Day 113 - Trail Time

Our family is a big fan of trails. We love hiking on trails at parks throughout the area.  We are avid volunteers for the Ice Age Trail. We frequent the local recreational trails with the kids for bike and scooter rides. I love to run on any trail I can find, paved or unpaved. At my school, I worked hard to add a trail to our outdoor classroom and am excited to see how community members use it all the time. Trails are such a great source of fitness and fun for my family. 

We enjoy trails so much that we decided the time had come to see how we could incorporate a trail into our own backyard. With twenty acres to play with, we were excited at the opportunity. Knowing we would be working to restore and improve the land, we knew the trail was sure to improve over time. With the fact that our land was connected to a forty-acre protected land preserve, we knew that there might be a possibility of extending whatever trail we create into a much larger one in the future.

I’ve actually had the experience of building a trail from scratch so that concept was not overwhelming. In fact, I was oddly excited to get out the maps and start putting some design ideas down on paper. It was tricky at first because our land has agricultural ditches and is very wet for a sizable portion of the year. I used a long-term mindset when planning. I wanted to create a trail that took us to places wanted to visit and improve while capturing the diversity the land offered. With forests, prairie, and wetland, we could have a lot of fun designing a trail that offered different sights and feels along the way.

After a few different drafts, I felt like we had a design that just might work. I was also able to acquire sixteen foot log deck boards I planned on using as bridges across the ditches. Hopefully soon, we would be hiking our land. On paper, the Dargatz Trail was ready. Of course, plans on paper don't always work out the way they were intended.