Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail Is America’s Friendliest Thru-Hike

The Green Bay Packers were suddenly not the most interesting entertainment option in Mac’s Pub and Grub, a dim dive packed with people wearing Packers gear on a Sunday afternoon in October in the lakeside Wisconsin town of Merrimac. Unfortunately for me, I was.

Midway through the first quarter, I had slipped inside Mac’s, found an unoccupied stool, and leaned against a wall with clear sightlines of the bar’s TV gallery, exhausted and half-frozen like a piece of melting ice. I’d left camp 11 hours earlier, at 4 A.M., hustling 31 miles through a Sunday squall in order to make Mac’s, or to watch the Packers’ bout with the Detroit Lions among the locals. But I looked as if I’d emerged from the depths of Lake Wisconsin, as puddles of rainwater pooled beneath my feet and around my backpack. Every play or two, someone else glanced askance from the bar, as if Cheers had been invaded by some primordial beast from the bottom of Boston Harbor.

“Are you hungry?” a broad-chested man in a Packers jersey, belly to the bar and bottle in hand, finally asked. When I nodded, he grinned and pointed. “There’s food over there. Help yourself.” For the next three hours, my wife, Tina, and I gorged ourselves on what surely must have been the most delicious potluck ever—finger-thick slabs of candied bacon, brie wheels topped with baked salmon, tortilla chip smothered in cheese-laden chili. As we slowly warmed back to life after the windy November downpour, the regulars steadily realized we were hiking across their state, endeavoring to finish the 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail before the infamous Wisconsin winter arrived. Some of them, at least, became fans.

Mac had first said I looked like a wet rat; now, he spun our laundry in the bar’s dryer, then offered to let us camp beside the bar. A couple, Paul and Deb, peppered us with questions about the adventure, then feted us with their own wilderness stories—and several shots. Sue, a retiree who would soon head south for the winter, offered up a bathtub and bedroom, which we accepted after needlessly worrying we were being soft. “You kids be safe,” Mac said, smiling like a proud father as we followed Sue to her car, “and let us know when you finish.”

So goes my overall experience on the Ice Age Trail, a 40-day slog through pleasant but repetitive woods and along often-busy highways, alleviated by bouts of unexpected support and kindness from Wisconsin natives. Strangers handed us candy bars from open car windows. Fathers running errands made U-turns to scoop us from seemingly ubiquitous rainstorms, while trailside bar owners treated us like Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay before offering to deliver us breakfast the next morning. A fleet of Ice Age Trail volunteers was seemingly always on call, too, ready to drive us from hotel to trail or offer camping intel during extended road walks.

Though it is one of 11 National Scenic Trails, alongside the more familiar and acclaimed Appalachian and Pacific Crest, the Ice Age Trail is decidedly not a premier thru-hike, best done in one continuous push. I do not recommend it as a thru-hike. But after 11,000 miles on such trails, I can say it is the friendliest long-distance experience I’ve ever had, both in terms of the people on or around it and the way its stewards have shaped and maintained it. Really, it is more of a linear community center that happens to stretch between the Minnesota and Michigan borders than a wilderness experience. The Ice Age Trail is, in every positive sense, Midwest Nice—pleasant to look at, if a tad boring, but as accommodating and kind as can be.

“Everybody takes pride in it in our own special way, whether it’s the person serving you breakfast in a trail town or the guy who walks the same five-mile segment every day,” Jared Wildenradt, who has now hiked the entire Ice Age Trail eight times, told me two weeks after I finished my walk.

“There’s a definite community here that people don’t expect when it comes to hiking in the Midwest,” he continued. “The people that power through here get to experience that, just like you did in 40 days.”

What is the Ice Age Trail?

More than many of its National Scenic Trail counterparts, the Ice Age Trail remains a work in progress. First envisioned in the fifties by a Milwaukee-born outdoors enthusiast named Ray Zillmer, it was only established by Congress during 1980. The trail roughly follows the terminal edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, as it melted out in what we now call Wisconsin about 10,000 years ago. Kettles, moraines, eskers, drumlins, wetlands, hanging valleys, outwash plains: Across, down, and up Wisconsin, you crisscross these glacial vestiges, repeated in random bursts like a particularly chaotic and tremendous platter of hotdish.

Still, after more than four decades of route-finding, trail-building, and parcel-buying, only 700 miles of the 1,200-route is contiguous, winding across forests, around fields and farms, or through tiny towns. Nearly 500 miles still depend upon what the Ice Age Trail Alliance calls “connecting routes,” a euphemism for rural roads and busy highways. The imperative, then, is closing those gaps, pulling hikers off those connecting routes by securing land for actual footpaths.

