History of the Ice Age Trail

During the 1920s, increasing numbers of Milwaukee residents began to explore the Kettle Moraine of southeastern Wisconsin. To satisfy the growing demand for places to recreate, the Milwaukee Chapter of the Izaak Walton League (MCIWL) purchased 850 acres of land near Campbellsport in 1926. Volunteers quickly began work to open footpaths on the property. Proposals for public acquisition of additional lands ensued. In 1937, the State of Wisconsin established the Kettle Moraine State Forest.

During the 1950s, MCIWL leader Ray Zillmer envisioned the Kettle Moraine State Forest forming the nucleus for a longer linear park that would be used "by millions more people than use the more remote national parks". He pictured a trail leading through the Kettle Moraine and continuing westward for several hundred miles along the terminal moraine left by the most recent continental glaciation.

In 1958, Zillmer founded the Ice Age Park and Trail Foundation (IAPTF) [exit DNR] to begin efforts to establish a national park in Wisconsin that would encompass this route. Bills were introduced in Congress to create an Ice Age National Park, but just as the effort to create this new type of park was gaining momentum, Zillmer died in 1960.

The following year, the National Park Service (NPS) concluded that, while many of the unique glacial features of Wisconsin warranted national attention, a park hundreds of miles in length would be too difficult for the federal government to administer.

State of Wisconsin and NPS officials went back to the drawing board. They came up with an affiliated area of the National Park System composed of nine separate units around Wisconsin, which Congress and the President authorized in 1964 as the Ice Age National Scientific Reserve.

In the early 1970s, following the goal of the late Ray Zillmer, volunteers began to expand the old Glacial Hiking Trail in the Northern Kettle Moraine State Forest into Wisconsin’s thousand-mile Ice Age Trail. Some of the new trail segments were opened on private land after volunteers received handshake agreements with the landowners, while others were built on public lands such as state parks and the Chequamegon National Forest.

Volunteer efforts finally paid-off in 1980 when Congress and the President established the Ice Age Trail as a National Scenic Trail—one of only eight such trails in the Nation.

The Ice Age Park and Trail Foundation purchased its first properties for the trail in 1986 and the next year the trail received the second designation of state scenic trail by the Wisconsin Legislature and governor. Land acquisition to permanently protect the trail has been increasing ever since. —Text by Andrew Hanson

Land acquisition for the Ice Age Trail has been aided by state funding from the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program since 1990 and federal funding from the Land and Water Conservation Fund Program [exit DNR] since 2000.

For more information, ask Wisconsin State Parks, (608) 266-2181.