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72 | Wolf River country • S p r i n g
• Saturday Night Prime Rib
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Tue: 4pm-Close / Wed-Sun 11am-Close / Closed Monday Grill Open Daily Until 10pm / Specials Served Until 9pm
• Friday Fish Fry
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Home of the Incredible Metz Chimichanga!
• Taco Tuesday
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Charming, Smoke Free Dining Room!
Publisher’s note: Including Navarino’s 15,000 acres, there are more than 30,000 acres of public wildlife areas within Wolf River Country. As noted, these areas do not take priority when it comes to available funds for improvements. Whether intended to do so, this helps keep these areas “wild,’ but it also can make them difficult to find. Visit www.wolfrivercountry.com and click on WRC Wildlife Areas to find detailed maps of each wildlife area in Wolf River Country. Have fun exploring!
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4 Miles Southwest of Fremont 9686 County Road HH
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(920) 446.3414
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chuckling a little. Navarino does have extensive recreational trails and a few other places have roads that follow old levees or have been built to get timber out. Hunting is the main reason these areas exist, but other recreational use is encouraged. Brockman-Medaras
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the areas they have to manage. The trails we had found were, as I suspected, “social trails” made by human feet rather than DNR plan. Hunters probably left the surveyor-tape blazes to find their way to a specific place or to not get lost. “Technically, it’s littering,” she said,
recommended that people using the areas for other recreation during any hunting season should wear blaze orange. She reminded me that bicycles are not allowed on state land, unless it has a designated bike trail. ATVs are allowed only for disabled hunters. Snowmobiles are only permitted on designated trails managed by clubs; a few cross corners of these lands. “Each of these areas is unique,” she said. Each has something a little different to offer. On the morning after the first accumulating snowfall, I ventured alone to the Lower Wolf River Bottoms, La Sage Unit. At 500 acres, it is one of the smaller local areas, but it is bordered on the east by the Wolf River and has in its small area a mix of grassland, marsh and forest. Some of the history of the Wolf River is laid out in the old oxbow lakes and dry channels that curve through the bottomland. The woods are open and easy to walk through without trails. On this bright day trees cast shadows across the ice of the old oxbows. In one place a tiny creek runs under a road and swiftly toward the Wolf River. According to the DNR Web site, “The primary purpose of state wildlife areas as stated in the statute is to ‘provide areas in which any citizen may hunt, trap or fish.’” So you do have places that you have paid for to hunt and fish––and also to roam and watch and feel the natural heart of Wolf River Country.
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At 15,000 acres, Navarino is the largest wildlife area in Wolf River Country.