Wisconsin's Ice Age National Scenic Trail is a dream woven in single-track, multi-use, bike trails, and back roads. It's tacked together through shared public spaces, private lands and easements. Volunteers and organizations work together to maintain and grow the trail. Every year the trail gains miles toward the goal of uninterrupted path ribboning off-road over 1,200 miles of Wisconsin's glacial terrain.
There are many ways to hike the Ice Age trail. Some people loop segments close to home, perhaps never knowing the trail could take them across the state. Others backpack a through hike from one end to the other. Segment hikers walk a section at a time to complete the trail over a span of years.
Local chapters of the Ice Age Trail Alliance organize volunteers who maintain segments of trail. Each trail segment has a name and those over a mile long are catalogued in the Ice Age National Scenic Trail Official Guidebook. The number of segments changes from year to year as road walks are converted to trail.
This poetry collection follows the journey of a segment hiker who wrote a poem to honor 124 segments of the Ice Age Trail, one unofficial segment (Murry's Creek) and one memorable road walk. Her thousand-miler journey she describes as poemwalking, shares the experience of the trail in all seasons. These poems, like the glacial grit that inspired them, are an amalgamate of place, life, and experience.
The poems in this collection are organized into seven sections. Each section represents a geographical area of the trail: from the eastern terminus of the trail at Potawatomi State Park along Lake Michigan, the Northern Kettle Moraine, the Southern Kettle Moraine, edging the Driftless Area, the Sand Counties, the Northwoods, and the northwest portion of the state to the trail's terminus at Interstate Park.
Each geographical section includes a subtitle and presents an ordered collection of poems that follow the poet's experience of the trail and life along with the seasons. A haiga (a haiku with an original photograph on the trail) introduces each section.
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