On the Sentinel Ridge Trail
On day 4 of our trip–Memorial Day itself–the sun finally came out in earnest, and, sadly. it was time to go home.
Since it was our first real opportunity, we wanted to take a real hike nonetheless, so after decamping and reading about several appealing options, we checked in with the ranger to get a recommendation.
Sentinel Ridge Trail, she said without hesitation, was the most important trail in Wyalusing. Running 1.6 miles (one way) from Point Lookout to the boat landing, it turns the corner from the Wisconsin to the Mississippi River, passes a monument to the Passenger Pigeon and a number of Indian mounds before heading downhill to the boat landing.
“You don’t want to take it past the Indian mounds,” she warned. ”It’s steep.”
It was a very pretty hike. We considered the fate of the passenger pigeons (originally ubiquitous, they were hunted and eaten into extinction), found Indian mounds of various shapes, and went down the hill to the boat landing despite the warning. As we were climbing up, I kind of wished we had heeded the ranger’s advice, but cs10 was fine.
I was too tired to want to stop back at the ranger station to ask what this interesting dark headed plant was:
What are these dark headed plants?
It was a bit after 4, I think, when we finally pulled out of camp, which meant that, with a lengthy stop for a good barbecue dinner around Madison, it was 10ish when we pulled into Woodstock, and midnight before I had gotten my gear up to the Hyde Park homestead. We had encountered a little traffic jam in Madison as we were first getting on I94, so we abandoned the Wisconsin interstate entirely and took quiet state roads all the way back to Woodstock. It was fun.
(Planning note: For reasons I won’t get into, the two of us ended up camping in group site B. After the glories of the group sites at Potawatomi State Park a few months earlier, it was quite a disappointment. The area was made up of a road with long, narrow group sites on either side. There was a thick row of trees behind each row, but nothing to separate the sites adjacent to each other. In the daytime, you could see all your neighbors quite clearly. Very uncharming. Nonetheless, the park itself is so beautiful, i would be willing to stay in a group site here to have access to the rest of the park in the daytime. And, of course, all campsites look good in the dark. cs10 speculates that group site A would have been better than group site B, since it was a little higher and flatter and potentially drier after rain.)
