Wyalusing State Park and the Mighty Mississippi

Pair of Eagles

This past weekend, Ali and I joined a ton of fellow Hoofers on the annual Fall Colors paddling trip.  We head over (this year a week or two too late for peak colors) to Wyalusing State Park, where the Wisconsin River runs into the Mississippi river.  (It's on the Wisconsin-Iowa border, about halfway between the northwestern corner of Illinois and the southeastern corner of Minnesota.)  Wyalusing is about 2 hours away from Madison, and there are some really pretty bluffs that surround the confluence.

Overlooking the last of the Wisconsin River
 (Iowa is the dark ridge on the right)

We headed out of town Friday night with 19 canoes and 1 homemade sea kayak.  Ali and I ended up in the backseat of this tiny Geo hatchback that had too much gear (and a canoe) even after dumping a bunch of personal gear into another car that had the same departure time as us.  The ride was cramped but not too problematic.

We got to the park after sun down, and set up our tents at a group site across from the Boy Scouts.  There was a pretty decent pile of firewood thanks to the earlier group of Hoofers, and we had a solid fire well into the evening.  Unfortunately, there were a couple guys who insisted on poking the fire (not really managing the fire, just constantly trying to break coals off of logs and generate fountains of sparks).  They were successful in their endeavors - I got a bunch of embers burning holes through my gear and one 2cm coal that landed in the wrist of my jacket.  Mind you, I was about 6 feet back from the fire.  Needless to say, many people around the fire ring were none to happy.

We headed to the tents just after midnight and woke to an incredible amount of condensation (a bunch of the newer folk thought it had rained overnight).  We had some awesome fruit + couscous before packing up and going for a brief hike.  The walk was about a mile's worth of scenic overlooks and neat caves in/on the bluffs.  There's some tradition of trying to fit as many people as possible into this one cave.  This year, the club got about 20 people in, but that did leave plenty of claustrophobic people (including me) out.
Just before noon, we packed up the cars and drove to the put in on the Wisconsin River.  Once the cars were unloaded and lunch (sandwiches) was finished, the drivers went off for a ridiculously long shuttle.  Granted, they were dropping off a lot of safety cars in case of trouble/hypothermia/slow-goings, but 2+ hours seemed excessive.  Everybody left at the put in had a lot of time for frisbee and old camp-style games.
We finally got on the water around 3 and had smooth sailing to our sandbar/island/peninsula/shore (depending on water level) campsite for the night.

With nearly 40 people, we had more than enough to get dinner going (tortellini, salad, and garlic bread) and get a massive pile of firewood.  Several years back, the group on Fall Colors had used a downed tree for the fire (long and narrow = plenty of room for lots of people), so we gathered a ton of really large pieces of wood.  Though our biggest tree was used as a bench, there was still a huge area dedicated to the fire.  Did I mention a sign at the put-in said no ground fires were allowed...   yeah.  One of the guys had a two-handed saw that we used to get some of the larger downed wood into pieces that could be carried by 2-4 people.  It was pretty awesome getting to help operate the saw.

Note our small wood pile

Small starter fire

By dinner time, everybody had worked up an appetite.  We had a giant propane-tank-fueled burner and an industrial-sized pot for the pasta.  Two coleman two-burners were being used for the sauce.  Our kitchen set up was pretty impressive and really useful considering the number of people we had to feed.   We got our food right around dusk.  The rest of the evening was just relaxing by the (huge) fire, chatting, checking out stars in a monocular, and sleeping.

Day two started at a more leisurely pace (read as:  half the group was too ill-rested to do anything but nap the first quarter of the day).  We had another vat of breakfast, some really sub-par coffee, packed up, and floated downstream.  The weather was great for our two days of paddling (especially considering that the weekend was flanked by cold, rainy days).  There were a ton of eagles out, and there was enough sun reflecting off the water to make me squint half of the day.  We unintentionally divided into willing-to-paddle and napping-on-river early in the day, and it wasn't until lunch (on a sandbar, probably on the entering edge of Wyalusing Park) that we got everybody together and ready for some paddling.

Lunch!!

After more sandwiches/cookies/fruit, we got back on the Wisconsin and headed down onto the Mississippi. We had been warned about barge traffic, and Ali and I had been set as a flank boat (to keep novices close to shore and further from the navigation channel), but we didn't see anything larger than a standard motor boat.  There was a really pretty ridge on the Iowa side of the river, but that tapered off pretty quickly.  The Mississippi was super, super choppy, and I'm really not sure what was generating the waves.  There was a little wind, but it was not that severe of a headwind.

Herding folks on to the Mississippi

A mile down the Mississippi, we turned back into an inlet and headed up a "lake" to a State Park take-out.  The sun was starting to dip near the trees, but the water was nice and calm.  We had a relaxing ride to the cars, a long stretch of cleaning/packing/waiting for the shuttle, and then it was home to our storage facility to unpack.