Kevin's Nature Blog

Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area (SW Wisconsin)

3/13/2025

Pines cling to the sandstone bluffs and outcrops at Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area near Ridgeway, WI.

Steep sandstone bluffs have protected stands of northerly pines for thousands of years at the Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area. Photo contributed by Mary Kay Baum.

On a mild January morning, about ten of us gathered at a sharp curve in the road, chatting while Jared prepared tools for us to carry back along the prairie-woods divide to our work site. There were chain saws and brush saws to lug, loppers, and long-poled herbicide dabbers.

My wife Dianne and I had joined forces with the Friends of the Ridgeway (WI) Pine Relict State Natural Area, two employees of Pheasants Forever, and State Natural Areas Volunteer Coordinator Jared Urban on their monthly workday. The task today was to clear invasive shrubs and scrub trees from a hillside oak savanna remnant.

The Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area, owned and administered by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), is a 546-acre tract that harbors white, red, and jack pine. Pines had once covered the Driftless region just beyond the reach of the glaciers, but as the climate slowly warmed, these pine species had crept northward along with the retreating ice.

That said, the north-facing slopes of Pine Relict provided cool micro-climates for the pines, and their location at the edge of steep sandstone cliffs had protected them against fire prior to Euro-American settlement. In modern times, the relative absence of fire has allowed the quick-growing pines to outpace the oaks at their flanks on the upland bluffs. In this way, the pines have maintained a foothold here for 12,000 years since the end of the glacial period.

And now the forest was being further aided by its Friends.

The Friends group Chief Steward Bob Scheidegger worked one of the brush saws, cutting and removing small scrub trees to create more breathing room for the oaks, another cherished tree species on the property. Bob’s ties to the land ran deep. He’d grown up on a farm that had included 160 acres of today’s Pine Relict.

“Growing up, we didn’t realize how wonderful this land was,” he mused. As a farm kid, it was a hassle to hike down the 300-foot slopes to check on cattle in the valley, “but our cousins and friends always wanted to come out here and play, so we began to realize it was something special.” They built rock dams in the valley creeks to create swimming holes and explored caves. They’d jump onto chimney-rock towers that were partially detached from 60-80-foot cliffs.

Bob credits Mary Kay Baum—recently moved away from Ridgeway—for energizing the Friends group in its early days. With a full and active life as a former Catholic nun, a social-justice lawyer, and an ordained Lutheran minister, Mary Kay next realized that nature and rural life provided antidotes for her health. She soon discovered the Pine Relict State Natural Area and added it to her list of passions.

Armed with a camera instead of law briefs or a Bible, Mary Kay took to photographing wildlife and flora. With typical enthusiasm, she relates how she once spent half an hour getting a just-right photo. Hiking through a nearby prairie one day, she heard a sound and turned to find a palm-sized Ornate Box Turtle crossing the path behind her. Not wishing to scare it off, she doubled back through the grasses, lay down on the prairie floor, and waited. Eventually, she used her hiking stick to swish apart the grasses, whereupon the startled turtle emerged looking straight into the camera, “cocking its head with curiosity, as humans do.”

Mary Kay snapped the photo.

Mary Kay brought this same “larger-than-life” enthusiasm to Pine Relict and helped convince others to join the Friends group, says Bob. “I learned about the Friends when she walked into the cheese store I was working at and began excitedly telling me about this nearby DNR property that I soon realized had been my home farm. She was looking for volunteers; she got one that day.” The Wisconsin DNR named Mary Kay the state Volunteer of the Year in 2019.

In working with Jared and the DNR, the Friends group is keenly aware that their goal is not to develop Wisconsin’s next state park. Jared explains, “While parks are geared towards recreational development, the State Natural Area program approach is to minimize development,” protecting sensitive plant communities and providing low impact recreation such as hiking, hunting, bird watching, and fishing.

Bob adds, “We’re trying to get the place back what it was like before settlers came through. So no trails, no little bridges, no bathrooms. We’re not doing another Governor Dodge.”
* * *
While the chain saws whined away on the hilltop, Dianne and I took up positions with loppers and dabbers on the prairie hillside beneath a couple of gnarly old oaks. Wiser souls knew enough to keep me away from the chain saws. Alongside us was an experienced Friends member who schooled us on which of the winter-dried plants were invasives needing to be sheared as near to the roots as possible and dabbed with a tiny touch of herbicide on their stubs and stumps. We worked from downhill to uphill, occasionally glancing backward to view the widening swath of open grassland laid out beneath the oaks.

After a while, the chain saws fell silent on the hilltop just as we on the loppers crew connected our prairie remnant to theirs. Then Jared offered to lead us on a short hike down to one of the pine cliff overlooks.
Descending steeply from the uplands, we arrived on a more subtle slope that had recently benefited from a prescribed burn. The uncluttered understory was punctuated with oaks on the rolling hillside until, near the cliff face, white, red and jack pines took over. The pines popped from among sandstone and dolomite rock outcrops like mushrooms. Leaning out from the cliff face, the pines directed our gaze across the valley to the next cliff top where a swath of green marked another stand of relict pine.

The pines were thriving here in the relict southwest Wisconsin forest while most of their species had retreated northward. Geography had saved them against the dual onslaught of a warming climate and human settlement.
But now the pines, along with the upland oak savannas and prairie, were also getting by with a little help from their Friends. -- March 2025

Relict pine stands have survived since the last glacial age (12,000 years ago) in southwest Wisconsin while most of their species retreated northward.

An active Friends group also helps restore and maintain prairie at the Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area. Photo contributed by Mary Kay Baum.

