Once in a while I need to leave town for a quiet overnight with Wife 1.2. Our choice is usually the Brewery Creek Inn, Mineral Point, Wisconsin. It’s a quiet and quaint place. Interesting, since in 1830 its population was greater than Milwaukee and Chicago combined. This is how quiet it is now. It’s wonderful.
It’s also just down the road from Governor Dodge State Park, one of our favorite places to get out and about. We had intended a nice loop of nordic, but some numskull forgot the key to the Atlantis. Oops. Luckily, the numskull also put a few pairs of snowshoes in the back of the truck. Because of this, Numskull was redeemed.
Numskull also broke out the vintage gaiters. These are classic 60/40 cloth gaiters in the finest 1983 color styling. They’re all faded and the grommets are rusty, but the bloody things still work. I usually donate or recycle gear before it gets to this point. For some reason, these 27 year-old gaiters are still in the bottom of the bench by the door where we cram extra gloves and hats.
I normally don’t need gaiters, as I normally wear mukluks for snowshoeing, but this was a little bit of a test. Wife 1.2 was wearing her Ojibwa shoes she laced a decade ago, nicely spar varnished and with a new pair of leather bindings. I was using a modern pair of aluminum and neoprene shoes with aggressive crampons and a super-duper binding system worthy of some geek at JPL.
It was a lovely day. High 20s, little wind, and a nice flat light from an overcast sky. The trails around Twin Valley lake were lightly trodden since the last snow, except for the tracks of a perfect-pacing coyote and a modern ‘shoer using a pair of Tubbs from about 1998 – 2000. Yes, I can tell. Being a snowshoe track geek is somewhat more esoteric than being a bird geek, but the sentiment is identical.
The small creeks that feed Twin Valley are spring-fed and run all year, but with the warmer weather the leads were further out into the lake than usual. Just a few hundred yards away, ice fishermen parked their trucks on the ice, a good foot thick in most areas. They had elaborate set-ups; large tents (no doubt heated) and one genius had procured an old truck camper and put it on skids, drilled holes in the bottom and dragged it out onto the lake. As if all that testosterone could be contained by that flimsy camper. I have to admit that in the 26 years I’ve lived in the icebox that is Wisconsin, I have yet to see a single woman ice fishing except for my daughter and her friend.
So we walked. I felt that this would be a good test of our respective styles of equipment and get some pros and cons. I was surprised by quite a few things.
First, I was amazed by how noisy my shoes were. Lots of moving parts and pivots, combined with the cold decking made it a little difficult to walk quietly. Wife 1.2’s Ojibwa’s slid quietly through the snow. I had her stop so I could walk, then had her walking showed me just how hard it would be to sneak up on wildlife. Nod goes to the Ojibwa shoes.
As we walked the trail I stepped off to take a picture. When I turned around I saw Valley View Cemetery. We would have walked right past it if I had not stepped off the trail. Google maps says it’s called Pleasant View Cemetery. Google maps is not always correct. But you can see why you’d miss it.
It might be one of the loneliest cemeteries in Wisconsin. A half a dozen monuments and headstones, most of them illegible, the names weathered but still beautiful. I bet it’s lovely in the summer. I’ll be back to see it soon enough. When I did a web search for Valley View and Dodgeville, I found very little, but I did find a request for bids for doing the lawn maintenance. I wonder if anyone took it, since it’s pretty tough to get a mower in there.
Brushing the snow off a few headstones, I wanted to find some names somewhere, but the same thing happened over and over again…worn letters, illegible, frustrating. I really wanted to find a name I could take back and look up on the internet…to get more info about these people who were so isolated.
Not a clue. Nothing.
Ingebretson. 1839 – 1909. That’s it.
We didn’t see anyone the rest of the day except ice fishermen a quarter mile away. The nice thing about snowshoeing vs. skiing is you can hold hands. Talk. Enjoy the views together. Side by side, not single file. Not that I mind skiing behind Wife 1.2.
Respectfully submitted,
Canoelover