Kevin's Nature Blog

Hoosier National Forest, Indiana

3/19/2023

The 1890s Brooks Cabin has seen southern Indiana’s old-growth forest fall to farm fields, and farm fields return again to forest.

In a quiet Indiana woods, Dianne and I notice the slight gully intersecting the hiking trail. Wide enough for a compact car, it is overgrown with scrub trees, but its U-shaped track through the woods is still faintly visible.
We step aside and listen, not for anything present, but for what’s long gone: hooves pounding the soil and raising a dust that strings along to the horizon. Snorts and grunts and bleats bellowing past.
We find ourselves at a crossroads of past and present, hiking alongside the Buffalo Trace in the Hoosier National Forest in southern Indiana. When bison still roamed freely, they rushed along this path after crossing the Ohio River at a shallow ford each spring and dispersed through western Indiana and Illinois. In the fall they retraced the path back to warmer Kentucky grasslands. Their weight and numbers pummeled and pressed the pathway into the gullied depression still visible in parts of the forest.
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The Hoosier National Forest covers 203,000 acres of south-central Indiana. In a state known for flat, sprawling corn fields and long straight roads, the forest landscape rises and dips from the Ohio River valley to just south of Bloomington.
The forest, largely a second-growth replanting, was created out of the Depression-era heartbreak of failed farming communities. At a crossroads of broken dreams, a new course was charted.
Mia Gilbert, Visitor Services Information Assistant, sat with us at a wooden picnic table under a grove of towering pines. She described the Hoosier National Forest’s beginnings. By the early 1770s, British-American settlers from Kentucky had begun moving into southern Indiana. The old growth forest fell quickly to farm fields.
But the forest soil was thin, and the land was hilly and rocky. Erosion control was not yet widely practiced, and as the soils washed away, area farms lost productivity. Add in the droughts of the 1930s and Great Depression economics, and all too soon landowners were abandoning their farms. Congress empowered the National Forest Service to buy up land from owners willing to sell. By August 1935 the Forest Service was inundated with offers.
To get a sense of the forest’s vastness, Mia suggested we drive to the nearby Hickory Ridge Lookout Tower, a 150-foot, 1936 steel structure built to watch for forest fires. The area was still transitioning from farm country in the 1930s, so at the time of construction, the tower also overlooked 80 farms, all of which have now been subsumed into the forest.
We gave our farewells to Mia and drove off. Along the road, I noticed a nearly-hidden sign announcing the Town of Todd Cemetery. I’m attracted to old graveyards, so we pulled in. Much of the cemetery hearkened back to the farming community that pre-dated the National Forest. Small, weather-beaten tombstones poked from the ground, leaning in every direction. Many were unreadable, but a few still told their stories. There was Robert Crough, the toddler who lived from 1927-1930. The death date of Louisa E. puts her in her twenties, likely during childbirth. Private William Hicks, on the other hand, had long outlived his battle days, finally succumbing at 53 years old, his life spanning 1829-1882.
A cemetery in the middle of the forest? This seemed odd to us. But soon enough we began seeing them all around as we drove or hiked, and we spotted even more on the maps. The cemeteries, too, suggested a crossroads between the farming past and the forested present.
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Another Indiana crossroads lies where the surface world and the underground intersect.
Marengo Cave, a National Natural Landmark just east of the forest, offered such a blurring.
Visitors tour among its nearly five miles of winding caverns through a phantasmagorical world of stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, flowstone, and other formations. Shallow reflecting pools give the illusion of unlimited depth, their still waters perfectly mirroring the cave ceiling.
Life forms within the cave offer their own little shop of horrors. Blind, translucent isopods scuttle along on shrimp-like legs searching for microscopic food in the cave’s streams, hiding out from equally blind, eyeless, pigment-less fish on the hunt. Millipedes and beetles explore the mud banks. Tiny, white-gray Springtails may jump when disturbed. Troglobitic spiders guard the natural entrances to the cave, catching and caching luckless insects that fumble into the openings.
Rain and meltwater enters the Marengo Cave through sinkholes or seeps down through cracks in the limestone. Dripping interminably from the ceiling, cave water eventually forms an underground stream that emerges on the landscape five miles later.
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Back within the Hoosier National Forest, we next sought out Lick Creek, a long- disappeared Freed Black settlement. Freed Black families started coming to Lick Creek around 1811, since even the possession of “Freedom Papers” didn’t guarantee safety in nearby slave-owning states. Invited and welcomed by the Quaker Church of Lick Creek, by 1850 the Black community had expanded to 260 settlers in ownership of 2300 acres.
By 1853, however, the state of Indiana required Black adults to register by name, place of birth and physical description. Prospects grew more ominous as the Civil War broke out. In 1862, with the war intensifying, many Black families sold their land and moved further north, some to Canada. Before long, Lick Creek was abandoned and the forest grew back.
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Indiana calls itself “the crossroads state.” Historically, this motto relates to its intersecting 1800s horse and wagon pathways as Americans and immigrants plied west and south. Today it refers equally to the maze of interstates that crisscross the state.
The bison laid down a trail that others followed. Native Americans used the Buffalo Trace as a travelling path. French, British and American explorers followed it across the countryside. Settlers travelled the route in wagons, heading west, adding wheel ruts to the hoof prints. Stage coaches and the U.S. mail soon followed. U.S. Highway 150 was laid down parallel to parts of the Trace.
The last bison was spotted on the Trace in 1799.
Most of the Buffalo Trace is gone. But here in the Hoosier National Forest it runs beside us, crosses our path, and disappears again into the woods. I imagine the long line of dust that the bison must have kicked up with the weight of their hooves, a string that would have lingered long after their passing and tied together the horizons and everything beneath the dome of sky.

