Adventure Awaits in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest

Protecting 1.5 million acres of Wisconsin Northwoods, the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest offers an abundance of summer adventures, including hiking, camping, gravel and mountain biking, and canoeing. The National Forest is divided into two sections in Wisconsin—one in the northeast adjacent to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and another in the northwest corner of the state.

One day in spring, I met my friend Erik for a weekday gravel ride from the little town of Drummond, population 156. This is our tradition—I drive from Duluth, Erik from Danbury, and we meet in the Chequamegon. As usual, Erik has picked out a loop ride that hinges on finding one of the big springs that dot this part of northwestern Wisconsin.

Considering the myriad forest roads, there are virtually endless options for gravel biking in the national forest. The website Bikepacking.com, which is a collection of long-distance biking routes around the globe, details the Tour de Chequamegon: “This route is a great urban escape that allows you quick access to wilderness, but the nearby towns of Hayward and Cable make it easy to stock up on anything you forgot to bring along.” A popular three-day trip, the 107-mile-long Tour is an unofficial route based on scenery, towns, and campsites. It’s nearly all unpaved.

The Tour is south of where Erik and I are making up our own day-length loop, starting on the Bear Paw ATV trail, which soon takes us onto a dirt forest road called “Horse Pasture Grade” through mature forest. Later in the day, we’ll chat with a local checking his beaver traps, who tells us a story relating to the road’s name. The man claims that over 100 years ago, Samuel Curtis Johnson kept a large stable of horses to log hardwoods for his S.C. Johnson Company, which later grew to produce wax for its wood floors and now-ubiquitous products like Ziploc and Saran Wrap.

We rode through a flat forest. The only things green this early are conifers, club moss, hepatica, and moss. Erik is on the lookout for hemlock trees, which don’t grow in our homes to the west. He points to an evergreen and says, “Hemlock”? Taking the role of the group’s buzzkill, I inform him that it’s a balsam fir.

Hard old snow lingers in shadows, and I gingerly skate my narrow 38mm tires across. Next to the snow, in low spots, is mud. Erik is soon wearing a vertical stripe of Chequamegon slime down his back. Because of the mud, the area’s wealth of mountain bike trails is still closed for the spring thaw. These trails are managed by CAMBA, the Chequamegon Area Mountain Biking Association. Daryl McNutt is CAMBA’s executive director. He’s a Hayward native long involved with biking and skiing, with affiliations with New Moon Ski and Bike Shop, Rex Ski Wax, and the Hungry Bear Gravel Race.

“This is a good trail system and one of the biggest in the Midwest,” McNutt said. “It’s built by riders. They put the money in. It really is a public trust that they put stewardship into. We’ve got 135 miles of mountain bike trails between here and Ashwabay. If you can ride it all in a season, you’re doing pretty good.” CAMBA has been around since 1993 and rode the rise of mountain biking as a popular activity. “We’ve always had forest roads,” McNutt said of the Chequamegon. “People were coming up here wanting to ride these trails and roads. Bikes got better. Singletrack bikes began to appear. People started making weekends and vacations there. With all the lakes, it was already the vacation mecca. It was a natural fit.”

CAMBA’s mountain bike trails are scattered over several clusters and feature both machine-built and hand-built trails. “Machine-built trails are flowy—fast and fun,” McNutt explained, while “hand-built trails are more aggressive with rocks and roots. Some people want rocks and gnarliness, so when you finish it, you feel like you accomplished an adventure.” One of CAMBA’s classic trails on National Forest land is Rock Lake, near Cable. Rock Lake has an “epic” rating from the International Mountain Biking Association, meaning it’s challenging, long, and scenic. I recall riding Rock Lake 20 years ago on a $300 mountain bike and whacking my elbow on a rock when I crashed. I was reminded of the trail for many months afterward whenever my elbow ached. “Rock Lake is a hand-built trail that’s never been machined, other than sawing logs and moving rocks,” McNutt said. “I tell everybody after you get your 12 miles on that, you’ll get it out of your system.” McNutt prefers the flowy stuff. For first-time visitors to the Chequamegon, he recommends the Hospital Trail in Hayward and the flowy trails around County Road OO between Cable and Hayward. “There’s something for everyone,” he promises. This season, CAMBA will be busy rehabbing trails and setting up one-way traffic around the Seeley Firetower, another favorite cluster of McNutt’s. “It’s a super fun place to ride, but it can be pretty quick coming down. One-way trails will make it safer for folks to blast down and ease up.” In addition to maps of the mountain bike trails, CAMBA has a list of suggested gravel loops on its website.

