Week 2 of “Splorin’tine”. This is being written after almost 2 months of not writing our blog entries as we (OK, well Mike) has been depressed about this whole situation with COVID-19. Not depressed enough not to do “Splorin’tine”, but it’s just not too much fun writing about it. We will power through with abbreviated blog entries until we can regain some semblance of a “new normal” for our Splorin’.
Now that restaurants are closed — two of our favorite things about Splorin’ are missing: breakfast at a small little “Mom and Pop” type place and our beloved #SupperClubSaturday. This morning we tried to make up for the breakfast aspect by doing take out from Randy’s Family Restaurant — one of our old standbys, we love this place!!! So a Veggie omelet for Tam and Ham and Cheese for Mike eaten at our kitchen table.
This week’s abbreviated adventures were going to keep us relatively close to home as we didn’t want to travel too far afield in the midst of this pandemic. We have driven near Hoffman Hills Recreation Area about a million times in our drives to/from Hudson and have always thought we should give it a try — this week we hit it!!!
Even though it had been warmerin recent days, there was still some ice and snow around on the trails. But we dressed warmly with our Winter hiking boots on and hit the road. We hoped there would not be many people there, and we were prepared to turn around and go home if there were, to keep with social distancing guidelines, but there was only two other cars in the lot when we got there. We were good to go. We headed down the Catherine Hoffman-Hartl Memorial Wetland Trail that would take us through, surprisingly enough, some wetlands that are on the boundary of the park. It was still pretty cold so most of it was still frozen but there was some open water that was a little “marshy”.
We came to a creek and a couple of small ponds that had a LOT of beaver activity present. We saw lots of signs of beavers, but never saw one. 😦
The plan then had us hiking on the West Savannah Loop which appeared on the map to be primarily a snowshow trail, we would find out shortly why…. (ominous foreshadowing). We made our way along the trail to where that loop was supposed to go around a big opening that was surrounded by woods. The only problem was that it was ALL marsh grass. The trail led us up to the edge and then, just….disappeared. It was pretty obvious that since this was supposed to be a snowshoeing trail it was expected that you could follow the trail in the snow, but with just marsh grass, there wasn’t really even anything packed down to follow. Mike did his best to find us a path through, but even though it wasn’t wet, walking through the grasses that were about a foot deep wasn’t much fun. We made our way around most of it and decided to head off to the edge where hopefully we would be back to hiking on solid ground.
Once we were back on solid ground the trail was easy to follow. We began to make our way to the tower in the park. We knew were in for some hills, but that’s OK, we LOVE hills now (not during the climbing, but after we reach the top and have recovered — we love them). However, once we were on the North side of the hills we started seeing lots and snow and ice on the trails. The worst part about these trails is that they were groomed for cross-country skiing, so they were very packed down and had lots of ice. Our last push to the top by the tower was almost like hiking up the ice of a glacier.
We did finally make it to the top of the hill and the tower.
Mike put on a brave face and said he would make it to the top……but only made it two-thirds of the way up. Here was the best view he could muster from the tower. Yes, those are from woodpeckers. Hmmm, exactly how stable can the tower be if the support are being consumed by woodpeckers? Yet another good reason for Mike to stay here. 😉
Tammy, of course, has no fear of heights and made it to the top of the tower with no problems and got better pictures.
We made our way back down and started down the trails again. However, we quickly became unhappy with the icy conditions. It became a struggle just to keep walking forward as the ice and snow compacted on the trails made it very difficult. We decided to just make our way back to the car and head home and return another time (when there was no ice or snow) to enjoy the remainder of the park.
Unfortunately, no #SupperClubSaturday…..stay tuned….
Splorin' Saturday 