Treading New Trail

Retiring in 2007 after 30 years in the Army, Nash moved back home to the area. He and his wife Marilynn live outside Weyerhaeuser, just a few miles from Murphy Flowage campground where the trail volunteers were gathering. Shortly after he moved back, he was driving by that same campground and saw a sign for an Ice Age Trail event. Intrigued, he asked around, learning it was the last day of a volunteer event run by the Ice Age Trail Alliance, the nonprofit dedicated to conserving, creating, maintaining, and promoting the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in partnership with the National Park Service. He learned that the Alliance would have another trail event there the next year. He signed up for that next year, attended the multiday trail building event, and was hooked.

That was 16 years ago. Since then, Nash has participated in five or six multi-day Ice Age Trail work events each year all across Wisconsin. He’s been trained as a volunteer crew leader and become a leader of his local chapter of the trail. Fred and Marilynn Nash are “thousand milers,” having hiked the entire trail. Marilynn Nash served on the Ice Age Trail Alliance’s Board of Directors for six years. They’re such active volunteers, the couple won the Alliance’s Spirit Stick award in 2024, the highest honor for volunteers.

“I feel that as long as I’m able to do it, I should,” Nash says of the volunteer trail building. “What really drew me in a big way was the camaraderie – it was one of the things that I missed the most when I retired from the military. These trail crew events, it gives a piece of that camaraderie. It doesn’t fill the void, but it’s similar to it, it helps replace it. I was just happy with the idea of helping for the future.”

Nash is doing more than just helping – in dreaming up the trail reroute, he’s designing a future path that will transform this section of trail for generations of hikers to come. As a volunteer, he’s helping to drive the future of the park.

'The Alliance is a Powerhouse'

Nash is one of many thousands of dedicated volunteers that commit their time, energy, and sweat to the Ice Age Trail. They’re coordinated through the Ice Age Trail Alliance, which hosts a variety of trail events each year in partnership with NPS where volunteers spend multiple days working together to improve the trail. Combined, some 2,000 volunteers contribute more than 100,000 hours of service to the trail every year.

“People have ownership in their area, their space, the whole trail,” says Luke Kloberdanz, executive director and CEO of the Ice Age Trail Alliance. “They own it. There’s such blatant pride in the state and things that are wholly theirs in Wisconsin: cheese, the Green Bay Packers, and the Ice Age Trail. It speaks to how we have so many volunteer hours – people just feel so invested in this space and sharing it with everyone.”

The Ice Age Trail Alliance is the glue that holds the volunteer events together, the body that coordinates all trail and maintenance activities as well as outreach and educational programming along the statewide trail. The Alliance works collaboratively with NPS, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and local governments, businesses, and landowners to build, maintain, and support the trail.

The Alliance has leveraged support from NPF for volunteer events like building the Dreamer Route, though that’s just the tip of the iceberg. NPF and the Alliance’s ties run deep, enabling the Alliance to grow and expand its impact on the trail.

More than a dozen NPF grants over the last five years have enabled the Alliance to increase volunteer and staff capacity, advance stakeholder engagement and collaborative decision-making, and develop a strategic plan.

Since 2020, NPF grants have also enabled the Alliance to purchase 80 acres of glacially significant land along Mueller Lake in the Northwoods and transfer that land to NPS to add to the trail; bolstered the Alliance’s volunteer chapters and trail crew events; supported the Alliance to work with the Ho-Chunk Nation on a podcast series highlighting Indigenous storytelling on the trail; and engaged a WisCorps youth crew to work on trail building, maintenance, and habitat restoration. And the list goes on. The partnership has supported the Alliance in developing from a small grassroots organization to a renowned partner group.

“It’s been game-changing for us all around,” Kloberdanz says of NPF’s support. “There’s not a part of the organization that NPF has not only supported when it was in its infant stages, but then also come back and challenged us to do more. Then we do more, and we see that growth ripple out… The impact of NPF has hit all corners of the organization and has really encouraged us to do more.”

For example, Kloberdanz started at the Alliance in 2013 with a goal to formally build out an outdoor education program he started on the trail back when he was teaching elementary students. A former trail thru-hiker, he piloted a summer program for young students and found it was more successful than solely in-classroom time. He dove fully into trail-based education, and after a few years of successful programming and several Open OutDoors for Kids grants from NPF to support that work, NPF challenged and helped fund the Alliance to get 10,000 fourth grade students out hiking through the program, its highest amount at the time.

The Alliance grew, stretched, and made it happen, Kloberdanz says. Today, as part of that program, the Ice Age Trail is one of the top distributors of Every Kid Outdoors passes to fourth graders among national parks nationwide.(The Every Kid Outdoors pass provides fourth graders and their families free access to federally managed public lands, waters, and shores, including national parks, for an entire year.)

Ice Age Trail Superintendent Eric Gabriel works closely with Alliance staff on priority projects and volunteer work along the trail. Gabriel’s NPS team has five to six full-time staff, mostly focused on administration, volunteer coordination, planning and compliance, and working with the Alliance. In the big nature parks out west where Gabriel worked previously, NPS employs hundreds of staff to do every aspect of operations and maintenance. Here, it’s volunteers who get much of the boots on the ground work done. The Alliance’s growth, then, has meant the trail’s growth through volunteer hours, educational programming, community engagement, and land acquisitions.

“The Alliance is a powerhouse,” Gabriel says.

Both the Alliance and trail have experienced remarkable growth in recent years. In 2013, there were eight staff members at the Alliance. In 2024, there were 27. Membership has more than tripled. It took 20 years to get to 200 “thousand milers” having hiked the Ice Age Trail; it then took two years to get to the next 200. When Kloberdanz thru-hiked the trail in 2003, he was one of only two people to do so that year. In 2023, 14 people completed thru-hikes, and nearly 100 more finished section hiking the complete trail, according to records of hikers who register their completion with the Alliance.

