A quiet escape
State’s highest point offers a remote reprieve
Timm’s Hill isn’t close to anything. That makes it the perfect place to get away from everything.
❚ The hill in Price County is worth visiting for bragging rights of having been to Wisconsin’s highest point. It’s worth staying for the quiet natural surroundings.
❚ It’s the kind of place you don’t need to bother taking the cellphones away from the kids because they don’t work here.
❚ There are no waterslides, fudge shops or trolley tours. Jumping off the pier or chugging along in the paddleboat is the daytime pastime, not video games or Netflix.
❚ And there is the hill, surrounded by quiet little glacial lakes lined with cedars and oxeye daisies. And miles of low-traffic trails for exploring it all.
Where farmland meets Northwoods
My random dart throwing this week took me to the small town of Chelsea, about 20 miles south of Timm’s Hill. A great name for a town, but the unincorporated community didn’t offer much more than that for a visitor, so I continued north.
This part of the state, at the border of Taylor and Price counties, is kind of like brackish water, in land form. The farmlands of central Wisconsin mix with the evergreens and hardwoods of the Northwoods. Pine plantations stand sentinel along two-lane roads where cows graze next to one-room churches. Rustic gravel roads, including Wisconsin’s first
Rustic Road, link county highways.
In the middle of it all stands Timm’s Hill, Wisconsin’s highest natural point at 1,951.5 feet. The area has a higher elevation overall, so the hill doesn’t feel particularly large. Rib Mountain, about 60 miles southeast, feels higher as it rises 670 feet above the surrounding terrain.
But the little-big hill still provides terrific views of the surrounding tree-covered landscape, beautiful in the summer and undoubtedly even better in the fall. The hill is in a county park of the same name, with looping hiking and horse trails that are popular
with snowshoers and skiers in the winter. Among them are the 10-mile Timm’s Hill National Trail that connects with the Ice Age Trail to the south.
At the base of the hill stands a lovely café, Hill of Beans, and High Point Village, cabins available for rent from the café owners, Kathy and Lyle Blomberg.
The village sits on Bass Lake at the base of the hill, with many cabins — including Northern Hills, the one I stayed in — providing views of the small lake and the hill to the northwest, its observation tower poking out from the treetops.
Over an omelet the size of a dinner plate, I chatted with Kathy about the land that she and her husband bought in 1991 to build cabins on. In addition to the private cabins, the couple have an events space that’s popular for weddings, reunions and other gatherings.
The cozy rustic cabins each have kitchens, living rooms and can sleep from four to seven. Some have views of the lake and fire pits for a classic Northwoods night under the stars.
It’s the type of spot you go to to truly unplug and relax. Neither my cellphone nor my mobile hot spot, from different cellular providers, worked. Entries in the guest book in my cabin spoke of women’s weekends, family getaways and even a marriage proposal.
Hiking trails galore
I had hoped to spend my only full day in the area hiking all of the Timm’s Hill Trail. Lyle told me he helped build the 10mile trail, with the Rib Lake Ski Club helping on the southern end.
He told me that outside the county park, the trail travels through private land, sometimes on handshake agreements that could dissolve if the land passed to new owners in the future.
But for now the trail remains open for hiking and mountain biking in the summer and skiing and snowshoeing in the winter.
The wide trail is a relatively easy hike, but muggy temperatures shortened my trek to about five miles out and back from the northern terminus at Timm’s Hill. There is some elevation change, including on the “Highway to Heaven,” a segment of the trail that features a handful of steep hills, but the trail wasn’t as hummocky as some segments of the Ice Age Trail, like those in the Kettle Moraine.
At the southern terminus in the Rusch Preserve near Rib Lake, the trail connects with the Rib Lake segment of the Ice Age Trail. The Timm’s Hill trail is an official side trail of the national scenic trail.
The southern 2 miles of the trail are closed from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31, and the entire trail is closed during gun deer hunting season. Horses are allowed May 1 to Nov. 15, and dogs are allowed as long as they’re leashed.
I saw evidence of horses at regular intervals along the trail, but I didn’t see any of the actual animals and ran into only two other people during more than two hours of hiking.
The Blombergs had told me the area is especially popular for snowshoeing in the winter, and snowshoe signs on trail markers were evidence of that.
Sculpture side trip
While the heat and bugs chased me off the trail earlier than I had planned, it left the afternoon to head north to another major attraction in this part of the state: Wisconsin Concrete Park.
The park on Highway 13 south of Phillips protects the concrete sculptures of Fred Smith. At the age of 65 in 1948, the retired lumberjack and self-taught artist began creating the sculptures outside his home and tavern. Over the next 16 years he would create more than 230 works using concrete and other odds and ends, mostly glass bottles. The garden of sculptures has everything from a woman milking a cow and a team of Clydesdales being driven by a dog to Paul Bunyan and Abraham Lincoln. Smith first used glass in his sculptures to help repel rain, according to an informational sign in the park. But he liked how the light danced off the glass, and it became a signature of his work.
“I just like it and could get it for nothing,” he said, according to the sign. “I liked it together. Otherwise, your work is too dead. The mirror shines.”
Although he couldn’t read or write, Smith dictated thoughts on some of the sculptures to a typist and placed signs around the site. Those signs have been re-created and still stand today, offering insight into the artist’s mind:
“Here shows Chiann, a big beer drinker,” one sign reads near a sculpture of a man drinking a beer. “He has been a cowboy in seventeen different states. He had been a drinker all the while he was a cowboy. He found the famous Rhinelander Export Beer, which is the finest beer that he ever drank in his life.”
Beer bottles are a common element in many of his sculptures, and Smith owned a tavern next door that is now privately owned.
Smith passed away at age 89 in 1976, and the Kohler Foundation purchased the park and its sculptures the following year. In 1987 the foundation deeded the property to Price County, which now maintains the grounds in cooperation with the Friends of Fred Smith. The park is on the National Register of Historic Places.
With a couple hours of daylight left, I headed back south to bookend my day with a dose of nature at the Mondeaux Dam.
The recreation area in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest surrounds a flowage lake created by a dam on the Mondeaux River. There’s a beach, an accessible fishing pier, a few campgrounds and a segment of the Ice Age Trail.
The area also has a historic lodge built by the Civilian Conservation Corp that is currently closed as it undergoes renovations.
Like most of the other spots I’d explored in the area, I had the area mostly to myself, aside from a father and son who played along the beach and a couple with a canoe who arrived as I left.
With my phone still giving me the no service sign, I sat at a picnic table along the lake and took in the quiet, classic Wisconsin scene of a calm lake surrounded by undeveloped shoreline. It was calming to be away from the ding of emails and the traffic of city life.
Getting away from everything: That’s the high point of any trip.
If you go: Cabins at High Point Village are available for rent year-round and can sleep from four to seven people, depending on the cabin. Call (715) 7675287 or see highpointvillage.com.
The Hill of Beans is open for breakfast and lunch from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday and dinner from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday. There is also a gift shop adjacent to the cafe.
The gate to Timm’s Hill County Park is open from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily, May through October. From the parking area near the top of the hill, it’s a 300yard walk up to the observation tower. The park has a boat launch, a small swimming area, a fishing pier and miles of looping trails for hiking and horseback riding. Leashed pets are allowed on the trails but not at the swimming area.
Timm’s Hill is at W3206 County Road RR, Ogema, about 250 miles northwest of Milwaukee. It’s about 5 miles east of Ogema, 14 miles north of Rib Lake and 24 miles west of Tomahawk.