After a couple of hours of gravel riding, Erik and I stop along the southern edge of the Rainbow Lakes Wilderness. Rainbow Lakes is 6,500 acres and was one of the first designated wilderness areas in the eastern United States when it was created in 1975. The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest has six designated wilderness areas, including the nearby 4,400-acre Porcupine Lake wilderness areas, as well as three other areas in the eastern portion of the forest, like the 18,000-acre Headwaters Wilderness.

At the southeastern corner of Rainbow Lakes, we find a scenic rustic campsite under large oaks and maples next to Reynard Lake. Reynard has a canoe landing that provides access to its clear water and pine-rimmed shores. The North Country National Scenic Trail crosses into wilderness here. At a staggering length of 4,800 miles that stretches from North Dakota to Vermont, the North Country Trail (NCT) is the country’s longest National Scenic Trail. It’s a beguiling thought that I could start walking east, continue walking all spring and summer, and maybe by late fall I’d reach the trail’s eastern end where it connects with the Appalachian Trail.

Sixty-one miles of the North Country Trail pass through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. I asked Mel Baughman for more insight into what makes this section of the trail unique. Baughman lives in Hayward and is the president of the local Chequamegon Chapter of the North Country Trail Association. Baughman said the trail through the National Forest is characterized by “gently rolling, forested hills that were sculpted by glaciers that also left kettle lakes, wetlands, and shaded, bubbling trout streams. Plenty of solitude is available all along the trail, but particularly in the Rainbow Lake and Porcupine Lake Wilderness areas. Almost any day hike will take you by remote lakes where eagles and loons will nest and feed. Timber harvesting near the trail is reduced to protect the hundred-year-old hardwoods, pine, and hemlock that provide habitat for black bears, wolves, pine martens, deer, and other wildlife. Dispersed camping is permitted along the trail, but rustic campsites have also been constructed for hikers. The trail is well-maintained by volunteers from the North Country Trail Association and U.S. Forest Service staff.”

Some years back, my wife and I hiked this portion of the NCT in May. It was a pleasant stroll over several days. We’d camped on quiet lakes, watched otters swim, and while approaching a highway crossing near Drummond, stopped to listen to an awful mewling that sounded like a bereft child. I initially thought a toddler was lost along the highway. Not having children at that time, my natural assumption was that a child had been crying in this awful way, so its parents had naturally ejected it from their car. My wife and I tromped through the woods toward the sound, only to realize it was coming from above. And then we found it. High up in an aspen tree was a bear cub, wide-eyed and shrieking for its mother. We headed on our way.

Erik and I bike into hillier terrain, passing scenic lakes called Star and Cisco, where I see my first loon of the year. Erik calls out a hemlock tree. I look prepared to disagree, but it is indeed a hemlock, its needles dark green and its loose branches singing of great eastern woods. Eventually, we reach a narrow dirt road fronted by a battered wooden sign reading Johnson Springs. The road descends into the woods and reaches a spring pond formed by an earthen dam before dead-ending. The spring pool gushes into a Class 1 trout stream, the Long Lake Branch. I stand on the culvert of the earthen dam and look down into a stony pool the size of a jumbo hot tub. Water swells up from the gravel at the base of the pool with hundreds of sparkling bubbles. It’s quite the spring. This summer, I resolved, I’m going to seek out more of these fascinating places.