need to cover somewhere between 25 and 30 miles, no matter the weather or terrain or whatever restaurant we found that served something other than fried everything. I also started the trail on antibiotics, still battling the vestiges of pneumonia and having not run in three weeks thanks to it. I was, as I told Tina that first day, not in fighting shape.

The combination almost cost me my thru-hike. I pushed my ailing body so hard for those first several weeks that I almost had to bail on the trail after 950 miles, when there were mere days remaining in our hike. My IT band protested the repeated and unrelenting loads so vehemently that bending my left knee became so excruciatingly painful that I finally hobbled to a road crossing and found my way to a physical therapist. Two months and endless leg exercises later, I’m starting to feel whole again, my joints and endurance coming back online.

The irony is that the IAT is full of places to rest. It’s lined with hundreds of benches donated by community enthusiasts, and the small towns are dotted with hotels accustomed to people travelling into the Wisconsin woods to hunt, fish, and hike. IAT volunteers will even pick you up and take you home for a meal and a bed from most anywhere. It would have been easy to take time off, had I given myself enough space and grace to do it. But we walk in part to learn, and I’m keeping that lesson with me.