All that growth has translated into more volunteer events, more supporters, more hikers, more community engagement, and more innovative programming. NPF’s ongoing and multi-layered support and close relationship with the Alliance has served as a catalyst for its growing impact along the trail and in the trail’s diverse surrounding communities (when complete, the trail will connect with over 140 Wisconsin communities, and the Alliance has partnerships with 24, which are officially designated Ice Age Trail Communities).

The Hands that Shape the Trail

Nash, the longtime volunteer, spent part of a fall volunteer day with Gabriel, the NPS superintendent, checking out some highlights of the future Dreamer Route, which is expected to be complete within five years, following two to three trail crew events annually.

“The Ice Age Trail, in theory, was to highlight features of the last glaciation, and here you have these great features, and they’re not on the Ice Age Trail [yet],” Nash says while overlooking a large talus field that the trail reroute will soon pass right by.

The field of shattered rocks – also called a false felsenmeer – was created from glacial outwash during the last Ice Age. The current trail route largely follows a “troad” (trail road), missing the landscape diversity and impressive features that the new reroute will spotlight.

A few miles away, trail crews of volunteers are working step by step to extend the trail away from the road and toward these glacial features. Before the project started, Alliance staff tied colored ribbons around tree trunks and branches to mark the future trail route through the lush forest. That helped chainsaw crews identify where to cut tree branches out of the way, followed by trail clearing and tread crews that move out roots and rocks and smooth out a walking path.

Volunteers proudly show before and after pictures – an inaccessible forest in the morning, and by the afternoon, a new trail running through it. It’s hard physical labor, but the crews have plenty of fun. As Nash highlighted, the camaraderie is what keeps him coming back.

And there are so many volunteers like Nash. There’s Alice Weinert, who lives in Chicago and commutes out to trail events in Wisconsin several times a year. She’s been organizing a Chicago group of Ice Age Trail enthusiasts to do group hikes together on the trail and go to volunteer events. There’s Wendell Holl, who’s focused on stonework and become a go-to consultant for Alliance staff in scoping out new projects and a leader of crews doing stonework on the trail. He’s patiently and kindly taught the next generation how to lay stone staircases and retaining walls to protect both the trail and hikers.

There’s Fred Stadler, a volunteer and Alliance board member who started out as a hiker – first casually, as a form of therapy, and ultimately as a “thousand-miler,” hiking the whole trail, section by section, over two years – and then became a volunteer.

“We really have a treasure here,” Stadler says of the Ice Age Trail. Volunteering has given him a sense of engagement and involvement. He’s found joy in being outdoors working together on a project that’s bigger than any one person can achieve alone.

“It’s so easy to get down on things. You look at the news, the world news, the national news, and it’s depressing. And here, there are active, optimistic people looking to do things, not self-serving, but doing something for other people. That is very uplifting,” Stadler says. “You can’t help but feel better about your fellow citizens when you’re involved with people like this. So I go home happy every time.”

When he hikes the trail, he feels that same connection and optimism.

A Team Effort

The community component is paramount. Volunteers spend several days together at these trail events – they camp together, eat group meals together, do dishes together, and work on trail crews together. The energy is electric and camaraderie apparent. Over beers and takeout pizza one night and cheesy ham potatoes and bread pudding the next, volunteers chat about their days, what they accomplished on the trail, and what work is left to be done. They talk about their interests, their hometowns, their families. Strangers become friends, friends get new nicknames, and the connection to the trail and the Alliance grows stronger.

“I’ve been to a lot of different places where there’s a big sense of community, and this is one of my favorites,” says Liv Waubanascum, a leader of the WisCorps youth crew that spent three weeks on the Ice Age Trail prior to the volunteer event, working on a boardwalk on the existing trail and clearing corridor along the new trail segment. “I’ve felt so welcomed here. The people are so kind, and they all care so much. It’s just gorgeous people doing gorgeous work.”

Waubanascum, co-leader Gabriella Muller, and their three crew members are spending seven months on priority trail and habitat restoration projects across Wisconsin and Michigan. They’ve found working with the Ice Age Trail volunteers at the long weekend event to be a highlight, because they’re treated as family.

“It’s a really nice sense of community that we’ve seen here. It seems like there’s such a strong foundation of really passionate volunteers and it’s just so comforting to be integrated into this community,” Muller says.

The strong community enables the hard work. Volunteers, banding together for days at a time to clear forest, pull roots, level ground, and forge new trail, are laying the literal groundwork for the future of the Ice Age Trail.

“This is an unbelievable project. We haven’t really in the past taken on chunks of trail that are this big – and this is a 19-mile chunk,” says Gabriel. It’s absolutely amazing to see the commitment and passion that the Ice Age Trail Alliance puts into this, the volunteers put into this, my staff and I put into this, and even way beyond that, the communities put into this.”

The Ice Age Trail is unique among long distance trails, Gabriel says. He often runs into families hiking parts of the trail near their homes, thru hikers going the whole distance, and individuals spending years exploring different sections of trail. No matter their time and distance on the trail, they all feel like they’ve experienced the Ice Age Trail.

“The pride and ownership that folks take in the Ice Age Trail is absolutely impressive,” Gabriel says. “It’s this organic commitment to this project that’s really something.”

For some, that organic commitment extends to dreaming and then building a new future for the trail.

Nash continues to volunteer, to build and maintain trail and lead crews, both in his community and across the state. He looks forward to the day he can walk on the rerouted trail, following yellow blazes past his favorite glacial features, now official parts of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, all made possible by his dream, and the commitment and support of many.