Mary Hartman Creek 2/29/20

Wheel of Fortune “Before and After” title, but oh well — just showing our age….

We faced a dilemma this weekend. Given what we experienced last week at Straight Lake State Park with the warm weather and the snowballing affect on our snowshoes we could not decide whether we should head south and “regular” hike, or over to Hartman Creek State Park and do some snowshoeing. The high temperature was supposed to be 34 degrees in Waupaca, WI — so we decided we might not get much more snowshoeing in this winter and decided to go for it!!

The plan Mike came up with had us stopping in Wisconsin Rapids, WI at Grandma’s USA Cafe. This place is the quintessential small-town Wisconsin cafe! Locals walk in and get served without even having to order, people stop by on a daily basis and out of towners (like us) are treated like family of the everyday locals. When we got there there were two older gentlemen sitting at a table for eight. We were excited because we though for sure this was the beginning of the typical coffee klatsch — but no, it might have been the end, but no one else joined the two. Funny thing though, as one of those older gentlemen got up to leave he walked over to a table with two people sitting at it. He asked them if they came in every Saturday because he had seen them there a couple of Saturdays in row. The couple said no — they came in EVERY day! Another customer sitting at the counter jokingly complained to the waitress that he was going to order something different, but the kitchen had already started making his “usual” order when he walked in the door. When looking up the restaurant on the way, Tammy kept reading that it was a quonset hut. Very interesting history. We just loved this place — we would go back in a heart beat!! Tammy had her typical veggie omelet and Mike has his (new usual?) steak and eggs. Mike forgot to say to skip the toast so they brought him two HUGE pieces of texas toast. When the waitress came back to pick up our plates she asked if there was anything wrong with the toast — Tammy told her that we just forgot to say that Mike didn’t want it. She said — no worries they feed the leftover bread to the birds — YAY!!! That is so much better than just tossing it into the garbage. As is typical with these small cafes — lots and lots of signs up all over the walls.

We were then off to the state park and a hopefully long day of snowshoeing!! We arrived at the park and made our way to the first parking lot where we would begin our first two hikes of the day.

The first one was along the Hartman Lake and Creek and some trails a little north of there. First we had to visit the pit toilets — Tammy took careful notice to see if there was frost on the toilet seat this week, no — there wasn’t. As we made our way to the pit toilets we noticed all the ice on the trail. Basically all the snow was packed down so much it was actually ice instead of snow. Mike walked down to the lake and saw that the trail to that point was still more ice than snow. We still decided to wear the snowshoes as we could surely use the traction that we would get from the crampons if nothing else.

After strapping up we headed down the (glare ice) trail. We were VERY glad we put the snowshoes on. We could actually walk much faster on the ice with the snowshoes on, because of the crampons, than we could have bareboot hiking. We were not sliding around at all — just steady forward progress. We made it to Hartman Lake and it has a beautiful view.

The trail then made it’s way along the dike between Hartman Lake and Creek. This trail was much more ice than it was snow. Once again though we were happy to have the snowshoes on because we did not slide around or slip at all — it was very nice. We made it around to the backside of Hartman Lake where there was an overflow dam that had a lot of running water — and boy was it clear water, you could see right to the bottom.

From the end of the lake we headed back to connect into the trail system. There were multiple loops and Mike had a plan that would allow us to cover all the segments of the loops with only going over two of the sections more than once. As we made our way up the first segment, we encountered more snow than ice so we didn’t feel as silly wearing our snowshoes. We were supposed to take a side trail off the main trail, but, as seems usual lately, Mike missed a turn along the trail and we ended up in the middle of the set of trails instead of traversing the outside of all the loops. Sadness…oh well, this just meant we would have to traverse more than two segments more than once. That’s OK, we determined a long time ago our hiking/snowshoeing is all about the miles!!! The more, the better!! There was a small bridge that we crossed along the dike, but it wasn’t until we viewed it from the trail above that it became picturesque.

We then came to a section where we most definitely needed the snowshoes. The wind had blown the snow over all the tracks along the trail so it was really like snowshoeing through virgin snow. Tammy had decided not to put her gaiters (leg coverings that keep the snow from getting in to her boots) on — and was now regretting it as we moved across this trail. Mike mentioned that we should see the section of the trail that connected back to where we had just been. Every deer trail Mike had to stop and look to see if that was the trail that we missed. He found two good candidates…until we found the actual trail which was MORE than obvious (at least on this end). The trail that we were one continued along Allen Creek. It was beautiful lowland creek with trees on either side of the creek and a large open prairie beyond that. As we made our way along the creek Mike spotted a Pileated Woodpecker that kept moving up the creek — almost like it was leading us along. As we stopped to watch it, it took off across the prairie and made it’s way along the woods to the other side.

We continued along the trail to some amazingly tall pines (Red Pines?). But the strange thing was not necessarily the super tall pines but the hundreds (thousands?) of tiny pines alongside the trail. We discussed if one out of a hundred of these small trees survives to grow into the tall mature pines, or if something else dictates which ones survive. Regardless how they survive — the view is amazing!

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We made it back to the car after 3.15 miles of snowshoeing. Whew — that was fun and tiring. We took a break in the car eating almonds, pork rinds and Tammy texting to check on our son who dropped a butcher knife into this leg the night before (ugh). (He is fine by the way.) After a good break, it was time to head out again. We were to snowshoe from the same parking lot down towards the campground and onto Deer Path Trail around Allen Lake. As we made it down to the campground we encountered signs saying that the trail was closed due logging. DRATS!!! (Well, Mike said a lot more than that, but that will do for here. He really does not like it when we have to change the Plan). We made our way back to the car, took our snowshoes off and headed down the road to the next section of the park where we were going to snowshoe.

