Our first, quick foray into Wisconsin was for a visit to Copper Falls State Park.
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It rained heavily Tuesday night, and into Wednesday morning. We felt sorry for the folks tent camping in the site next to ours.
Mosquitoes continue to be the bane of Tom's existence. One snuck into the van sometime in the morning and got a good long suck before Tom noticed her. She made a run for it, but Tom got her with the bug zapper and fried her for awhile; unfortunately she was quite full of blood and exploded, making a bit of mess.
We made the short drive from the campground to the main parking lot. Tom thought he might be able to get away with just wearing long sleeves and pants, since it was a cool day, but got 3 mosquito bites within minutes of trying to leave the van so he changed back into a t-shirt and shorts and sprayed himself with Repel Lemon Eucalyptus - which worked reasonably well as long we kept moving, but he still got a couple of bites from aggressive mosquitoes if we stopped for too long in one spot. Our plan for the day was to hike the 1.7 mile Doughboy's (loop) Trail to see the various sights along it.
The first point of interest was Copper Falls itself, which in our opinion is not actually the most spectacular falls in the park - at least not any more. It reportedly used to be much taller, but in 1902 miners re-routed the Bad River by blasting through a bedrock formation upstream from the falls; this caused more river volume to flow over the east side of the the falls accelerating rock erosion on that side. Since the redirection, Copper Falls has dropped from its original height of 30 feet to its current height of just 8 feet today.
Next up was the 30 ft tall Brownstone Falls.
This opening cut through the conglomerate rock (naturally cemented gravel) by the Bad River is known as Devil's Gate.
Further down the trail we encountered the Tyler Forks cascades...
...followed by the Tyler Forks itself.
As we neared the end of the loop trail we passed Copper Falls again, getting to see the falls from the other side of the river this time.
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Having completed the Doughboy's Trail, we decided to take the old CCC Trail up to the 65-foot Observation Tower, from which you're supposed to be able to see all sorts of sights in the surrounding area. The climb up to the tower was pretty steep, and arriving at the base of the tower we became pretty skeptical that we'd be able to see anything interesting at all - since the surrounding trees looked suspiciously like they were taller than the tower. But since we had already come this far, we had to climb the stairs to make sure...
Arriving at the top of the tower, our suspicions were confirmed: nothing but overgrown trees on all sides.
The trip wasn't a total loss, though. We found this funny looking little caterpillar crawling on the top railing. We're not sure why he was up there (as there was nothing for him to eat), but he certainly had traveled a lot farther (proportionally speaking) than we did to get there!
There was a nice park / picnic area by the parking lot, so since Tom still seemed to be protected by the Lemon Eucalyptus we decided to bring out our grill (something we usually only do at our campsite in the evening) and make burgers for lunch (hot food for lunch, for a change!).
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We stopped back at the campground for showers, and saw another Travato drive by into the campground somewhere.
We then spent the evening parked in the Mellen Public Library parking lot, using their WiFi to finish and publish the South Dakota, Part 5 blog. Looking out our window after the moon came out, we thought the view was kind of pretty.
We returned to camp around 10:30, and proceeded to chase a pesky mosquito around the coach until almost midnight. 🙄.
Tomorrow we'd be leaving Wisconsin (for awhile, at least) and heading on to our next adventure...
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