Wilderness Walk

Hayward built its identity over the last century as a Northwoods vacation town, drawing families north to its lakes and forests summer after summer. Around that draw grew a collection of homey attractions meant to fill the days of a lake vacation, and a walk-through wildlife park like Wilderness Walk fits squarely in that tradition of wholesome, kid-friendly fun.

These are the sorts of stops that live long in family memory, remembered not for spectacle but for a pleasant hour on a summer afternoon. In an age of big-budget theme parks, a shaded trail past native animals in a pine forest keeps alive an older, gentler idea of the family outing, one rooted in the particular rhythms of a Northwoods summer.

The country around Hayward is classic Wisconsin Northwoods, a rolling forest of pine, spruce, birch, and aspen scattered with hundreds of lakes and laced with rivers and streams. It is a landscape shaped by the glaciers and by more than a century of logging and regrowth, and today it is prized for fishing, paddling, and quiet time in the woods.

This is country long connected to the Ojibwe, and the nearby Lac Courte Oreilles community is part of the living Anishinaabe presence in this region, whose relationship to these lakes and forests reaches back generations. The forest that surrounds Wilderness Walk is the same great northern woods that has drawn people to the Hayward area for a very long time, first for its abundance and later for its beauty and calm.

The appeal of Wilderness Walk is its simplicity. Trails wind through the woods at an unhurried pace, letting children and grownups alike take in native animals and the cool green shade of the pines without a lot of fuss. It is the kind of place where the point is the walk itself, the discovery of what waits around the next bend, rather than any single big attraction.

That makes it an easy piece of a larger Hayward day. Families can pair it with the town's lakes and fishing, its museums, and its other family attractions, building an afternoon of the low-key, old-time pleasures that a Northwoods vacation is all about. For young children especially, a shaded trail and the chance to see animals up close is often the highlight of a summer trip north.

Summer is the season for a place like this, when the Northwoods is green and warm, the trails are inviting, and Hayward is at its liveliest with vacationing families. Long, mild days make for the most comfortable strolling through the pines.

The shoulder seasons of late spring and early fall can be pleasant too, with cooler air and thinner crowds, though a seasonal attraction like this keeps to warm-weather hours. Once the deep Northwoods winter sets in, the focus of the region shifts to snow country and the trails go quiet under the pines until the warm season returns.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.