Summit Lake State Recreation Area

Hiking around Summit Lake SRA | Tekamah and Fremont NE | March 2021

As expected, our ‘false spring’ lasted a couple weeks before cold and dreary weather moved back in. On this weekend, it was predicted to start raining in the afternoon, so we decided to get out early and go for a hike. Curtis had noticed a listing on AllTrails that described a 5 mile loop hike around a lake, and since that’s been our go-to for Midwest hiking lately, we went with that. Today’s focus was Summit Lake State Recreation Area, a half hour North of Omaha, just West of Tekamah, Nebraska.

While we’ve enjoyed all the lake hikes we’ve done up to this point, this one unfortunately turned out to be somewhat of a bust. When Curtis first looked at the loop trail, he thought it would be mostly trail with a little bit of road walking, but it turned out to be the opposite. There were trails that meandered around the hills in the park, but there wasn’t actually a trail that went around the lake. However, we didn’t want to give up having driven up here for a 5 mile hike, so we decided to just go with it. We had brought our big backpacking packs in order to train for future hiking trips which gave a little additional challenge to our road walk.

Thankfully there were only a few fishermen here so we were basically all alone on our trek (read: less people to judge us for looking like a couple of lost backpackers wandering around). And the whole thing wasn’t a complete bust because the views of the peaceful lake and surrounding hills were quite nice. Really, we enjoyed most of our quiet walk, right up until the end where we ended up outside the park walking on a dirt road where the AllTrails “official” trail was telling us to cut through someone’s private property to get back into the park. Rather than be arrested for trespassing, we continued until we came to a road leading into the park. Overall we still got to do the 5+ mile hike that we came for, so that was good enough for us. Still, we wondered how this trail was listed as an “official trail” online, while other listings such as Iron Horse Lake and Willow Lake are not, and recommended changes to AllTrails as appropriate (always important in a crowd sourced database).

After our walk, we took NE-32 West to US77 to change up our drive home, and stopped in Fremont to see the Dodge county courthouse. We made it back home before the rain and had a cozy rest of the weekend home together.