An Ornate Box Turtle emerges from the grasses at a southwest Wisconsin prairie. Photo contributed by Mary Kay Baum.

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Mississippi-Missouri Rivers Confluence

12/29/2024

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North America’s two largest rivers meet as the Missouri River enters the Mississippi at the Edward “Ted” and Pat Jones Confluence Point State Park near St. Louis, MO.

I am watching a six-foot log ride the Missouri River current upon entering the Mississippi at the Edward and Pat Jones Confluence State Park north of St. Louis. The log follows the Missouri’s defiant flow halfway across the conjoined river until the Mississippi catches it, spins it, and realigns its path.

The rivers’ convergence has long appeared as a battle of wills between the two giants. In 1673, the first European observer of the rivers’ confluence, Jacques Marquette, described “an accumulation of large and entire trees, branches, and floating islands…issuing from [the Missouri], with such impetuosity that we could not without great danger risk passing through it.”
Judging from the log bounding halfway across the Mississippi, the two rivers haven’t yet called a truce.

Life above the water level, though, is tranquil. Confluence Point State Park, the adjacent Riverland Migratory Bird Sanctuary along the Mississippi, and several additional parks and refuges along the Mississippi and Missouri offer 30,000 acres of wetlands, woods, and prairie a stone’s throw from St. Louis and its suburbs.

“Over 300 bird species use the Mississippi/Missouri corridor during the fall and spring migratory seasons,” says Ken Buchholz, Director of the Audubon Center at the Riverlands Sanctuary. In the fall, their flight patterns converge at the confluence much like the rivers’ waters, and in spring they diverge at the site as they come back north, selecting their respective paths as if from among highway exits.

Whether in migration or living year-round, so many species gather near the confluence that the Audubon society designated the region an international Important Bird Area (IBA) in 2004. Especially during migration season, the Riverlands-Confluence region “is a birding hot spot popular among enthusiasts,” Buchholz says.

Bald eagles are among Buchholz’s favorites. Among them are a growing population of year-round residents, as well as migratory eagles who come down from the north in colder winters. Other celebrated visitors include trumpeter swans, paddler and diving ducks, and Canada geese. Residents include various species of owls, raptors, and shoreline birds. “Limits on development along the river has helped to retain habitat,” Buchholz explains.

All on the northern edge of metropolitan St. Louis.
* * *
When I visited the Confluence Point State Park on a late summer afternoon, I encountered both tumult and solitude. For me, however, the confluence’s commotion was more related to the packed and swift U.S. 67 expressway traffic hustling to cross both rivers. The final exit before the Mississippi quickly transitioned me from metropolitan traffic to an isolated, five-mile road on the peninsula between the two rivers where the only other car in sight belonged to a man photographing backwater egrets.

Immediately off the exit, the pace slows. Riverlands Way Road slips along a causeway through the Alton Slough. The Audubon Center at Riverlands is the last significant building encountered on the peninsula, aside from a handful of scattered farms and a station for conservation vehicles. Riverlands Way road soon turns to gravel as it winds along the narrowing peninsula to the confluence.

When I pulled in at the Confluence Point State Park parking lot, mine was the only car in sight. Signboards near the parking area, however, tell of this lonely site’s celebrated natural and cultural history. The Mississippi and Missouri’s combined watershed incorporates 40% of the continental U.S. and a small reach of Canada, the fourth largest watershed in the world. From ancient times the confluence—along with the nearby Illinois River to the north and the Ohio River to the south—offered indigenous peoples a trade and transportation route to vast portions of the continent.

In 1804, William Clark and the Voyage of the Discovery crossed the Mississippi into Missouri River (Meriwether Lewis would join them upriver at St. Charles) as they embarked on their commissioned odyssey to explore the Louisiana Purchase. In a letter sent back home, Clark echoed the prevailing sentiment that the Missouri presented the stronger flow: The Missouri, he wrote, “seems to dispute the preeminence [of] the Mississippi.”

A short 1/3-mile trail leads from the parking lot to the confluence itself. The first stretch is confidently laid down in cement. From there, the trailblazers seem to have acquiesced to the fickleness of the rivers’ flow as the trail transitions to dirt. Near the convergence, the trail had disappeared entirely, its exact path having been mudded over by early summer floods.

Now, in late summer, the rivers were limping past in time of drought. “Flood pulses are changing habitat,” says Buchholz. “More frequent high water upsets a wetland complex by bringing in non-native or invasive species.” But droughts are increasing along with the floods. “We have more roller coaster years in which flooding is quickly followed by drought, with barges tied to shore waiting for the river to come back up.”

If there is a bright spot, it may be that the more frequent flood-drought cycle is getting the attention of St. Louis residents and business people as they are encounter the impacts of climate change.

Another bright spot lies in some increased collaboration between conservation groups and government agencies ordinarily more geared to commercial use of the rivers. The Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, for example, was paradoxically enhanced when the shoreline was slated to receive dredge material from the nearby construction of relocated Lock and Dam #26. Wildlife biologists at the Army Corps of Engineers strategically placed the fill “to re-create and enhance some of the wetland expanses that one would have seen in earlier times,” says Buchholz.
* * *
When I reached the confluence point, I turned in three directions: one, upstream along the Upper Mississippi; two, upstream along the Missouri; three, to the point of merger and downstream, where the conjoined rivers take the name “Mississippi,” but the Missouri keeps up the fight.
The log, though, finally pivoted and turned downstream.

-- December 2024

A short trail runs beside the Missouri River to its meeting point with the Mississippi at Confluence State Park.

Greater White-Fronted Geese are among the migratory waterfowl splashing down at the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary. Photo contributed by Madi Hawn.