-- March 2023

A 1930s 150-foot fire tower overlooks a portion of the 203,000-acre Hoosier National Forest.

The Marengo Cave National Natural Landmark offers a subterranean universe of stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and other formations in southern Indiana.

A faint indentation from bison hooves is still visible along the Buffalo Trace in Indiana’s Hoosier National Forest.

A weathered tombstone reminds visitors that farming communities once thrived in today’s Hoosier National Forest.

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Hocking Hills Region, Southern Ohio

1/8/2023

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A waterfall tumbles from the overhang at Ash Cave in the Hocking Hills.

I wish I owned windows like these. Light streams in from seven Gothic openings stretching almost from the floor to the 25-foot ceilings. The openings are irregular, curved, carved, twisted, and phantasmagoric: an ace of spades, a bowling pin, a goose taking flight, tongues of fire. From the outside they can barely be seen, but from the inside the seven windows cast light spells across the otherwise darkened room.
Dianne and I are in the Rock House cave in southern Ohio’s Hocking Hills. Largely hidden behind a massive sandstone wall, the cave is accessible only through its seven window-like openings. This cave—running 200 feet long, 20-30 feet deep, and 25 feet tall—has been home to ancient peoples for thousands of years. The windows are water- and wind-hewn entrances to the cave interior. We use our camera flashlights to negotiate the deeper recesses and uneven floors where the light doesn’t penetrate. We bask in the coolness of the chamber, and in the perfect balance of light and earth and underworld.
Hocking Hills is a 2000-acre state park in southern Ohio, known for its numerous waterfalls, arched cliff faces, and steep, narrow box canyons. Other features of the park, like Ash Cave, Old Man’s Cave, and Whispering Cave, are not true caves but recessed, horseshoe-shaped rock shelters wedged into the bedrock, hidden away behind waterfalls that drop 200 feet or more from overhanging ledges. People have taken refuge here for thousands of years in a delicate balance straddling the land surface and the underground.
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An hour west of the Hocking Hills near the present-day city of Chillicothe, ancient indigenous peoples once pondered the relationship among the earth, sky, and underworld. This southern Ohio region is home to at least six different sites with conical, linear, serpentine, and elliptical burial mounds. This was the birthplace of the Hopewell culture from 200 B.C. to 400 A.D., whose trade patterns, artwork, and signature burial and ceremonial mounds spread throughout the Midwest and beyond.
Metalwork and carved mineral-stone from across North America have been unearthed from the mounds. Copper—perhaps from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—was patterned into a copper headdresses, copper hands, copper stars, copper antlers, copper falcons. Mica from North Carolina mountains was thinly sliced, like onion skin, into shapes of hands and abstract swirls. Ceramics and pottery utilized designs traceable to indigenous peoples from the Appalachian mountains. Local Hopewell-based ceramic pipes were shaped as turtles, wildcats, falcons, and squirrels.
Dianne and I walked among the burial mounds at one of the sites called Mound City. Taller than our Upper Mississippi mounds, the largest here reached 17 feet with a 90-foot circumference. No indigenous peoples lived at the earthworks, but nearby villagers and likely gathered here to trade, to marry, and, of course, to bury the dead.
Archaeologist John P. Hancock writes that in Hopewell cosmology “the earth where we live is brought into being between the sky world and the underworld.” There was balance here: earth, sky, water, and what lay buried.
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Southeast of the Hocking Hills lies one of America’s earliest coal regions where the underworld got out of balance. Nelsonville, Athens, and a host of other local coal towns boomed in the 1870s and 80s. Sunday Creek, not far from our campground, gave its name to the second largest coal mining company worldwide. Small company towns abounded, with their tell-tale look of semi-identical homes on small lots, all in a line.
But controversy and tragedy were hauled up alongside the wealth of coal. In 1884 striking workers set fires in numerous coal mines that burned for decades, venting from cracks in the surface ground. The largest mining disaster in Ohio history occurred in the Hocking Valley in 1930 near Sunday Creek when an explosion killed 82 workers. Mining disasters killed another 180 Ohio workers before the end of World War II.
At the start of the 20th century 50,000 coal miners were employed in the region. But after World War II, mine shaft operations began shutting down, replaced for a while by surface strip mining. Eventually these, too, began closing. Today only a small number of coal-related jobs remain in the area.
Meanwhile, despite some successful mitigation and restoration efforts, over three hundred miles of southeastern Ohio streams still bleed orange, white, and green where their waters emerge from abandoned underground mines.
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One early evening, we rode out from our Hocking Hills campsite to the Moonville Tunnel in the Zaleski State Forest. We turned into a muddy parking lot. One nearly-broken-down car sat amid the puddles near the access to the 16-mile Moonville Rail Trail. The trail led to an abandoned train tunnel that cut into the hills.
Moonville was home to 100 villagers in the late 1800s, coal miners mostly. Workers walked the tracks to and from the local mines. The town dried up as the coal mines closed, with the last family departing in 1947.
The Moonville tunnel is still part of local lore as the haunted site of six accumulated deaths until the railroad ceased operating in 1988. The 100-foot tunnel sports a handsomely bricked edifice announcing, in large letters, “MOONVILLE.” Above, below, and beside the town name, and inside the tunnel as well, layers of time-worn graffiti compete with the encroaching forest attempting to snuff out the passage.
It was eerie, all right. There was something haunting at the Moonville Tunnel, but it wasn’t about railroad deaths. It was something from the underground itself.
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Ancient, indigenous peoples strove to keep the upper, lower, and middle worlds in balance. The Hocking Hills’ geological wonders kept the equilibrium as well, with underworld caves and rock shelters providing refuge to the middle world’s indigenous peoples. The Hocking Hills waterfalls today still bind earth and sky and underworld, plunging from the cliff faces and pattering at the stony canyon floors.
But what happens, then, when the balance is upset? When extractive industries deplete buried ore? When boom leads to bust, and people are without jobs? When the imbalance poisons local streams?
Maybe these are the questions that haunt the Moonville Tunnel near the edge of the Hocking Hills.

