/

Right, so we spent the weekend canoe camping (sort of) at Buckhorn State Park outside Mauston, WI. It’s really quite a short jaunt from Madison, a little under two hours one way. Clicking on any of the images below will give you a bigger picture.

Mapquest totally hosed us on the directions (surprise!) so we got in later than we wished on Friday night and had to chase the dying sun. We quickly loaded up the canoe and Steven and I paddled about 1.75 miles out to the campsite with ludicrous amounts of stuff while the ladies walked the infinitely buggier one-mile path with the watch dog, who was very excited to receive us on the shore.

This was canoe camping, which means weight is more or less irrelevant so we brough out decadent stuff like a mini-keg of beer, boxed wine, folding chairs, and a guitar. Lovely campsite right on the water though, which meant ’round the clock entertaining of the dog who loves her floating frisbee and will not stop until you pry the thing from her cold, dead jaws.

It was a lazy weekend. We had planned to canoe around the park and blah blah blah but ended up sitting in the sun and doing flat nothing all day. Wasn’t a bad call at all, actually. This picture taken by Amy sums up the weekend the best:

Overall, it was a fun weekend but we’re not going to sprint back to the Buckhorn. The park description made it seem much more remote than it actually was and the lake had quite a bit of motor boat activity. The new thing in Wisconsin is the “pack-in” campsite that’s set between 0.5 and 1.5 miles from the parking lot. This caters to a growing population that wants to escape the boors at the drive-in campsite but don’t want to graduate to full-on backpacking. The park offers carts, so people can still bring in way more than they would backpacking, and we saw a lot of boaters pulling up to campsites as well which means you don’t get that backcountry feel with all this stuff. Of course, we were just as guilty as anyone, but had garbage disposal and other backcountry concerns actually mattered, we would have packed very differently. The verdict?

More like car camping than backpacking, but it was secluded enough and it ended up being a lazy weekend which we all probably needed more than a grueling backcountry excursion. And Athena has been sleeping it off ever since.

Current Mood: Fair to Middlin’ |