Red Cedar Trail

We had originally planned to ride the Old Abe and Chippewa River trails, but the park employee that we talked to when riding the Old Abe yesterday said that the Chippewa River Trail was in pretty bad shape. A lot of comments about it on the AllTrails website confirmed his opinion, so we opted to ride the third State Trail in the area, the Red Cedar. All the trails are connected, and except for a few miles they are all off road, nearly 75 miles in total – great job Wisconsin (just do some repairs to the Chippewa River Trail).

The Red Cedar Trail starts in a very large and shady park in Menomonie with picnic areas, a playground, beach and a canoe/kayak launch right on the Red Cedar River.The trail is packed dirt in pretty good condition and it runs right along the river for 14.5 miles. There’s plenty of shade and the river views keep it interesting. The wildlife was mostly of the flying variety so we had to stop early on for a heavy dose of bug spray.

There was a really nice rest area with bathrooms, water and an air pump at about 8 miles and many pull offs with picnic tables. We’re seeing rail trail facilities in other states that are much, much better than anything we’ve seen at home.

There’s a long trestle bridge at the end of the trail with a sign that surprised us as it was pretty high and had an extensive steel girder lattice.

How anyone would jump off that I cannot imagine but I expect that sign may be due to low water levels. There’s a path right before the bridge to get down to a great beach area along the river.

Looked like a great place to be on a hot day! On the way back Tom spotted a rustic barricade with many warning signs about not trespassing in the quarry

With temperatures rising we also paused in this very cool little oasis of rock and moss

That concludes our Wisconsin bike riding. Tomorrow we head for Escanaba MI which is really just a stop along the way to our next ride on Mackinac Island. We’ll spend two nights in Escanaba and then one in Mackinac City so we can catch an early ferry to spend a day on the island.

We like Wisconsin dried cherries but are not too impressed with their cheese or ice cream. Tomorrow we’ll be trying their Friendly’s equivalent for lunch as we keep seeing them all over the place, Culvers. Won’t be our healthiest meal but we need to explore the famous butterburgers and frozen custard!