The Audubon Center at Riverlands near the Missouri-Mississippi Rivers confluence. Photo contributed by Madi Hawn.

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Witkowsky Wildlife Area, Northwest Illinois

11/9/2024

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• The Prairie Point Overlook gives a clear view of Northwest Illinois’ Driftless Area landscape.

Brad Petersburg’s UTV pitched at a hang-on angle as we descended the Walnut Trail at the Witkowsky Wildlife Area. I braced myself with the roll bar until Brad stopped to chain saw a tree limb that had fallen across the trail. Then we emerged from the upper woodlands to the prairied valley floor at the 1100-acre refuge where we encountered—of all things not expected in a prairie—the concrete remains of an abandoned satellite station.
The Witkowsky Wildlife Area is a partner property of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF) in northwest Illinois. The property is owned by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) and maintained in part by a Witkowsky Friends group associated with JDCF. I was fortunate to tag along on a trail clearing mission with one of the Friends. Motorized vehicles are not otherwise allowed on the property.
The long journey to becoming a wildlife area began in 1986 when Jack and Iris Witkowsky donated 400 acres to the IDNR with the stipulation that the state add more property to the refuge and develop trails open to the public. IDNR succeeded at the first task but had not progressed on the second when concerned neighbors, led by Brad Petersburg, approached JDCF in 2012 about possibly intervening.
JDCF is a private conservation foundation that owns seven public preserves totaling over 1,500 acres in northwest Illinois, but its mission also includes helping landowners preserve environmentally sensitive habitat through other means. Under these auspices, JDCF completed a cooperative agreement with the IDNR in 2017 by which the local Friends would develop trails and keep them cleared of fallen trees, and the state would keep them mowed.
The refuge fully opened to the public in 2021.
Brad had quickly become enamored of the nearby Witkowsky Wildlife Area after relocating to the Driftless Area. “In 2006,” Brad explains, “my wife and I purchased a cabin in the woods of Jo Daviess County as a second home. A year later, when the opportunity arose to sell our farm home in north-central Iowa, we moved to Jo Daviess full-time.” The Driftless Area, they discovered, had the perfect mix of wooded hills, open fields, and rural atmosphere. But the Witkowsky property lingered in terms of becoming open to the public with usable trails.
Brad went into high gear when the cooperative agreement was completed. He began laying out the refuge’s ten miles of trail, conferring with the IDNR to make sure the paths didn’t impinge on fragile ecosystems. “The challenge of creating a new trail system was appealing,” Brad says. “I enjoy studying the landscape, laying out and clearing trails that highlight interesting features like rock outcroppings, large trees, and big views.” Dozens of friends and neighbors helped clear the trails over several months.
Our first stop was about halfway down the upper portion of the Walnut Trail. Brad pulled the vehicle to the side of the trail and led me along a deer path to a small clearing in the woods. Here Brad pointed to a massive tree nearly 100 feet tall that had been verified as (tied for) the second largest red oak in Illinois. Its girth would take at least four adults to encircle. However, since that designation, its largest limb had fallen in a storm, revealing a hollowed trunk.
Perched on the still-freshly splintered branch, Brad worried that the tree might now be in decline. Even so, he mused, “They say oaks spend 100 years growing, 100 years living, and 100 years dying.”
Next on the trail clearing mission was the Prairie Point Overlook. Located at the end of a wooded ridge, the Point looks out over the remainder of the woods, the prairied valley floor, and a neighboring privately owned pond. A signboard explains that the hilly and varied landscape is part of the Driftless Area, the four-state region (northwest Illinois, northeast Iowa, southwest Minnesota, and southwest and central Wisconsin) that had been spared the leveling effects of the glaciers.
Brad pointed to a white splotch on the prairie below, nearly tucked away beneath the view from the ledge. That, he said, was the now-abandoned shell of the telecommunications “Earth Station” that had once operated in the valley. Brad left me hanging for the moment. We’d learn more, he said, when we got there.
After stopping a few times to clear fallen limbs from the trail and to clean the signboards, we emerged onto the valley. In the October sun, prairie flowers had already spent their royal purples and gold for the season, and the grasses had lost their green. Still, big bluestem towered over the UTV and pulsed in the persistent breeze like ocean waves.
Finally, we arrived at the Earth Station. Two massive concrete hulls, partially engulfed in vegetation, sprouted from the prairie floor. An information board shows a photo of the communications facility in its glory days, topped by two massive radar dishes. The Earth Station was one of seven U.S. communications sites built in the 1970s to ferry long-distance telephone calls to upper atmosphere satellites, from which they’d be bounced back to other locations. Local newspaper photos show the facility’s interior complete with massive computers and technicians sporting 1970s hairstyles. The Earth Station was decommissioned in 1986, by which time its technology had become obsolete.
The interior works and the massive satellite dishes were removed from the two circular structures, leaving behind just the concrete shells. Brad and others have fancied how the structures might some day be used if enough money were somehow available (and with IDNR approval). “Star-gazing on the roof? Concerts inside the buildings?” he wonders.
My wife Dianne and I returned the following day to explore more of the Witkowsky Wildlife Area’s scenic trails. We followed the two-mile Cedar Trail as it first led across fields still leased to local farmers before dropping into a stream valley. Tall cedars outlined the start of the wooded portion of the trail, and the late afternoon sun flooded the stream bottom deciduous woods in a gold light. The ascent treated us to limestone outcroppings hidden in plain view in the woods. We drove the remaining perimeter of the refuge, saving the Oak Trail for another visit.
The Witkowsky Wildlife Area offers a view into what the Driftless Area landscape looked like prior to Euro-American settlement. Ironically, even its “futuristic” telecommunications Earth Station ruin is a harbinger of days gone by.

