Exploring Our State Parks: Rib Mountain

Rick and Shannon went hiking at Rib Mountain earlier this year and said I should hike it with them sometime. After giving them some dates, we made arrangements to go hiking today but earlier in the week the weather didn't look favorable. However, the rain came over night and it wasn't going to be terribly hot.

Rib Mountain is also Ski Area in Wausau. I have heard that Rib Mountain is scary and not my kind of ski hill. Once we got to the parking lot for hiking and I got to see part of the ski hill, I decided I will never ski Rib Mountain... sure I was seeing the black diamonds and terrain trails but still not my cup of tea. I've skied the double black diamond at Ski Brule which is technically a terrain trail but I think that is only because it goes through the woods. These trails at Rib Mountain are just evil looking.

Once Rick and I were done checking out the ski trail, Shannon and I found a narrow trail near the ski hills. However it was too narrow and rocky for anyone but me to like so we headed down the road and found a wider, groomed trail.

I found an little trail that headed up to some rocks. I scrambled up the rocks trying to get some pictures. I like scrambling among rocks. I probably don't want to scramble among rocks all day but for a little bit was fun. Going up was fine... going down took a bit of talent to make sure I didn't crash and burn.

After I was done scrambling around on rocks, we continued exploring the trail. There were some hills but there weren't so bad going down them. At one point there was an emu sighting... until we realized we are in Wisconsin there are no emus in the wild. The emu turned out to be a stump.

We continued down the trail for about 30 minutes before turning around. The way back was quite strenuous since we had to go up all those nice hills we went down. Some of them were pretty steep. It was a good workout though.

It was a beautiful day for a hike. Because we got to Rib Mountain around lunch time, we had the trail to ourselves. I'm sure if we got there after lunch, it would have been busier since there were more people heading to the trails as we were leaving.

I would love to go back and climb the look out tower and explore more trails some day. Maybe one of these years, I will get my own state park sticker and I can explore all these parks on my own. Hopefully I will get a chance to explore another park this year.