Landing Devil's Lake 

11.62 miles northwest of Merrimac, Kit had made an impromptu cut north to Devil's Lake

so to circle a few times and check out what this ancient glacial jewel looked like from 1500 feet at 120 mph.  While she circled around the edge of the beach, she really wished she had floats on her Cessna and was

tempted, on first pass, to try her first landing on the open road peeking out of the woods just above the beachside chalet at the end of the lake.  She pulled up on the column for one more pass and remembered some famous landing stories she was told by her grandpa – the very first airplane flyer in Sauk County, George Schlieckau,

who soloed with old Cecil Hess in Reedsburg back in 1928.  The story goes that old George once dropped off his parents at the nearest Sauk Co. train station so they could travel to a wedding in Kansas. What he didn't tell them is that he too planned on going, but by plane, just no compass or brakes. Not many hours afterward, he found himself landing in a Kansas wheat field which he thought, from high above, was six inches in height, but was in fact closer to three feet high.  Five days later, after the wedding festivities, it took the cousins and a handful of neighbors to heave the plane onto a lift-off position.

"It was always the gliding at the approach to landing that was difficult," he recalled, talking about the first time "I tried to come in to land on my first flight, I hit the ground before the landing field…I bounced so hard that I went up 12 feet and cleared the trees and fence to get to the landing field.  My instructor was in the field waving for me to go up again and circle around before landing.  I forgot for a minute why he was there and waved back at him!"  Kat wasn't sure if these stories instilled confidence or fear in her as she flew over the easy sightings of balanced rock, which she always

thought, when a girl, was somehow glued together, and devil's doorway,

another one of those bizarrely windswept formations so noticeable in this part of Sauk County.  She took a deep breath and decided to take the advice from one of her favorite Jimmy Buffet songs "Breath in, Breath Out, Move On," and placed herself on a parallel path just to the left of the long straight road below...