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| The Holy Hill segment of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail heads through a sugar maple forest below the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary. |
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| Ice Age National Scenic Trail-Holy Hill segment topo map. Click for larger version. |
The out-and-back trail runs 2.6-miles round trip in southeastern Wisconsin. It sits beneath the majestic Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary.
To reach the trailhead, from Hartford take Wis. Hwy. 83 south. Turn left/east onto Wis. Hwy. 167 (aka Holy Hill Road). In about 2.5 miles, go right/south on Stationway Road. After about 0.1 miles, look for the parking lot along the road’s left/east side. There’s a small clearing with picnic tables there, and the trail runs southeast from the lot.
Kettle moraine
The first stretch of the trail is fairly level as heading through a woods dominated by sugar maples. Aspen with its golden leaves and the evergreen white pine and white spruce dot the forest, making a perfect accent to the sugar maples’ yellow, orange and red crowns.
The woods sits in the middle of the kettle moraine region, a series of deep glacial depressions stretching across this part of Wisconsin. During the last ice age, two glacial lobes met here, leaving a large amount of debris between them. As the glaciers retreated, an outwash plain of meltwater formed atop the debris with the ice trapped beneath it. As the buried ice melted, the outwash plain collapsed, leaving a bumpy terrain of small knolls and mounds. Sometimes a conical hill of glacial sediment and debris – called a kame – was left behind.
The Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians, at Holy Hill is built on one such kame that rises in the east above the forest. Constructed in the late 1920s using a neo-Romanesque design, the basilica’s 192-foot high twin towers can be seen from several surrounding counties.
During autumn, the sugar maples’ colorful leaves often block any view of the basilica from the trail. The sugar maple usually grows between 80-115 feet high, though some have been known to reach 148 feet.
Sugar maple leaves
Despite the trees, your certain to hear the basilica’s bells tolling. Between their ringing, songbirds provide a melodic soundtrack punctuated with the staccato of scampering squirrels.
It’s a wonderful accompaniment to the crescendo of colors. The sugar maple is among the few plants whose leaves turn different colors from tree to tree.
Sugar maples contain three different pigments in their leaves. Each autumn when trees stop making food from chlorophyll, the leaves’ greenness disappears and those pigments stand out. Which pigment appears depends on how much sunlight they receive and genetics.
If a sugar maple is in the shade, it’ll turn yellow. If it’s in the full sun, expect red. The proportion of sun of shade, as well as the leaves’ DNA, affects how they change throughout the day from yellow to red to orange. Usually the top of the tree and its sides turn red first with the inlaid portion of the tree yellow.
Visiting the basilica
About 0.8 miles in, the trail begins climbing a knoll until reaching about 1220 feet elevation. It then descends quickly.
Sugar maples aren’t just loved for their fantastic leaf display. In spring, their sap is used to make a sweet syrup that most of us enjoy on pancakes, waffles and French toast. This is done by placing a tap into a hole drilled just past the tree’s bark. The sap is collected in buckets or through tubes sent to a large tank. It’s then boiled so the water evaporates, leaving syrup behind. About 40 gallons of sap must be boiled to produce a mere gallon of pure maple syrup.
At 1.3 miles, the trail reaches Donegal Road. This marks a good turnback point. If looking to extend your walk, the Ice Age Trail does continue onward by heading east along the roadside before darting south along Emerald Drive and into the Kettle Moraine State Forest’s Loew Lake Unit.
After the hike, drive up to the basilica, where from its spires at more than 1350 feet elevation, you can enjoy panoramic views of the surrounding woods (It’s 178 steps to the top!) and on a clear day the downtown Milwaukee skyline about 30 miles away. To reach it, from the trail’s parking lot take Stationway Drive right/north then at Hwy. 167 go left/west. Turn left/south onto Carmel Road. More than 500,000 people from all over the world annually visit the basilica.