-- October 2024

• In autumn, prairie grasses tower over the hiking paths in the Witkowsky bottomlands.

• Only the shell remains of the prairie valley’s “Earth Station,” which once housed two massive telecommunications satellite dishes that ushered long-distance phone calls in the 1970s-80s.

• Asters provide autumn color after most of the season’s prairie flowers have faded.

• Brad Petersburg stands beside Illinois’ second largest red oak at the Witkowsky Wildlife Area in northwest Illinois.

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Pipestone National Monument, Southwest Minnesota

9/20/2024

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Winnewissa Falls is a key attraction at Pipestone National Monument in Southwest Minnesota.

The hand-hewn quarries at Pipestone National Monument in southwest Minnesota were underwater. The day before, Dianne and I had seen the same early-summer floods hurtling through the nearby bordering corners of South Dakota and Iowa, devastating communities and destroying infrastructure. And here at Pipestone, raging waters had wiped out a trail bridge at Winnewissa Falls and had submerged the quarries.
Pipestone is a 300-acre National Monument protecting prairie and wildlife and assuring the right of indigenous peoples to quarry soft pipestone rock as they have for at least 700 years. For centuries, peoples of the Oneota culture and its descendent nations came from throughout the Midwest to dig out the pliable, reddish rock and carve it into ceremonial pipes, effigies, and other sacred figurines.
The Pipestone quarries were an area for peace. No fighting occurred here when the nations came together to quarry. In pre-contact times, the pipes and figurines were traded among tribes throughout North America. Petroglyphs on the site—dating back 5000 years—indicate an even earlier sense of the sacred.
Dianne and I were visiting Pipestone after a bit of a washed-out regional trip in which a failed car transmission scuttled one set of plans and flooding on the Big Sioux and its tributaries altered the rest. We were frustrated. It wasn’t until the morning of our final campsite in South Dakota that I sensed a change in fortune. At sunrise, I hurried down a cold, dewy trail to catch the last mists of fog rolling off our camp-side creek. It seemed like a good omen.
When we arrived at Pipestone a short while later, the recent rains were now just a memory being carried away by the receding streams, though the quarries remained inundated.
Geology and the Creator had worked wonders here. Wedged in between layers of steel-hard quartzite formed from ancient sandy sea floors lay thin seams of pipestone molded from intermittent clays. Pressurized and uplifted, the formation offered itself to indigenous peoples.
The sixty-some active quarries on the site today are not industrial-sized, as the term might suggest. A typical quarry might be 20 feet long, a few meters wide, and a dozen feet deep. Indigenous peoples who work the small quarries even today use only hand tools. They first remove several feet of soil and glacial gravel from their small quarry sites, then painstakingly chip through six to eight feet of hard-as-nails quartzite before reaching the 11-18-inch bands of pipestone. The back-breaking toil is part of the sacred ritual.
The reddish rock, according to the oral tradition, has been colored by the blood of the ancestors. The place felt holy.
Strikes-the-Ree, the Ihanktonwan (Yankton) Chief credited with saving the grounds from American encroachment, explained in 1881 how tribes “approached the sacred ground. All of us followed a three-day long purification of fasting, prayers, and sacrifices, imploring the Great Spirit to expose the holy minerals buried beneath the rocks. On the fourth day, we painted ourselves and began working.”
The area began to draw the interest of Euro-American explorers in the early 1800s. In 1836 the famed western exploration artist George Catlin visited the quarries over Native American objections. His drawings, as well as the pipestone sample he sent back to eastern geologists, put the quarries on the White map.
Geologists named the new (to them) formation after him, calling it Catlinite, although the term “pipestone” is more frequently used today. Soon after this, Joseph Nicollet and six other explorers visited the site and literally left their mark on the landscape by carving their names and initials into a rock at the top of Winnewissa Falls, a graffiti still visible today.
When forced treaties signed away the surrounding landscapes from local tribes, Strikes- the-Ree in 1858 negotiated to keep Pipestone available to the Yankton tribe. Encroachments on the quarry lands eventually led to a Supreme Court decision against the U.S. government for illegal seizure.
Although the U.S. government then purchased the land from the Yankton rather than return it, some attitudes had begun to change. In 1937 Pipestone became a national monument, with guarantees that Native Americans could continue quarrying the sacred stone.
Dianne and I often feel cast into oppositional roles of trespasser and humble learner at such sites. As is the case among most of the 80,000 annual visitors to Pipestone National Monument, this is not our holy land, nor our sacred tradition. But we respectfully observed the “Do’s and Don’ts” advice the Park Service suggests to non-indigenous visitors, beginning with “Be open to learning” and “Listen and observe more than you speak.”
No one was quarrying during our visit due to the flooded work pits. Inside the visitor center, a local indigenous pipestone carver described to us what he was making, why, and how. He straddled two worlds as he told us about the good medicine the mallet he was shaping would bring while also explaining the geology underlying the quarry fields. A fifth-generation quarryist, he worried that no one from his family would carry on the tradition.
Outside we listened and observed as well. The 26- acre prairie harbors over 300 native plant species and offers habitat to 100 permanent and migratory bird species. The ¾-mile trail that winds among the prairie, quarries, quartzite cliffs, and wetlands are meant to be walked quietly and slowly, to be seen and heard rather than be talked over.
The rushing stream speeding past the washed-out footbridge, spilling over the rapids at the lip of Lake Hiawatha, and tumbling over Winnewissa Falls told us that the catastrophic rains had dissipated and were being carried away, that the drying had begun, but that there would be more waiting before the plentifulness of summer returned. Our frustrating trip had not been for nought.
We left nothing behind at Pipestone, and, as we returned to our car and to the road back home, took with us only the assurances given by the stream.

