What was planned as a full two day expedition
turned into a 24 hour jaunt due to cold weather. We were hoping for
temperatures to hover around 30 degrees but that was not the case.
Sleeping inside our vehicles while it was 10 degrees outside
made for an uncomfortable nights stay and I decided to head home
Saturday afternoon. However, we did cover a lot of area in our
vehicles Friday night traveling about 30-40 miles of back roads
looking for a good place to set up camp. Here are the details.......
I left Friday morning from Port Washington
around 9:30 am and headed to Eau Claire to meet up with Shane. The
trip was going well and I was making good time until about 10 minutes
away from Shane's place when my serpentine belt on my truck started
squeeling. I'm thinking to myself, you have got to be kidding me, I
just had it tuned up but I was thinking the worst like I popped a
radiator hose or something and the belt was wet with anti-freeze.
I get to Shane's and pop the hood. Here the
idler pulley is laying on top of the engine and the belt is rubbing
the bolt that holds the pulley. A quick call to the local Advanced
Auto Parts store confirmed they had one in stock. Drove over there and
installed the new pulley. All in all about an hour set-back. I guess
it could have been worse.
We made our way to an area about 45 minutes
north, northwest of Rice Lake, WI. This was a new area for both Shane
and I. We arrived about an hour before dark and proceeded to explore
some of the back-roads we mapped out in a 10 mile by 10 mile area.
This area was east of Lake Chetak. We drove these snow covered
roadways for about 4 hours. We got a pretty good feel for the area and
made two peculiar discoveries in doing so. The following are some pics
of an X formation we located just off of one of the roads we were on.
This thing stuck out like a sore thumb. It was quite large.
That's Shane, he's just shy of
6ft tall
These large trees were wedged in
there very tight. It appears as if these trees were cut down with a
saw prior to them ending up in this formation. We did not investigate
this area thoroughly for we felt this may have been private property.
If anyone is in the area around Meteor Tower and would like gps
coordinates to this marker to investigate further, email me.
We continued traveling around
the general area and came across some suspicious tracks leading off of
the roadway. Here are the pics.
These tracks were very
intriguing due to the fact that we were pretty much in the middle of
nowhere. No detail could be made out as to whether these were made by
boots. I would have loved to follow these for a while but considering
we may have been trespassing, it wouldn't have looked good with our
vehicles parked on the roadway and us snooping around in an area
completely foreign to us. I failed to mark these on my gps and regret
it. I would have liked to take another look in the daylight.
We finally made it to the Ojibwa
State Park at around 10 pm. We did a drive around of the park looking
for possible sign. When we got back to the parking area Shane
proceeded to prepare bait. We hung one rainbow trout, a bag of
popcorn, 3 cd's, and Shane also placed a couple candy bars in some
trees. Shane also put out about a dozen apples on a log. During this
time I was recording video just in case we had something unusual
happen.
Once the bait was placed Shane
did some wood-knocking. After his first series of knocks we heard what
sounded like something lightly tapping a branch or wood about 50 yards
away. Who knows what it was but it did get our attention. Shane
did about 3 more series of 2-3 wood-knocks and we headed back to the
vehicles. We let our vehicles idle for a while, mainly to get one last
warm-up before we hit the sack, but also to give any possible
creatures in the area a chance to use the noise from our vehicles as
cover to possibly get closer to us without detection.
Once I hit my sleeping bag I was
out like a light. Shane commented he heard a possible howl around
2:30am. This could very well have been wolves. We found plenty of wolf
tracks in the park. One of our equipment failures was the
walkie-talkies. Shane tried to call me with the vibrate mode on the
radio but wouldn't you know it the batteries went dead on my radio. So
I missed what little excitement Shane had heard early in the morning.
We both got out of the vehicles
around 7am and checked the bait. No luck. There were some deer tracks
around the bait but nothing was eaten. One candy bar was laying on the
ground but seemed untouched. We walked the majority of the southern
portion of the park but didn't find anything out of the ordinary.
We didn't find what we were
looking for but did get a good overall feel for the area. We had fun
even though it was rather cold. Can't wait to do it again.
We are planning a couple more
weekend expeditions for early spring.
