We had the great forture of having no classes this past Friday and that meant it was time to finally get away on that weekend backpacking trip I had been planning. I and three other seminarian friends headed north to Kettle Moraine State Park in Wisconsin for the weekend. It’s about 45 minutes north of Milwaukee, which makes it only a two hour drive from the seminary.
I had hoped to see some fall colors, which we did, but this just isn’t going to be a very good fall for leaves. Many of the trees had lost their leaves and others were still green. It really was beautiful hiking though. We had a beautiful forest floor covered in yellows and reds almost the entire way. The Kettle Moraine forest is named after the geographic features left behind by glaciers during the last ice age. It made for some interesting terain to navigate with lots of ups and downs.
We hiked all Friday afternoon with temperatures in the upper 40’s and cloudy skies. It definitely felt like fall. We did about 8 miles the first day and ended up at our campsite late in the afternoon. The trail we were hiking is known as the Ice Age Trail and runs several hundred miles through Wisconsin. We reserved one of the backcountry campsites for the night which is not accessable to vehicles. This made for a nice quiet evening by ourselves.
As the sun was going down, so was the temperature. We quickly found some wood to build a fire which would serve as our entertainment and point of reflection for the rest of the evening. It was really nice to gather around the fire and pray our daily prayers together as seminarians. Two of us are about to be ordained deacons and will promise to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day for our people. While I enjoy praying in our chapel here at the seminary, it was a really nice change of scenery to pray gathered around a campfire in the dark with owls hooting and nothing but the trees to disturb us.
It got down to about 35 degrees over night, but I was nice and toasty in my warm down sleeping bag. The hard part was motivating to get out of said sleeping bag in the morning! The weather forcast had promised us some sun for Saturday. It was actually pretty cloudy again, but there were a few moments of sun. We ended up doing about nine more miles on this second day and I have to admit that I think I overdid it a little bit. We were all pretty dead by the time we reached our ending point. Still, we saw some beautiful scenery along the way and I really felt thankful that God had created such inspiring places. Sometimes you just need to get outside and get away from the business of life for a little bit. Some of us had parish responsibilities on Sunday morning, so our trek ended on Saturday night. I’m still a little sore, but it was a great time. Maybe we’ll go back in the spring. Praise God for the beauty of creation and good friends to share it with!