-- January 2023

Window openings in the Hocking Hills’ Rock House Cave take a variety of fanciful shapes.

5. Chillicothe, OH, was the birthplace of the Hopewell Culture that spread throughout the Midwest from 200 B.C. to 400 A.D. Burial and ceremonial mounds—this one 17 feet tall—were signature features of this Native American period.

The Moonville Tunnel in southeast Ohio marks the location of a long-disappeared coal town.

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White Horse Hill, North Dakota

11/5/2022

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White Horse Hill National Game Preserve took its present name in 2019 to more accurately represent the local Native American peoples and their stories.

The volunteer couple at the White Horse Hill Visitors Center told us where to look for the bison herd, except for one old bull who liked to wander off by himself and “rake you over with his stink eye” if you came upon him. So naturally that became our mission. Never mind the elk, the prairie dogs, the trumpeter swans, and the rest of the bison herd. We wanted to find old Stink Eye.
The 1700-acre White Horse Hill National Game Preserve in northeast North Dakota dates back to 1904 when it was originally designated a national park. In 1914 it was re-classified as a Game Preserve for nesting and migratory birds. In 1917 bison and elk were introduced to the Refuge as their numbers had plummeted on the Plains. In the 1970s, prairie dogs joined the general melee.
The Preserve sits on the southern bank of Devil’s Lake, at 330 square miles the state’s largest natural body of water. A remnant of an ancient glacial lake that once covered 4000 square miles of North Dakota, in historic times Devil’s Lake has alternately diminished and grown. In the drought-prone Depression era, it bottomed out in 1940 at a surface level some 50 feet lower than today. Then came a gradual rise through the decades, followed by a quick acceleration from the 90s to the present as regional rainfall increased. Since the lake has no natural outlets, the result has been a fisherman’s delight and a farmer’s nightmare. One farm at the former shoreline has lost 2500 acres to the swelling lake. Half-submerged barns haunt the shoreline. Roads have been swallowed up by the growing lake. It has lapped up the Preserve’s lowlands.
Colleen Graue, Visitor Services Manager for White Horse Hill, says that despite the Preserve’s modest size, White Horse Hill harbors three distinct habitats. Wetlands at the lake’s perimeter are ideal for migratory birds. Elk love the woodlands. Bison and prairie dogs are partial to the prairie savanna.
Hiking near the Visitor Center along the fence of the bison/elk enclosure, we saw none of the Refuge’s dozen elk, but noted their handiwork in clearing the underbrush as they ate their way through the woods. Woodlands are rare to North Dakota, where only two percent of the land is forested. But White Horse Hill’s location on the southeastern edge of Devil’s Lake helped the woods get established in pre-settlement times, Graue explains. Prairie fires that elsewhere swept across the landscape and kept tree growth at bay were snuffed out here by the big lake, allowing the forest to take hold.
When we emerged from the woodland trail onto a prairie bluff, the trail’s descent toward the lake was blocked off. An old trail that once rimmed the lake was now underwater, and the field beyond it was flooded. Dead, drowned trees lined the old shoreline and the hiking path. The lake’s high waters have impacted the Preserve in other ways as well. The Visitors Center is new since 2006, necessitated by the rising lake waters, says Graue. The lakeside road to the old Center is now underwater.
But the flooded lowlands have been a boon to the Preserve’s ducks, geese, pelicans, kingfishers, swans, otters, water snakes, frogs, and other wetland species.
The Preserve’s 4.5-mile auto tour loop within the bison/elk enclosure is a favorite for visitors. Here, beyond the wetlands, the prairie rolls across the valley floor. The grasslands are home to at least two prairie dog towns. When we stopped at the edge of their burrowed city, they seemed as curious about us as we about them. Perched on hind legs while chewing stalks of grass, they sized us up, wondering perhaps whether our Honda was a big white bison. Finally, though, the small engineers nosedived back into their burrows to return to the work of interconnecting the holes with tunnels.
In another section of Prairie Dog Town, a dozen or so of the twenty-ish bison milled about the burrows, tugging at the sod and looking bored. A few calves among them pondered the prairie dogs with curiosity and amusement.
The bison herd is small, but the herd is prized throughout the federal Fish and Wildlife Refuge system for its genetic purity, says Graue. And because the acreage is limited, the herd has to occasionally be culled. Bison from White Horse Hill have been sent to other national wildlife refuges. At other times, excess bison are slaughtered and the meat distributed at the nearby Spirit Lake Indian Reservation.
Near the edge of the perimeter hills, the prairie is dotted with hardwoods, mostly oaks, creating a prairie savanna. We climbed the 185-step stairway to the top of the Preserve’s namesake, White Horse Hill, overlooking the prairied valley and the surrounding upland forest. A 20-mph wind raked the hilltop grasses in wavelike pulses.
White Horse Hill took its present name in 2019. For a century the refuge bore the name “Sully’s Hill,” referencing Army General Alfred Sully, who led several bloody campaigns against the Dakota Nation in the 1860s, including an 1863 massacre of 400 victims. Disturbed by the honor given to the massacring general within eyesight of the reservation, the Spirit Lake elders campaigned to change the Preserve’s name. The elders proposed the name White Horse Hill, or Sunka Wakan Ska Paha, to commemorate a wild white stallion that in earlier times was known to come down from the Hill to drink at the lake.
We didn’t see a white stallion. In fact, we’d nearly given up on seeing elk until we finally heard one through our open car windows, and then spotted him, slowly mashing his way through the forest, stripping and munching leaves as if they were lettuce.
Back at the prairie dog town, we had also looked for Old Stink Eye among the bison, but couldn’t seem to find him. So we gave the auto tour loop a second lap. We found him, finally, not far from the Visitor Center, his dark, humped shape off by his sullen self in a grassy clearing.
He seemed to hold within that eye the Preserve, the lake, the tribal history, all permanence and change.
Don’t mess with me, he seemed to say. So we drove on.