This state park has very narrow roads — just barely enough room for two cars to pass one another and both keep all four tires on the pavement. The woods come right up to the side of the road too. Mike was going along at the 15 mph speed limit when some jackleg in a pickup truck flew up behind us and started tailgating us. Mike was undeterred and just kept at the speed limit (and given his great mood already had quite a few choice words for the guy). Almost to the next parking a lot Tammy saw a deer just off the side of the road and it jumped right out in front of us. Mike was going slow enough that he had no trouble stopping in time, but the pickup truck, tailgating guy behind us came within a foot or two of rear ending us. Ugh…thus why you don’t tailgate on roads like that. You just never know. This next section was where all the bike trails were — surely there would not be that many bikers out of the trails with all the ice we encountered earlier. Boy, were we wrong.

There were probably 10 – 15 vehicles in the parking lot with bike carriers on the back. Mr. Tailgating Pickup Truck Guy got out and took his big fat tire bike off his truck and headed down the trail. We ended up having to wait for another truck to leave so we could take his parking space. We found the trail we were going to head down. As we walked to the end of it we noticed the snow was starting to get soft and the ice was melting. We decided then that we were done snowshoeing for the day and would just do bareboot hiking. Given that it would possibly be still a little icy, we were not going to take any chances and still brought our trekking poles.

Holy trails batman!!! This portion of Hartman Creek State Park has trails on top of trails, intersecting trails, parallel trails, trail sharing, just about anything you can think of!! There are hiking/snowshoeing trails, biking trails, snowmobile trails and the Ice Age Trail. Mike had decided that we were going to follow the 2.2 mile hiking/snowshoeing trail then stop at the car and see how much time we had left. As we headed down the trail we went about 1/10th of a mile before we ran into the Ice Age Trail — the two trails overlapped for about another 1/10th of a mile before the Ice Age Trail veered off to the right. We stayed on the hiking trail. These sections of the trails had “map boxes” that were numbered and actually listed on the map. When Mike was looking at the maps prior to coming to the park he could not figure out why these were listed in this part of the park — it quickly became apparent that they were on the maps because with so many trails and intersections, you needed to know which map box you were by to figure out where you needed to go.

We just kept going. We ran into and crossed a snowmobile trail, the Ice Age Trail several times, and the busy fat tire bike trail several times. We were almost all the way back around when we came to map box 7. According to the map the hiking trail and biking trail ran really close to one another. What the map did not make clear was that the two trails ran right on top of one another. So — we had to hike the last 1/2 mile of the trail sharing it with the bikers. Thankfully we only had two bikers come up behind us and one came from the front of us. Had it been “really” busy, it could have been difficult. We made it back to the car and had about an hour before we were to head out for #SupperClubSaturday. We had already decided that we were going to walk down the Ice Age Trail for half the time left and turn around and head back to the car. So — down the Ice Age Trail we went. We passed several places that we had already been on during our first hike. The Ice Age Trail was a little bit less traveled than the hiking trail, but it was still easy to navigate. In the end we ended up deciding we would go 1.5 miles down the trail instead of just the 30 minutes – we only ended up spending an extra 10 minutes because of that decision, no big deal.

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It was now time to begin making our way to #SupperClubSaturday. But first, we stopped at the sign at the entrance to get our obligatory selfie.

We had passed the restaurant we were going to earlier in the day so we knew exactly where we were going (we were actually backtracking our exact same route). Along the way we stopped a a Kwik Trip truck stop (they have HUGE bathrooms) for us to change in. It is so much nicer changing in a temperature controlled bathroom instead of in a cold pit toilet in the middle of a state park in winter.

Our destination for dinner was Pinecrest Supper Club just outside of Pittsville, WI. Given our timing last week, we were a little worried that we would get there and be the first people there or we would get there and be told we should have had reservations. We were happy to see several other cars there, but not too many.

We walked in and were told we could pick whatever table we wanted. We were quite happy to sit somewhat near a table of 5 more elderly people. They were absolutely hilarious. It was quite apparent they were all a little hard of hearing because they were talking as loud (or louder) than Mike usually does, so it was impossible not to eavesdrop on their conversation. It ranged from how to use a blood sugar monitor, to continuous glucose monitors (something we know a LOT about now), to how could “these liberal democrats just hand your money to someone else”, to who lived and worked where for how many decades. It was absolutely hilarious. Tammy could not stop laughing. We are glad to be enjoying our favorite #supperclubsaturday pasttime again.

We decided to order “homemade deep fried mushrooms” for our appetizer. Mike had, of course prime rib, and Tammy went off script and ordered a tomato and basil pork ribeye. It wasn’t long before our mushrooms came. OMG — there had to be about 2 pounds of mushrooms on the plate! I don’t think we took a picture, but we should have. It was a full size dinner plate stacked about 4 inches deep with mushrooms. The two other tables of people all stopped their conversations and stared as the waitress dropped these off at our table. Tammy offered everyone to come over and have some, but no one took her up on it. Not only were there a ton of these mushrooms — they were arguably the best tasting deep fried mushrooms we have ever had. We ate, and ate, and ate on them but I don’t think you could ever tell that we were eating them. We ended up having to get a to-go box to bring them home for dinner on Sunday — and we could barely getthe box closed! Mike’s prime rib was pretty good, but well under seasoned. Tammy was excited for her pork ribeye because one of the elderly ladies had it and she was going on and on about how moist and tender it was. Unfortunately Tammy’s was way over done and super dry and the tomato and basil on the outside was burned (it was actually black). Good thing the mushrooms were so good!!

We had a rather uneventful drive home — we saw lots of deer and turkeys — thankfully none of them on the road in front of us. Unfortunately we have to take the next week, or possibly two, off from Splorin’.