Wisconsin

Hiking Along the Ice Age Trail

Coursing through Wisconsin, the Ice Age Trail is a place where all people may enjoy and embrace unique glacial landscapes and cultural histories, while finding physical and mental renewal in a peaceful setting and an enduring spiritual connection to the land.

The nearly 1,200-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail (IAT) is the crown jewel of Wisconsin hiking. Weaving its way from Door County all the way to northeastern Minnesota, the trail presents both a tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity for long-distance thru-hikers looking to immerse themselves in the geography and wilderness of Wisconsin as well as trail communities that offer quintessential small-town Wisconsin experiences.

Hiking the IAT—whether for a few hours, a single night, several days, or several months—is an absolutely iconic, bucket-list-level Wisconsin experience, and one that you can have while visiting Door County.

More than 12,000 years ago, an immense flow of glacial ice sculpted a landscape of remarkable beauty across Wisconsin. As the glacier retreated, it left behind a variety of unique landscape features. These glacial remnants are now considered among the world’s finest examples of how continental glaciation sculpts our planet.”

The Ice Age Trail is designed to highlight these incredible natural features and provide hikers with an expansive look at the geography and topography of southern and central Wisconsin as it was shaped by glaciation.

The trail’s National Scenic Trail designation in itself is also significant—there are only 11 official NSTs in the country, and Wisconsin is lucky enough to have one to itself (except for that western endpoint on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border). The IAT takes hikers from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin all the way to St. Croix Falls, Minnesota. During that journey, hikers will trek nearly 1,200 miles across the state of Wisconsin, pass through 30 counties (including Door) and traverse a huge variety of ecosystems, terrains, and environments. The views and natural attractions of the trail vary wildly from segment-to-segment (and, really, step-to-step), but in general hikers can expect a relatively low-elevation trek featuring “mature forests, expansive prairies, and thousands of lakes and rivers” as well as “kames, lakes, drumlins, ice-walled-lake plains, outwash plains, eskers, tunnel channels, unglaciated features of the Driftless Area and other older landforms.”

In other words, those who hike the full trail will get a crash course in key Wisconsin geographical features, plantlife, wildlife, waterways, and rock formations. https://www.iceagetrail.org/

For more on Wisconsin