-- Kevin Koch
November 2022

The stairway to the top of White Horse Hill leads to an overlook of the forest and prairie habitats.

Bison were introduced to the White Horse Hill National Game Preserve in 1917. Photo by Bob Christie, at White Horse Hill.

Prairie dogs have been creating a burrowed city since their introduction in the 1970s.

An inlet from Devil’s Lake’s decades-long high water has submerged a hiking trail and lowland trees.

White Horse Hill National Game Preserve offers a textured landscape amid the North Dakota plains.

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Copper Harbor & the Keweenaw Peninsula, Michigan

9/5/2022

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The town of Copper Harbor on Lake Superior was an 1800s port for shipping copper ore from Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.

Hannah Rooks’ father always told his clients to listen for the “quiet full of noise” in the Northwoods. He wanted them to listen for bird song and the rustling of the leaves. Her father, Jim Rooks, ran Bear Track Eco Tours in Copper Harbor, Michigan. Before that, he had been the first Director of the E.B. Lyons Preserve in Dubuque, IA, and city Naturalist from 1974 to 1983. Born in Michigan, he felt the call to return, not just to the state, but to one of its most remote locations.
Copper Harbor, population 136, sits near the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, the northernmost point of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Keweenaw peninsula is a 55-mile, sickle-shaped sliver of land that slices into Lake Superior along its southern shoreline. This had once been copper country, but the mines had shut down long ago and ghosted many a town. Tourism is king now. Not the waves of visitors who favor easy-to-reach parks, but still a steady stream willing to drive to the end of the earth, or at least this portion of it.
As Dianne and I descended the long hill into Copper Harbor on a Thursday morning in July, we found a town going about its own business. There were motels and B&B’s for visitors, but they seemed modest enough in size and décor, and all locally owned. We found a hidden bookstore, Grandpa’s Barn, that rivaled those from the cities. We found the Laughing Loon, the gift shop Jim Rooks and his wife Laurel opened in Copper Harbor and which Hannah now runs since the passing of her father in 2005 and her mother’s retirement.
Looking down from Brockway Mountain above the town, it’s easy to see how the harbor and its lighthouse offered a protected gateway to Lake Superior for shipping 19th and early 20th century copper ore. While French and British colonialists in the 1600s and 1700s lightly mined sites first utilized by Native Americans as long as 7000 years ago, the first big U.S. copper rush gathered steam in the 1840s. Copper mines throughout the peninsula shipped their ore through Copper Harbor, giving it a bustling population of 1300 by 1887.
Dianne and I toured the remains of the Delaware Copper Mine that had operated from 1846-1887. Properly helmeted, we descended 100 feet into the uppermost level of the long-defunct mine. Alongside the stairway ran old rails that once hoisted copper and rubble rock up to daylight.
Seepage from recent rains glistened, dripped, and trickled into the descending shaft, then disappeared into darkened passageways. Electric lights in lantern casings now lit the lateral vein, but they were soft, subdued, and spread far apart along the passageway. They gave off a dim light as copper-colored as the hard-sought ore, offering just enough light to peer into subterranean rooms and into cross-cut passageways. The tops of shafts descending to the lower levels were just barely visible, the shadows revealing the water surface of the seepage that filled the several lower levels—the deepest shaft descending 1400 feet—in the years following the mine’s closure. The topmost level was reasonably dry, as it drains through a distant adit, or horizontal vein that opens to the outside world.
Inside, the temperature was a constant 43 degrees Fahrenheit. A white fungus grew on some of the wooden structures, the result of the damp air. Timbers still supported the bedrock roof. Other bits of timber and rail had been discarded and left at the side of the passage. A few supplies had been left behind as well, including a long, hand-cranked drill used for boring into the rock.
At least two other defunct mines on the peninsula are open to the public.
Mining was dangerous and plagued by labor disputes. Mine owners sometimes adopted brutal tactics against striking miners, hiring violent strikebreakers. Songwriter Woody Guthrie immortalized the 1913 tragedy at Calumet, MI, 30 miles from Copper Harbor, when strikebreakers yelled “Fire!” and barred the only door at Italian Hall where striking miners and their families were celebrating Christmas Eve. Panic ensued, and 73 persons died, half of them children. No one was ever arrested.
Dianne and I found a memorial to the massacred victims in downtown Calumet. Although Italian Hall is no longer standing, the fateful door is preserved, along with the story of what transpired.
Copper mining began to wane after 1916, and by the 1960s was pretty much finished.
Today, the Keweenaw Peninsula offers the great outdoors, not the insides of mines, as its chief asset. South of Copper Harbor lie the Estivant Pines, a stand of 300-year-old white pines stretching 125 feet tall. Fort Wilkins State Park, just a mile up the road from Copper Harbor, preserves the history of an 1844 U.S. fort established in the midst of the mining boom. The Keweenaw Peninsula offers numerous other beaches, parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and lighthouses along the Superior shore. Visitors can stop for a photo-op to measure themselves against a towering mast marking the average seasonal snowfall of 240 inches.
But the highlight of our visit was finding the James Dorian Rooks Nature Sanctuary on Brockway Mountain, named for Jim Rooks by the Michigan Nature Association. The sanctuary includes a 1.2 mile hiking trail looping through a well-shaded woods with occasional overlooks of Lake Fanny Hooe on the edge of Lake Superior. Harsh winds from Superior create a microclimate here, favoring trees and wildflowers more prevalent in Canadian forests. In the valleys the oaks grow tall and sturdy, but on the exposed ridges they are small and stunted, like youthful oaks captured in old gnarled bodies. The understory is rich with ferns. On this July day orange fox-and-cub wildflowers showed off against the white trunks of downed birches.
Hannah recalled that her father drew people to the outdoors of the Keweenaw Peninsula through his passion, his nature-based stories, and “his great, deep voice.”
Jim Rooks used to walk the trails at this sanctuary. And Hannah was going there after we talked.

-- August 2022

Copper mines like this burrowed as deep as 1400 feet below ground level on the Keweenaw Peninsula.

The fateful doorway of Calumet, Michigan’s, Italian Hall is preserved to memorialize a massacre of striking miners that took place there in 1913. Seventy-three people were killed, half of them children.

A marker on the Keweenaw Peninsula displays the annual average snowfall depth of 240 inches.

Wildflowers and decaying birch at the James Dorian Rooks Wildlife Sanctuary.

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Savanna Institute: Agroforestry in Southwest Wisconsin

7/4/2022

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The Hillside Farm's sylvan pasture incorporates agroforestry principles into cattle ranching.

