kinnikinnick creek conservation area 3-13-11

ETA: Our last visit here

Somehow I lost a couple of the clips along the way, including the one where I talked about the conservation district employee I met along the trail who was scouting for horse users. They are not allowed this time of year because they damage the trails severely. So some of my comments won't make much sense as they refer to a clip that does not exist.

I really wanted to try out the trail along the south side of the creek that we finally found at the very end. The employee said it was not an official trail, just where people have walked to get to the creek a lot over the years.

2.64 miles according to GPS, about 2 and a half hours. I believe the distance. The trail map says the horse trail is 3.5 miles and we did not go that far. A lot of time was wasted bushwhacking it. Very slow going some of the time. I doubt the route we took would even be passable in the summer once stuff started growing.

Oddly, the GPS track log says it was 3.2 miles. I am inclined to believe the smaller number, based on the stated length of the horse trail as being 3.5 miles. We were well inside the horse trail virtually all the time and basically walked around in a smaller rectangle than the horse trail.

We had a good time, mud and all.



[added 3-20-11]
It's a rainy and gloomy day, so the hike in the woods with the beagle has been delayed, or maybe canceled. It is thundering and raining pretty hard. So I decided to play with the GPS my wife got me for Xmas. I have not had a lot of time to work with it. 60+ hours a week of work plus the rest of life tends to do that to one. But over time I have learned to use bits and pieces of it. I even found a place that has free topo maps I can use.

I turned the tracking feature on but with the default map (such as it is) that the Garmin eTrex Vista H comes with, it is not real useful. The addition of the topo map makes it a whole lot more usable. I printed out a track of last Sunday's hike and put it on my blog along with the sketch I made from memory afterward. They are pretty close, except for the part where I put a question mark in the sketch because I was unsure exactly how I got from one point to another.

I am a little disappointed that the topo map does not have the roads inside this particular preserve as part of the map. Nor does it show the boundaries of the preserve. But, it is free, and works pretty well.

Now that I have a map loaded that actually has some detail in it, it might be useful for navigating in the woods. It takes some effort for me to work with the tiny screen so it may be a while before it is useful to me for navigating in the woods.