- August 2024

3. In addition to preserving sacred Native American pipestone quarries, the national monument also protects 260 acres of prairie with over 300 native plant species.

The small hand-hewn quarries at Pipestone National Monument were underwater due to recent rains.

An open bluff face at Pipestone National Monument displays layered bands of quartzite and pipestone.

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Hiking With Students

7/5/2024

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Fall semester students from Mississippi River Lore & Legacy enjoy an outing to the Mines of Spain river shoreline.

“Do you have a woods eye or a prairie eye?” I would ask my Loras College students after reading Bill Holm’s essay, “Horizontal Grandeur.” “Or maybe you have some other eye—a mountain eye, an ocean eye, a river eye?”

Holm’s essay extolls the virtues of Midwest prairies. Someone with a prairie eye, he writes, “looks at a square foot and sees a universe: ten or twenty flowers and grasses, heights, heads, colors, shades,” and more. The woods eyes, he writes—not better or worse, but different—looks for mystery and a sense of the baroque.

I didn’t care so much which landscape “eye” my students claimed. I cared only that they used their eyes and ears to see, hear, and be in whatever landscape they encountered. To facilitate perception, I took students out into local landscapes several times a year.
***********************

“We’re going to climb that?,” I overheard one student ask of another as we reached the base of a steep Mines of Spain hillside. To the left rose a sheer limestone wall, probably an old quarry not far from the river and just south of the ponds. To the right there was just enough foothold that by digging into the snow with our hiking sticks and grabbing onto tree trunks, we could pull ourselves up the incline. It may have been January Term, but after climbing the slope, we were plenty warm.

We were exercising our woods eyes. Here and there in the scraggly forest stood a few majestic burr oaks, 150-170 years old. Originally an oak savanna with a prairie carpet spread out beneath the scattered oaks, this river overlook would have been clear-cut for lead smelting furnaces in the 1800s, I explained, and the oldest oaks here today took root as lead mining came to an end. These old oaks took root in the relative absence of other trees and spread their limbs horizontal and wide. As the forest regrew, the younger trees had to stretch vertically for sunlight.

But the prize of this hike was located another hill over, down a ravine, and up another hearty climb. And there in the cover of woods and far from any summer-time trail, a simple hole dimpled the earth, then another as we curved up over the lip of the hill. And then another and another until we were in the lead-mine field, among hundreds of shallow pit mines dotting the river bluff like a crater-scape, each ranging in size from six to a dozen feet wide and four to eight feet deep.

I explained Dubuque’s lead-mining past as we zig-zagged among the pits. We playfully slid down into the larger ones and clawed our way back out. Spreading out across the woods, we searched for the widest and the deepest. After reaching the end of the mine field, we paused and looked out over the ice-caked river. I asked students to walk quietly back through the woods, imagining the miners who once roamed over this river bluff and who had tossed dirt, rock, and finally lead out of these holes.

The only other footprints in these woods besides our own belonged to deer and mice.
*******************

Alongside Catfish Creek at the Swiss Valley Nature Preserve, we tested our prairie eyes and talked about the stream restoration project completed several years earlier that had transformed the creek’s steep-walled, muddy banks into the gentle, grassy gradients that prevailed in pre-settlement times. Before the advent of quick, massive drainage associated with modern agriculture and municipalities, prairie grasses would have sidled down to the creek-side on slopes more ambling than precipitous. Occasional high waters could glide across the creek’s grassy twists and curves instead of further downcutting into the mud walls.

Sloping down from the tree line, last year’s dried prairie stubble poked through the sagging January snow as the students and I huffed upward to the hanging marsh. Located on an embankment halfway up the hill, the marsh is fed by small springs that flow practically year-round. Groundwater filters down from the crown of the bluff through the porous limestone, then
travels vertically on a layer of shale until it emerges in rivulets on the embankment. Warmer than the surface soil in winter, the springs encourage early season wildflowers while everything around it lies frozen. The constantly wet soil keeps the trees at bay, producing a marshy opening in the woods and boosting the warming power of the sun.

I encouraged my students to find where the spring waters emerge. Above, they noticed, there is frozen ground; below, a soil soaked and spongy.
**********************

In May Term and Fall, we drove to the base of Lock & Dam #11 on the Wisconsin side to exercise our river eyes. Far from a natural environment here, we talked about what the wandering river might have looked like before its harnessing. We considered the environmental impact of dams creating a narrower but deeper river and how barge engines churn up the river bottom. But we also discussed the economic benefits of barges, especially their relative fuel efficiency in comparison to rail and truck transportation of goods.

We watched the river roil and boil as it exited the gates on the downstream side of the dam, and noted the smooth upper pool surface stretching lake-like as far as the eye could see.

I told students about the habitat restoration above the dam at Sunfish Lake that protects fish breeding grounds from the swift flow of the river. Students were surprised to learn that they were standing on the shore of the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge (now celebrating its 100-year anniversary) that lines the river for 261 miles from Wabasha, MN, to Rock Island, IL.
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After each outing I asked students to write about what they’d learned, but also what they’d reflected on or seen without my pointing it out. “I think I have a woods eye,” one student wrote, noticing the sun trickling down through the canopy. “But maybe I could have a prairie eye when the wildflowers are in bloom.”

Which eye she possessed wasn’t really the point. What mattered was that she had opened her eyes.