“We’re building the new in the shadow of the old,” Keefe Keeley mused as we meandered about the fields and woodlands of the Savanna Institute’s North Farm five miles from Spring Green, Wisconsin. Our walk took us among young walnut trees, cedars, hayfields and newly sown rye in the shadow of a ridgetop forest. In the valley, hazelnut saplings had recently been planted in recurring strips between plots of alfalfa ground cover. “We’re working toward a perennialization of agriculture, plus some,” Keeley added.
Keeley is Executive Director of the Savanna Institute, a Southwest Wisconsin-based nonprofit organization promoting agroforestry, or the incorporation of forestry into Midwest farming. Trees protect against soil erosion, keep nutrient runoff from entering local streams, and provide windbreaks, shade for cattle, and wildlife habitat. Sometimes the timber and tree fruits are crops themselves. All this while sequestering carbon in the fight against climate change.
Savanna Institute’s origins trace back to 2013 in central Illinois as forestry and agriculture graduate students at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana began working with community farmers to explore more diverse, economically viable options for farming. They hoped to shift away from the typical mono-culture row crop model, explore markets for new crops, and make agriculture part of the climate change solution.
Keeley joined the organization in 2013 as its first Director. Now centered in Spring Green, Savanna Institute has grown from having Keeley as its sole (part-time) employee to a current full-time staff of 31 whose positions range from biological and soil scientists, to marketing and community outreach specialists, to hands-on farming experts on its four recently acquired agricultural properties in the Spring Green area.
The organization takes its name from the prevailing ecosystem that graced the Driftless Area prior to Euro-American settlement, the oak savanna. Savannas were not quite forests, not quite open prairie. In oak savannas, hardwood oaks and hickories dotted the landscape in groves or solitary stands with prairie grasses and wildflowers growing beneath and between them.
That’s where the “old” and “new” come in. Keeley points out that indigenous peoples farmed amid the savanna, and even the earliest Euro-American pioneers kept much of the surrounding woodland intact. But economic pressures eventually led to mechanized, fencerow-to-fencerow farming. Agroforestry revives “old” paradigms of maintaining and tending trees in an agricultural setting. The “new” comes from modern research methods for studying and breeding the best combinations of trees and row crops.
Noting that farmers are constrained by enormous economic pressures, Keeley emphasizes that the Savanna Institute is “not wagging a finger at anyone” in regard to conventional modern agricultural practices. Rather, the goal of the organization is to “put some new tools in the farming toolbox.”
Savanna Institute purchased what they call the North Farm in 2020. The farm’s seller was interested in the organization’s conservation mission. He had already planted a walnut grove on the upslopes of the farm property, and helped place a conservation easement on part of the property that lay along the Wisconsin River to preserve its marshy backwaters as habitat for migrating waterfowl.
Keeley found that the Spring Green farming community was equally supportive of Savanna Institute’s goals. In fact, local conservation-minded landowners helped recruit Savanna Institute as a buyer, and contributed toward the purchase. “Southwest Wisconsin offered a community already engaged in conservation and agricultural innovation. They were already pushing the envelope of what 21st century agriculture might look like,” Keeley says, with their interests in organic farming, rotational farming, farmer-led watershed groups, and community-supported agriculture (CSA’s). Many in the region were already practicing Aldo Leopold’s maxim “to live on a piece of land without spoiling it,” he adds.
