I did a recon ride on Saturday, and the report is somewhat mixed. In Madison, the trails are in fine shape. The paved section of the Badger had been plowed and had just a light dusting of snow on its surface. As expected, the paved section of the Military Ridge between PD and Verona has seen zero maintenance, but has a pretty decent fat bike track between PD and Quarry Ridge. The rest (just under 2 miles) might be hike-a-bike on Saturday. My guess would be that the ATV sections of the route—the Badger between Monticello and Monroe and the entire Cheese Trail—have been seeing ATV traffic and will be pretty passable.
The real wildcards are the limestone sections of the Badger and Military Ridge that have not been open to snowmobile traffic yet this season. Rutted with footprints? Nicely groomed by bandit snowmobilers? Deep, mushy powder? Thawed and refrozen?
No. Idea.
So, the current strategy will be to ride south and see what happens. If we don't make it to Monroe by, say, 10 a.m., we can always bag and call good what we did manage to ride. Even that may be optimistic…who knows?
At least it looks like the forecast has done a complete about-face, and we might be looking at almost ideal conditions. We'll see whether this holds.
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