-- June 2024

Students brave the snow and cold temperatures for a January-Term hike at Swiss Valley.

Loras College January-Term students discover their woods-eyes while hiking in the Mines of Spain.

We hike among old lead mine pits dimpling the snow at the Mines of Spain.

Students are surprised to learn that the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge extends over 200 miles along the river and its shorelines.

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Muscatine Sand Story

5/7/2024

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Wildcat Den trails lead upward into wind- and water-sculpted sandstone glens.

  The boy and his father were tossing bits of pea gravel past the railing of an overlook platform at Wildcat Den State Park. As Dianne and I approached, the dad laughed and explained they were aiming for the hollow in a tree trunk just a few yards beyond the railing. We picked up a few sandy bits from the trail ourselves and tried our luck: it was harder than it looked!
What isn’t hard is finding sand and pea gravel in southeast Iowa’s Muscatine County. From the heights of Wildcat Den to river-bottom Deep Lakes Park, Muscatine is awash in the sands of time connecting the past and present.
*          *          *
By the multitude of lake names alone, we might have thought we were bicycling in the lake country of northern Wisconsin or Minnesota. The bike trail slid between and among Turtle Pond, Lake Ivy, Goose Pond and Lake Chester. But one name, Haul Road Pond, offered a clue that Deep Lakes Park, with its dozens of canoeable and fishable ponds, is a 435-acre recreational site salvaged from depleted sand and pea-gravel quarries. A few short decades ago, the site was crawling with end loaders and dump trucks preparing sand and gravel for road construction sites.
Muscatine County and surrounding areas of southeast Iowa are known for their sandy soils. But the sandy, gravelly soil that today nourishes famous Muscatine melons and is quarry-mined was laid down by glacial meltwater. During the Illinoian glacial period 100,000 years ago, an ice dam formed downstream on the Mississippi River, backing up a glacial lake across parts of southeast Iowa. At the bottom of these silent and still waters, the Mississippi dropped fine sand and gravel it had been carrying down from the north. When the ice dam broke and the backwaters subsided, today’s Muscatine County was left with a deep, sandy, gravelly, outwash bottom from the ancient lake.
At Deep Lakes, located in the river valley about half a mile inland from the Mississippi, the spent quarry pits eventually filled with rain, snowmelt, and groundwater. With some additional sculpting and shaping, Deep Lakes became a Muscatine city park in 2013. The 435-acre park includes 120 acres of pond and lake surface, some with depths up to 30 or 35 feet. Boat ramps and access paths allow for canoes, kayaks, and small motorless boats. A handful of rental cabins sit among the lakes, and Lake Chester offers a swimming beach.
The glacial story is ever-present. Mounds of sand and fine gravel line the bike trail, which in turn connects with the Muscatine city bike trail system. Hiking paths wind among the dunes and sand prairie. Short cedars and woody bushes tolerant of this type of soil predominate. In this early spring bike ride, we stopped at the lakes’ access points and peer through the leafless branches to more distant ponds.
I shook my head when we reached the end of the trail. At the edges of the park today, quarrying continues. “More ‘Deep Lakes’ for the future,” I joked, and then marveled at the reclamation of an industrially scarred landscape.
*                      *                      *
In 400 feet of climb from stream base to the heights of the park, Muscatine County’s Wildcat Den tells an even older story of sand and other layers of bedrock. At base level, Pine Creek tumbles over a mill dam in the limestone bottoms. An 1848-constructed four-storied grist mill still graces the side of the dam. From the railing of an 1878 steel bridge long retired from vehicle traffic, Dianne and I admired the brown-stained, immaculately maintained mill and watched Pine Creek spill over the dam and speed away beneath the bridge. In drought, the limestone base of the creek had been laid bare at its edges, dry and exposed to sunlight for one of its rare periods in the 375 million years since the Midwest sat at the bottom of an ancient sea.
We set off on what we intended as a short hike that turned out to be an hour and a half of climb and descent. As we ascended, a thin band of shale, 315 million years old, crumbly and containing minutes layers of coal coated the tops of the limestone outcrops.
But farther back and higher up in the park we encountered the sandstone glens that define the park. This is an older story of sand than lay at the Mississippi bottom. At 310 million years old, these sands were laid down where ancient rivers met the sea. The twisting, turning trail led us deeper into hidden glens and shelters naturally hewn into the sandstone that must have harbored more than a few wildcats’ dens.
The layered, swirling, multi-colored bands in the sandstone were sculpted over time by the sea bottom itself, by the pressures of uplift, by wind whistling down through the glens, and by newer waters that still pour over the upper ledges during snowmelt and after torrential rains. The Devil’s Punchbowl—dry most of the year—fills when water cascades over its lip during such events.
Our descent offered warning of a trail closure ahead. We’d spent more time hiking than we’d allotted, so we decided to check what the enclosure entailed. A simple downed tree had fallen across the trail where it descended from the upland glens. A few over-and-under’s and a misstep or two finally brought us tripping to the base of the sandstone bluffs. Here we encountered Devil’s Lane, a narrow squeeze-way where a slump of sandstone had broken free from the ledge, and Steamboat Rock, a hundred-foot wall of sheer bedrock rising from the trail.
When we plied at Steamboat Rock’s sandstone ledge, our fingertips came away…with particles of sand.
And the cycle of the sand story at Muscatine started anew.

-- May 2024

An 1840s four-story grist mill still graces Wildcat Den State Park's bottomland.

A retired 1870s bridge at Wildcat Den State Park now serves pedestrians and admirers of Pine Creek.

Depleted sand and gravel quarry pits have been transformed into more than a 100 lakes and ponds at Deep Lakes Park at the edge of Muscatine, IA.