North Farm serves as a working commercial farm, demonstrating what agroforestry might look like, how mechanization fits in, and how economic realities can be met. As we walked along the hazelnut plantings in the alfalfa field, Keeley talked about land equivalency ratios. Scientific agricultural studies have shown that tree crops and row crops grown separately may take 1.4 acres to produce what can typically be grown on one acre when intermingled. Tree and row crops often mature at different times, meaning that harvesting the one crop won’t disturb the other. And since their roots are deeper, trees can actually help row crops by bringing water up to the surface level even beyond what they use themselves.
And there is the added benefit to wildlife. As we toured, we encountered butterflies in the alfalfa and a hummingbird among the hazelnut plantings. Keeley loves to hear the insect and bird songs amid the fields.
North Farm is 331 acres, including 200 acres of woodland. But three other recently purchased farmsteads bring Savana Institute’s total to 778 acres. Valley Farm, located in the sandy flood plain of the Wisconsin River, will be devoted to tree crop research using cutting-edge agricultural science. Located near popular tourist destinations like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and the American Players Theatre, South Farm will serve an educational purpose, introducing the general public to agroforestry.
The newest acquisition, Hillside Farm, is a sylvan pasture cattle ranch obtained just this past March. Here, Keeley explains, the goal will be to study the effects of grazing cattle in an existing oak savanna. But Hillside Farm is also arguably the most aesthetic of the four properties. A short hike up to its commanding wooded bluff reveals a view of Taliesin in the distance, and sweeping woods, farm fields, and lightly-traveled roads in every direction. The previous owner had built a sprawling, light-infused, Wright-inspired house that will serve as a community events center and a meeting place for the Savanna Institute.
Keeley laments that in the face of climate change and other environmental threats, “people feel pretty powerless, and are typically told to do less.” Savanna Institute, he says, asks instead, “What’s the positive action where we can do more, and have healthier food and better farming economies as well?”

-- June 2022

A newly-planted field of Rye is surrounded by woodland at Savanna Institute’s North Farm near Spring Green, Wisconsin, demonstrating sustainable agroforestry.

An overlook at the Hillside sylvan pasture farm offers a view of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin across the valley.

The Wright-inspired home at Hillside Farm will serve as a community events center and a meeting place for Savanna Institute.

Keefe Keeley is Executive Director of Savanna Institute, a Southwest Wisconsin-based organization promoting agroforestry as an ecologically sustainable and economically viable approach to farming.

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Katy Trail, Missouri

5/2/2022

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Missouri’s Katy Trail follows the Missouri River for much of its 240 miles, on the bed of the former MKT (or Katy) Railroad and along the pathway of Lewis & Clark.

Monday 21st May 1804
Set out [from St. Charles] at half passed three oClock under three Cheers from the gentlemen on the bank. –The Journals of Lewis & Clark
*                      *                      *
The bicycle lane across the Missouri River at Jefferson City terminates at a structure called the “corkscrew,” a rectangular three-level spiraling ramp on which cyclists descend between the bridge and a short spur leading to the Katy Trail. Riding the layers of corkscrew is like passing over the same ground on the backs of overlaying stories: the Missouri River; Lewis & Clark; the MKT Railroad; the Katy Trail; and three days under a glorious sun.
Missouri’s Katy Trail is the nation’s longest bike trail at 240 miles of crushed gravel that follows the Missouri River halfway across the state from Machens (near St. Louis) to Boonville before swinging southwest. It runs on the former bed of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, aka the MKT, or Katy. Along the Missouri it also follows the path of Lewis and Clark, whose Corps of Discovery ascended the river in 1804 and returned in 1806.
Unlike Lewis and Clark, Dianne and I had only set aside three days to ride along the Missouri River. We’d have to sample segments of the Katy Trail.

