Lost and found at Brad’s Pit

We got a little lost yesterday, and found our way to Brad’s Pit.

We followed Google Maps into Tommy Thompson State Park Sunday morning with a very loose plan of hiking and then hitting any spot neither of us had ever been.

We passed a Booyah Festival setting up in Crivitz and our mouths immediately started watering.

“So we’ll hike the Forest Park Trail and then have some Booyah?”

“Perfect.”

If only….

If only either one of us would have taken the cartography class offered by Marquette University in 1985.

If only we’d realized the hash tags we were following on our printed map actually marked the edge of the park and not, as we thought, the Forest Park Trail.

If only we had an Internet signal at any point in our hike.

Alas, we never found our way back to the Booyah Festival.

But we did stumble on to a cool little place on White Potato Lake called Brad’s Pitt that offered wifi and a path home.

And then we made our way to Klondike, where we met Mandy, a bartender/historian/emt/search and rescue diver/mom extraordinaire who told us so many stories about that cool little town it will require another post.

As we salute all the proud laborers today who built this amazing country, I’m so glad we had the chance to stumble into a few slices of northern Wisconsin’s particular variety of hard working folks who had the wit and the drive to build their own stake in the American dream.

Clearly overconfident in our abilities to read a map, we headed off to explore Tommy Thompson State Park with no real plans at all (except to reward ourselves with booyah from a festival we passed on the way into the park.)
Ever see this message pop up on your Google Maps as you try to figure out where you are and how you’re going to get where you want to go? Me either.
Fortunately we were lost in a beautiful place.
That included this cool birch tree forest.
And this pretty lake with a kayaker who posed, still as a statue.
Eventually, we found the cleverly named Brad’s Pit on White Potato Lake, which, happily had wifi that helped point us in the right direction.

One thought on “Lost and found at Brad’s Pit

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.