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Good Earth State Park, South Dakota

3/14/2024

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The sun sets on the Good Earth Prairie and Visitors Center in southeast South Dakota. (Photo by Angie Mulder and provided with approval of Good Earth State Park.)

Sometimes the good earth offers a surprise landscape. For Dianne and me, an unexpected find was South Dakota’s Good Earth State Park, located about eleven miles southeast of Sioux Falls on the hilly banks of the Big Sioux River marking the boundary with northwest Iowa. We had been travelling the eastern corridor of South Dakota and were looking for a place to stop for a short picnic lunch. We found Good Earth on the map, decided to stop for a brief visit, and stayed for several hours.
Opened in 2013, the 600-acre Good Earth is South Dakota’s newest state park. But its story of goodwill dates back much further. From 1500 to 1700 A.D., Good Earth was the site of intertribal, interconnected villages lining both banks of the river, home to six thousand residents of the Omaha, Ponca, Ioway, and Otoe nations living together in harmony and prosperity.
On a hot July day, we first sought relief in the sleek, new Visitor Center. Far from just being a refuge from the heat, however, the Center told the amazing story of this collaborative ground.
Good Earth had been a prosperous trade center. Its location on both sides of the Big Sioux River, about 75 river miles north of its confluence with the Missouri, gave it trade access with Native Americans across the North American continent. Artifacts found at Good Earth include obsidian from Wyoming and Idaho, chert from southeast Nebraska, and copper artworks from the Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Local artisans made bison robes and carved pipes, decorative tablets and other objects from red pipestone mined nearby, which they in turn traded across the continent.
Although the Good Earth village existed prior to the region’s first contact with Euro-Americans, signs of change were in the air even as Good Earth thrived, as evidenced by archaeological finds. Tribal merchants began arriving with Jesuit rings and Dutch marine shell beads called “runtees,” signaling the Eastern tribes’ increasing contact with explorers, missionaries, and colonists.
The village’s dispersal around 1700 occurred prior to extensive Euro-American presence in the South Dakota region but was influenced by eastern contact. Like dominoes, displaced tribes pressured other tribes westward until tension with the Sioux likely caused the Omaha, Ponca, Ioway, and the Otoe to abandon Good Earth. The Ioway moved south along the Missouri River in Iowa and Missouri, the Otoe to the Platte River in Nebraska, the Omaha and Ponca to southeast and northern Nebraska, respectively.
But the story of Good Earth was never fully forgotten. Even early Euro-American settlers knew that something out of the ordinary had taken place here. Archaeologists drawn to the site on both sides of the river discovered 76 imprints of family and community wooden lodges ranging from 12 feet to 123 feet long. Stone circles, geoglyphs (mythical images carved into the ground) and hammer-pitted boulders, along with pottery and trade artifacts, were eventually unearthed at the site. Stone mauls, hide-scrapers made from deer antlers, and clay pots tempered with ground-up shells were among the food-preparation utensils discovered.
Dozens of burial mounds were likewise identified. A great serpent mound, 1/8 of a mile long, is believed to have existed at the site, but was largely obliterated by an 1800s railroad line and local agricultural plowing.
By 1970 enough modern interest had gathered around the site that it was declared the Blood Run National Historic Landmark, Blood Run being the name of a creek on the Iowa side of the village, named for the red tint its waters picked up from iron oxide during heavy rainfalls.
But officials sought a different name as the South Dakota site moved toward becoming a state park. Park Manager Jim Henning explains there was a concern that “‘Blood Run’ would have a negative connotation, as if something bad had happened here,” when in fact the story to be told was immensely positive. Conversations with the four descendent nations coalesced around “Good Earth,” although that was probably not its literal name.
Good Earth park personnel continue to collaborate with the Omaha, Ponca, Ioway, and Otoe nations. “We meet with them twice a year to talk about plans for the park, and to get their feedback and help on planning our programs. If we want to build a deck or even when we built the visitor center, we had tribal representation on site. We’re proud of that partnership,” Henning reports.
Although the indigenous peoples farmed the land, their agricultural imprint was not as large scale as today. One of the goals of the park personnel is to restore the landscape to what it might have looked like in the 1500s. Henning points to timber stand improvement efforts that have helped bring back and stabilize native hardwood species and 240 acres of re-established tallgrass prairie as movement toward this goal.
Most state parks offer RV camping and other recreational amenities, but Good Earth does not. Instead, there are 11 miles of hiking trails through the prairie, interpretive signs and overlooks, and an education-focused visitor center. The Good Earth mission, says Henning, “is concerned with preserving the area and making sure we take care of it the right way.”

Dianne and I eventually ate our lunch at a pavilion overlooking the prairie and then walked the grounds. The grass paths were warm against our sandaled feet on this hot summer day. The restored prairie blazed with wildflowers on the uplands, and woods outlined the steep ravines and valleys. At an observation deck we looked out over the Big Sioux River and its wide valley across to the farms and silos on the horizon, and thought about the changes that had come across this land.
For two hundred years, Good Earth provided well for the Omaha, Ponca, Ioway, and Otoe nations. Three hundred years later, it is enshrined as a South Dakota state park.
But for Dianne and me, for a single July morning, Good Earth arose on the landscape like a shimmering unexpected gift.

March 2024

The golden prairie reflects park efforts to restore the landscape as it may have looked in the 1500s. (Photo by Shawn Koch and provided with approval of Good Earth State Park.)

The Good Earth Native American villages sat on both sides of the Big Sioux River demarking South Dakota and Northwest Iowa. Four regional tribes collaborated in this trade-center community from 1500-1700.