Trailhead & St. Charles, MO
The Katy Trail’s eastern terminus isn’t particularly memorable, located at the juncture of lonely country roads where the MKT once joined other rail lines to enter St. Louis. The unofficial, more popular terminus lies 12 miles southwest at St. Charles. Here the trail re-launches at Frontier Park with its larger-than-life statue of Lewis and Clark and an 1893 Victorian-style Katy Railroad depot.
St. Charles is lovely, on and off the bikeway. Off the trail, we carefully navigated the historic brick streets on our road bikes. We found Missouri’s first Capitol. Nineteenth Century brick storefronts with scrolling facades lined Main Street. We ate at the Bike Stop Outpost and Café, debating between the Lewis and Clark Wrap and the Katy Sandwich. And then we headed southwest out of St. Charles onto the trail.
At the start of their journey, William Clark and crew spent five days in St. Charles awaiting Meriwether Lewis’s arrival from St. Louis, where he’d been making last-minute purchases for the voyage. Lewis arrived by nightfall on Sunday, May 20, and the full Corps set off the very next day, on May 21, 1804.

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad
Shortly after the Transcontinental Railroad linked east and west, the MKT connected Kansas with the Texas border in 1872, an simultaneously expanded eastward through Missouri, where it linked with St. Louis’ other rail lines at Machens in 1894.
The company’s fortunes peaked and plummeted. In the 1890s the MKT was awash in cash, but by 1915 its fortunes crashed, and it was placed in receivership. It turned around again, reaching new heights of prosperity during World War II. But by the 1960s it was losing money. It ceased operations in 1986, and in 1989 the MKT was legally dissolved.
Almost immediately Missourians began converting the railbed to a bicycle trail. Construction began in 1987, with successive trail segments opening between 1990 and 2011.

Hermann, MO
The town of Hermann lies at Mile 78, a short two miles across the river from the Katy Trail. The bridge across the Missouri is scenic, with a protected bike lane.
Some towns along the Katy have withered over time, a fate not uncommon in rural America. But as soon as we crossed the bridge and entered Market Street, we knew this town of 2400 people was alive. The Hermann Wine Trail tasting house represents seven local wineries. The Deutschheim State Historic Site preserves the home of one of the town’s German-immigrant founders. Tourist shops and restaurants line Market Street and the downtown: Liberty Glass Works stained glass studio; Ricky’s Chocolate Box; Grape Expectations Guest Hous; the Hermann Wurst Haus; the Doxie Slush, a slushie bar named after the owners’ dachshund dogs. We ate at the Downtown Deli & Custard Shoppe, chasing our sandwiches with generous helpings of custard ice cream.
            We sheltered through a rain squall and hit the trail again.

Cooper’s Landing
We explored the historic Missouri capital of Jefferson City, another short spur off the trail, before heading to Coopers Landing, a boat dock, bar, and campground at Trail Mile 139. In summer, Cooper’s Landing offers riverside concerts. Taking a break from the trail, we sat for a while on Adirondack chairs in front of the store and watched the river pass. It’s frisky here. Down at the river’s edge, a signboard warns of the Missouri’s swift current around this corner where the inside curve holds eight feet of undisturbed sand while the outside bend has been scoured nearly to bedrock. The river toyed with the Lewis and Clark boats here.
From Coopers Landing, the trail passes by Boat-henge, a whimsical display of a half-dozen 1950s-era boats half sunk into the ground in a graceful arc, alternating bows and sterns protruding, creating a bit of local kitsch.

Rocheport
Near Rocheport (Trail Mile 156), the Missouri River cut 200-foot sheer bluffs into the limestone ago during eras of glacial melt. Today the bluffs tower above the trail, home to peregrine falcons and other raptors whose shadows swoop across trail riders’ backs. We passed Petite Saline Creek and The Hole in the Rock that Lewis and Clark described in their journals.
Rocheport was another small town that had breathed new life at the side of the Katy Trail. With a tiny population of 201, it seems to boast as many restaurants, antique stores, and wineries as people. We stopped for lunch at the Meriwether Café and Bike Shop. I ordered the Meriburger (“Add a Clark, make it a double”!)
Dianne and I then rode through the Rocheport Tunnel. The 243-foot train tunnel was blasted through the bedrock in 1893, destroying petroglyphs that Clark had described. The northwest entrance sports a handsomely arched limestone face, while the Rocheport entrance opens into the gaping natural rock. Inside, the tunnel is perfectly arched in brick, cut stone, and natural rock.

