Leaving Wyalusing and heading home, a few of us decided to take an alternate route called the Wisconsin River Overland Tour, or WROT for short. It was shared to us by a TacomaWorld forum member but was un-verified by anyone in our group, and there isn’t much info about it online. A couple of the guys drove part of it on the outbound trip on Friday but not the entire distance, and we figured it was worth a closer look. [Because I don’t trust the other link not to disappear, here is the GPX file so you don’t have to go looking for it. DISCLAIMER: I take no responsibility if you take this route, do your own research.]
Part One
Not many photos from the first section, I was in the rear of the pack with Carlos leading and Dean in the middle. Mostly I just enjoyed the journey. After getting off the highway this section does have quite a few gravel roads winding near the Wisconsin river and up through farmlands, woodlands, and bluffs with fairly large elevation changes for the region.We were seeing intermittent snow flurries and in one or two places more heavy and consistent snow. We stopped for fuel in Boscobel and at that point we split – the other two heading more northwards towards Milwaukee on the highways. I decided to continue onwards since I didn’t have anything else to do today.
Part Two
After Boscobel the trail is mostly on the roadways and winds through lower elevation areas bordering along the southern Wisconsin River. Only small sections of gravel existed, and most of those were directly along the river in public land areas. River levels are very high right now so I couldn’t drive completely to each terminus, but it was close enough to get the idea.
Found a few closed gates along the way but nothing that required a huge amount of back-tracking.
Again, I was mostly concerned with enjoying the route and exploring new areas so I didn’t take a huge number of photos. Most of them are just gratuitous photos of my truck. If you like that sort of thing you are in luck.
Part Three
After reaching Spring Green and crossing to the north side of the river, the snow picked up and was now a steady storm. I’m calling this part three because of the change in terrain and weather making it different on today’s adventure. Some areas still had green grass visible but visibilty was diminishing to less than a mile.
Just minutes up the road the snow blankets all vegitation. Luckily, thanks to the warm temperatures on Friday & Saturday, the roads were melting everything nicely and traction was not affected.
More truck photos if you like that sort of thing. This was up in the hills near Baraboo where the snow accumulated heavily. I would finish today’s journey at Baxter’s Hollow as the sunlight ran out – will share more on that in the next post.
Video
Much of the video I took wasn’t really anything special, however I did share a short clip with our Tacoma group from Ranch Road near Plain, Wisconsin. The group who explored on Friday said this one was a bit gnarly, even when the conditions were dry, sunny, and warm. Today was a completely different story – cold, snowy, and very sloppy. Normally I wouldn’t try something this silly on my own but it felt solid underneath and there are no extreme obstacles on the short stretch. At the 0:57 mark you can see how the deep ruts catch my tires and kick out the rear end – a bit of a butt-pucker situation to be sure but I didn’t really lose traction so much as just taking a weird line defined by existing obstacles.
GPS Driving Data
Here is the GPS recording of the route from Wyalusing to where we split up in Boscobel. We missed some small connecting sections since we had to loop around a few times. As you can see by the pace, we were taking our time and enjoying the drive.
Part two was from Boscobel all the way until Baxter’s Hollow in the Dells area. Overall this was a much slower pace, but on the paved sections it was easy to make good time. At the very end I was racing the final light of the day which helped speed things along. It was still 7.5 hours of driving just for fun and another 2 hours not shown here to get home. I was pretty tired but happy to have completed the trip. If you intend to do the full WROT be aware that it includes driving around inside the Sauk Prairie Recreation Area just east of where I finished. Since I already explored there in the past I skipped it today as it is all paved and (to me) quite boring.
Hey, I recognize these pics! Just stumbled on your blog here. It’s Dean (@rubbersidedown) from the TW group. Nice work and great documentation. I really need to get to know Gaia better and do more mapping of adventures.
Hey Dean, wow crazy you found my site at random but thanks for the kind words! Gaia just takes a bit of fiddling around and you’ll get it but feel free to message me on TW if you have questions or just ask the group, lots of people use it. We can talk at Bearpaw camp this weekend too, hope to see you there!