Wildenradt has helped find six such parcels; he talks about the first one—a glacier-carved patch of property that interrupts a 25-mile road walk via a 0.7-mile roller coaster through the woods—like a father might extol a firstborn. When we spoke, he sat plucking seeds from pine cones that he intended to plant on that plot soon. “I went away and hacked at the dirt, started clearing away for trail. I was beat up from head to toe,” he said, laughing about the spot’s temporary nickname, Prickler’s Property. “I had close to 300 volunteer hours when it was done. I could easily drop 100 more.”

All that, mind you, for less than a mile. When the Ice Age Trail Alliance’s current executive director, Luke Kloberdanz, thru-hiked it in 2003, he was the eleventh person ever to do so. Only two decades ago, the mileage ratio was reversed, with nearly 700 miles of road walks to 500 on trail. He now believes the path will be finished within his children’s lifetimes, meaning his grandkids could walk from Minnesota to Michigan and touch very little asphalt.

“I always thought that completion was a long way off, that I was never going to be part of that,” Kloberdanz told me. “We may not reach the end of the tunnel in my lifetime, but we’re at least starting to see the light. I’ve never felt that way in my 20 years here.”

That aspirational pride animates the Ice Age Trail, end to end. I’ve never hiked a better-blazed path. Hikers can spot its bright yellow stripes by headlamp as by sunlight. (When you fill out a thru-hiking certification upon completing the trail, the Ice Age Trail Alliance even asks how many times you get lost, so they can fix the problems.) And I’ve never encountered a volunteer network so robust and eager to help hikers; wherever you are in the state, you are almost always a phone call away from a free ride, meal, or bed. These volunteers raved about the contributions they and their friends had made to the trail, as if thanking me for using them, for making good on their hard work.

The trail is also dotted with benches, sometimes more than one per mile, and often dedicated to a late hiker who loved the place. They’re meant, of course, to make the trail more accommodating, to give people who aren’t aiming to finish 30 miles in a day a chance to rest. You won’t see that on any other National Scenic Trail. The friendliness is by both circumstance and design, pervading everything.

In 2020, to celebrate its 40th official year, the Ice Age Trail Alliance launched the Mammoth Hike Challenge—essentially, a reward for anyone who hikes 40 miles during the month of October, when the foliage of the Wisconsin fall is at its apex. The trail’s mascot is a mammoth, Monty. It’s so cute I now have one on my desk, dutifully carried for the last 400 miles. They’ve added one mile to that requirement each subsequent year.

On weekends, we’d meet couples and crews of friends in pursuit of their 44-mile quota. They were eager not only to share the best things they’d seen but also to hear ours. More than once, my answer was you, the people who love this trail so much.

Did I Like the Ice Age Trail?

On a cold Saturday morning at a Kwik Trip, a particularly bountiful chain of convenience stores launched in Wisconsin in the sixties, I was waiting in line at an automated espresso machine. “Are you hiking the Ice Age Trail?” said the woman ahead of me, her smile as bright as her pastel tie-dye. When I answered yes, her grin somehow grew wider. She introduced herself as Tarra. “I want to do that someday, too.” Several hours later, Tarra sent us an Instagram message with her phone number and an offer of help should we need it as we neared her home a few hundred miles east.

Turns out, we did. Due to a few work deadlines, we’d pushed our pace on the Ice Age, hiking at least 30 miles every day with zero rest days. As we neared the 1,000-mile mark, my body—specifically, my left IT Band, suddenly as intractable as a massive team of mules—tightening to the point that each step felt as if a knife was being jammed into my joint. At night, crawling into the tent, my knee looked like a balloon. I knew it was time to stop. The next morning, I hobbled two miles to a gas station and texted Tarra, asking if she knew where I might rent a car nearby. The sun wasn’t up yet, but she told me she was on her way.

As I lamented my knee an hour later, she texted a friend who happened to be her physical therapist. How soon could she see me? For two hours that afternoon, Jeanie Crawford—a doctor per her credentials, a blessed sorceress per my experience—pulled, tugged, straightened, bent, jabbed, and corrected seemingly every bone in my body. I had almost crawled into her office, but I somehow walked out with a mostly normal stride. She charged me half of her hourly rate, ostensibly excited enough by the effort to cross her state that she practically gave away her day.

For the next week, I returned to more than 30 miles every day, moving at my normal pace because a stranger had been willing to leave her home long before her workday began and find me help. The Ice Age Trail didn’t dazzle me with scenery or variety, and it didn’t prompt me to learn any new backpacking techniques. Most days, truth be told, I didn’t even like it. I contemplated quitting more often than I’ve ever considered such for anything in my life.

But it did remind me of something obvious, something that can be easy to forget high in the mountains or deep in the woods: Hiking trails are for all people, and those interactions can take a dozen different forms, from the married couple hustling from one end of a state to another to the bartender who keeps asking for more of their stories, from the gaggle of retirees out for a slow Sunday stroll high on an esker to the trail runner bombing down a rock face in the rain. The Ice Age Trail is a gift from Wisconsin’s past to Wisconsin’s present and future. I’m grateful its people share it so generously.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for Outside since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.