A hilltop prairie at Good Earth State Park is rimmed by the forest that lines the Big Sioux River.

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BLACKHAWK WILDLIFE AREA, JACKSON COUNTY, IOWA

1/18/2024

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An upland trail affords occasional glimpse of the Maquoketa River that rims the Blackhawk Wildlife Area.

A two-mile gravel road leads from Highway 64 to the Blackhawk Wildlife Area. I last visited the site on a mid-October day free from classes when leaves were beginning to turn, more copper than gold or red in the autumn sun. Cattle lazed in shaded groves along the road, lying or grazing among fallen trunks. It’s an unassuming road, even occasionally a bit unkempt. But at the end of the lane, Blackhawk is a grace note.
A grace note in music is a tiny ornamental note heralding the next big, flourishing sound. In a similar way, Blackhawk Wildlife Area, is a smallish, 180-acre refuge at the southern edge of the hilly, rocky Driftless Area that spreads over 24,000 square miles north to northeast. Owned and managed by the Jackson County Conservation Board and located six miles west of Maquoketa, Blackhawk offers a Driftless preview of prairie remnants, woodland trails, river overlooks and glimpses into the local past.
Jackson County Naturalist Tony Vorwald considers Blackhawk a little gem, even a bit of a diamond in the rough. “In spring you’ll find ephemeral flowers like snow trillium, spring beauty, and trout lily,” he says. He mentions the refuge’s tall bluffs overlooking the Maquoketa River, mature oak stands, and cool summer micro-climate rock outcrops harboring relict northern monkshood wildflowers that once flourished at the edges of the glaciers.
But there’s a “good, the bad, and the ugly,” too, he says, as the county works at restoring habitat compromised prior to the land becoming a Jackson County Conservation property.
The preserve’s two miles of hiking trails begin in the uplands with a few strands of remnant prairie. But prairies need occasional fire to prevent forest encroachment. Prairie fire hadn’t occurred for decades, Vorwald explains, so the Conservation staff has had to remove woody species, replant some prairie, and maintain the area through prescribed burns to bring it back to prairie health.
From the prairie, a trail swings down into the hardwood forest, granting occasional bluff-top glimpses across the blazing reds and yellows lining a bend of the Maquoketa River. Leaf litter along the trail and tell-tale tree bark revealed walnut, shagbark hickory, maple, and oak. During my solo hike, occasional shadows swooped overhead like raptors, but turned out to be large, swirling oak leaves, each taking its individual turn to settle on the forest floor.
Occasional timber harvest of red oaks and walnuts provides some income for the Conservation Board, but more importantly maintains and improves habitat, Vorwald explains. Hardwood forests need occasional canopy breaks for regeneration. Too much shade will age out a healthy forest. To restore the hardwood forest after a timber harvest, the Conservation Board planted 2000 red oak and walnut trees, which at 30 years old are now coming into their prime.
The geologist’s eye is next engaged as the trail descends steeply alongside a 50-foot limestone bluff laid down 420 million years ago in an ancient, shallow sea. Caves and indentations pock its lateral face as the bluff curves away from the trail. Sturdy boots and a hiking stick aid in the rock-strewn descent. It would be easy to leave an ankle behind on the path I’ve chosen.
The base of the trail opens up to a Maquoketa River flood plain. At first glance the flood plain appears to be the least adorned of the Blackhawk habitats. But the flood plain provides cover for neotropical birds such as indigo buntings and scarlet tanagers migrating north in spring, says Vorwald.
The flood plain is also where the wildlife refuge brushes up against its human past. Along the river and separated from the rest of the preserve by private property lies a parcel that housed YMCA Camp Blackhawk from 1918 till the 1950s. Little remains of the old Y camp except for a few footings and foundations. But the likewise defunct Boy Scout Camp Iten, removed a bit from the river, is more generous with its artifacts left behind from its reign from the 1930s to the 1970s. Where else in the forest will you find old dishware or a remnant chimney from a disappeared Scout camp dining hall? A 1931 Telegraph Herald / Times Journal article hailed the forty-some volunteers who descended into the valley floor to build sleeping cabins, latrines, a ranger’s cabin, and a 46 X 64-foot lodge/mess hall that eventually left only its chimney behind in the woods.
Youthful campers left relatively little impact on what would become the Blackhawk Wildlife Area. But part of the uplands had seen a more damaging past, utilized by area industry as a dumping grounds for old machinery and parts. In preparation for the land’s transition to a wildlife area in the 1980s, the businesses cleaned up the site, covered it with fresh soil, and planted black locusts. Unfortunately, the thorny locusts are an aggressive species that the County is now working to replace.
It was a lazy day’s solitary hike. The trail back up to the parking lot sprung a few more surprises, with rocky knolls popping out from behind the twists and bends. Winding back to where I started left me with the feeling that I was at the edge of something bigger.
The 180-acre Blackhawk Wildlife Area is just one of 38 Jackson County Conservation properties that altogether comprise over 2500 protected acres. But even more, Blackhawk is a grace note at the edge of the Driftless, announcing ever-so-briefly and elegantly the mysterious hills and valleys that stretch far beyond.
January 2024

A hiking trail at Jackson County’s Blackhawk Wildlife Area offers October finery.

All that remains of a 1930s Boy Scout camp in the Blackhawk Wildlife Area is the mess hall chimney in the woods. (Photo contributed by James Varcho.)

The uplands contain some remnant and restored prairie.

One trail steeply descends alongside limestone bluffs to a Maquoketa River floodplain.

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South Dakota: Edge & Transition

10/30/2023

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