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The Naked Woods

The hike begins at the Lautenbach Woods Preserve.

The morning of March 21 – the first full day of spring – started out gloomy with a uniformly gray sky and a distinct nip in the air thanks to a bitter northwest wind. A few fat and lazy snowflakes tumbled down, but that didn’t prevent about 20 hardy souls from taking a morning hike through the Door County Land Trust’s 151-acre Charlie and Minerva Lautenbach Woods Preserve, guided by Land Trust members Guy Fortin, Sarah Freyman and Jon Hollingshead. The property is just off County G, about five miles south of Egg Harbor.

“This is a very special property that the Lautenbachs owned,” lead guide Fortin said.

He started things out by explaining why he was happy to be representing the Door County Land Trust. Before coming to the county 13 years ago, Fortin said he lived in places where development trumped everything, and he saw a need for more natural and wild places.

“I think Door County is at a unique crossroads right now, and I think the Land Trust, in my opinion, is doing the most important work to keep Door County the way it is,” he said, fully acknowledging that he was in his soapbox mode.

All of the hikers seemed to be aware that Governor Walker’s biennial budget has targeted the all-important and nationally unique Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program to go dormant until 2028, a program that since 1989 has helped the Door County Land Trust and other Wisconsin land stewardship organizations preserve more than 500,000 acres of land for the public good.

Originally an 80-acre donation, the Lautenbach Preserve is now at 151 protected acres thanks to the Land Trust. It sports a 1.25-mile wooded and gently sloped hiking trail that highlights all the things that make the Niagara Escarpment both famous and infamous, including, on the plus side, birds, and on the other side, karst features.

This is how the Land Trust describes the property: “Loop trail passes through a northern hardwood forest of beech, maple and ash, and eventually descends the rocky slope of the Niagara Escarpment. The trail then traverses the escarpment dominated by conifers and passes an impressive stand of hemlock trees before gradually ascending back through the hardwood forest. A wonderful variety of wildflowers carpet the forest floor in springtime. This preserve is home to many songbirds and visitors may also encounter raptors such as the north goshawk.”

The hikers on this day walked on a blanket of leaves through a nude forest. They heard the bleat of a Sandhill Crane, and all heads looked to the sky until a trio of cranes was spotted circling high overhead. Someone mentioned that Sandhill Cranes mate for life, and Sarah Freyman offered that the third crane people were seeing was probably last year’s issue, still hanging with its parents.

As everyone looked skyward at the hovering cranes, a Chickadee issued its piercing, high lonesome two-note song, but no one mentioned it.

Hike leader Guy Fortin points out information posted on the land trust property and invasive species.

The hikers were able to see three very different karst features. One is available for any trail hiker to see, a small, rocky slip in the earth, right next to the trail – it might have been a Hobbit’s mail slot. The other two Earth fissures were off the beaten path, which hikers normally should not leave, but Fortin pointed out that the group was lucky to have the dedicated land trust volunteers such as Freyman and Hollingshead who knew where the features were and could share exclusive viewings with this group.

The final karst feature was, as one of the hiker’s noted, large enough to serve as a bear den.

Fortin described the fissures as “an avenue to the earth.”

Two of the hikers knew exactly what he meant.

At the first and smallest karst feature, Dan and Margie Andrae identified themselves as victims of the September well tainting incident when a subcontractor for Haberli Farms spread liquid manure over a sinkhole and subsequently contaminated 12 wells that made 16 people sick and killed one beloved dog.

Since then the Andraes have become spokespeople for what happened and what is going on with groundwater in Door County. You can see them at meetings and gatherings throughout the county, and always now they manage to bring up what happened to them and their neighbors last fall and what they have learned and continue to learn since then.

In essence, their situation represents the worst of this karst topography. A sloppy application of liquid cow manure last September got the attention of all kinds of people – the county, the state, the people who were poisoned, the farming community, the insurance industry. Let’s just say that September manure incident had far-reaching effects, which became exponentially more complex with the January Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that determined cow manure stopped being a nutrient and became a pollutant once it entered the water table.

Hiker Brenda Wolfe hangs on to a tree to peer down a deep karst feature.

Now, on this hike, people could see the fragile balance of the Door County ecosystem. All of this added up to a revelation about the nature of this pockmarked karst topography. The first of those off-the-path holes was large enough for one of the hikers to ask why these features are not marked. Fortin said sinkholes are all over Door County, leaving everyone wondering why we don’t hear of animals and people falling into them.

As the group entered the thickest part of forested land, the sun peeked out of the prevalent cloudbank, which seemed to cause the group to stop and discuss the trees that surrounded them.

The trail they walked on was compacted with Oak and Maple leaves, but the woods did not look like either of those trees.

Guide Sarah Freyman helped the hikers identify the trees.

“Beech trees look like elephant legs,” she said as everyone surveyed the abundantly elephant-legged forest. “Hemlock has short needles and tiny cones.”

She walked up to a thin tree and ran her hand down its shaggy trunk. “Ironwood,” she said, “with bark that looks like it needs to be ironed down. That’s Roy Lukes’ way of remembering it.”

At one point the group had to deviate from the path because a tree had fallen across the path.

That gave Fortin the opportunity to talk about work parties.

“Some people think you shouldn’t have obstructions. Something like this lands on the trail, we’ll get a phone call,” he said. “These properties don’t maintain themselves.”

But workers are also needed for removal of invasive species.

Fortin told the group the Door County Land Trust has Tuesday morning work parties, mostly for the removal of invasive species.

“It’s not fully a social event, but it is a social time. Everybody’s welcome,” he said.

For more information on the Door County Land Trust, public hikes and work parties, visit doorcountylandtrust.org.