Return Trip
The Corps of Discovery continued up the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains and arrived at the Pacific Ocean on November 15, 1805. Then they began their return trip and arrived back in St. Charles in September 1806.
Dianne and I biked a few miles past the Rocheport Tunnel until our three-day time allotment ran out. Even so, for three days we’d been riding the Katy Trail’s layers of history, at the side of the Missouri River, on the literal back of the Katy Railroad, and on the backs of Lewis and Clark.

-- April 2022

The Rocheport tunnel announces one of the most scenic sections of the Katy Trail where the Missouri River runs alongside tall bluffs. Several wildlife areas are contiguous with this section of the trail.

The “corkscrew” lifts and lowers bicyclists between a Katy Trail spur and a bridge leading into Jefferson City, the Missouri capital.

Glacial meltwaters scoured 200-foot sheer bluffs along the Missouri River near Rocheport.

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Pikes Peak State Park, McGregor IA

3/7/2022

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A panoramic view of the confluence of the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers from Pikes Peak State Park in Northeast Iowa.

We are perched 500 feet above the Mississippi River, gazing upstream and down at the braided mesh of sloughs and islands, and across the channel to the mouth of the Wisconsin River. Our roost is the Pikes Peak State Park overlook, a double-decked cement, stone, and rail construction that thrusts a triangular nose out over the river bluff like an arrowhead. Time holds still here, even as it relentlessly marches on.
Pikes Peak State Park occupies 590 acres in northeast Iowa’s Clayton County, just south of McGregor. It rests in a region rich in wildlife and cultural history, sharing its Driftless Area limelight with Iowa’s nearby Yellow River State Forest and Effigy Mounds National Monument, Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park, and the multi-state Upper Mississippi National Fish & Wildlife Refuge, to name a few. In the early 1900s, the entire region had been proposed as an Upper Mississippi River National Park. While the proposal withered, the lands were protected as separate grounds.
Iowans are often bemused to learn that their state shares a landmark name with the more famous and mountainous Pikes Peak of Colorado. In 1805, a year before he embarked on his westward journey, Captain Zebulon Pike was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the upper reaches of the Mississippi River, newly acquired by the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. The expedition mirrored the voyage commissioned to Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River in 1804.
Along the way, Pike explored the bluffs at today’s park and recommended building an army fort there to keep a watchful eye over the newly acquired river, but the U.S. government decided instead to build Fort Crawford a short distance upstream at Prairie du Chien. The decision left the river bluff undeveloped. In 1837 its owner donated the land to the U.S. government for preservation, and the federal government later deeded it back to the state of Iowa. Pikes Peak became a state park in 1935.
Long before Zebulon Pike, the Mississippi-Wisconsin River confluence was chronicled by Fr. Jacques Marquette, as he, Louis Joliet, and their crew became the first Europeans to enter the Upper Mississippi in 1673. Marquette’s journal entry could have been written today as he looked up and down the Mississippi and across to the bluffs from the mouth of the Wisconsin River. “Here we are, then, on this so renowned River….To the right is a large Chain of very high Mountains,…the stream is Divided by Islands.”
How deep Pikes Peak history goes depends on where and when one starts counting. Geological studies date its oldest rock stratus, Jordan sandstone, to ancient seashores 500 million years ago, with intermittent layers of limestone, shale and sandstone stacked upon its exposed bluffs like a seabed layer cake. Meltwater from receding glaciers to the north dug the river wider and deeper and carved out the sheer bluffs as recently as 12,000 years ago.
Dianne and I have encountered Pike’s Peak history along many of its 11 miles of trails. A path leading from the overlook marches past one of three bear effigy mounds located in the park. Sixty additional conical, linear, and composite burial mounds scattered throughout date to the Woodland Period of Native American inhabitance, from 600-1200 A.D.
Past the bear effigy, the trail descends the more rugged topography as a boardwalk leading to the Bridal Veil Falls. Here a small stream cascades over a concave, limestone lip and slides down a long, slick, exposed rock face. In between, a softer rock has been hollowed out in an arc beneath the overhang. From here Dianne and I watch the tumbling water from behind the falls.
We’ve visited the park in all seasons and over many years. We camped there early in marriage, we camped when our kids were young, and we’ve camped since they’ve been grown and on their own.
We’ve watched from the overlook in early spring as the season’s snowfall has just begun its release on the bluff and the ice has begun to mottle on the river.
One winter we cross-country skied in below-zero weather to the Point Ann cliff face on the north side of the park. This remote section is far removed from the more-visited Pikes Peak overlook. Under a brilliant, blue sky and protected by forest, we were warmed by our own movement. We removed our skis, though, when we reached the exposed bluff overlooking the river. It didn’t seem like the best location to stand on slippery appendages.
In summer we’ve watched bald eagles, falcons, other raptors ride the thermals above the river beyond the bluffs. Pikes Peak’s dense forest and location on the migratory flyway of the Mississippi River have earned it the designation of an Important Bird Area (IBA).
In fall, we’ve taken small groups of students to the overlook, often in tandem with a visit to the nearby Effigy Mounds. These energetic students pause a good long while, taking in the timeless view of the river before their active selves return and they’re laughing, jostling, and taking group selfies.
To know a place, I tell these students, is itself an exercise in layering. At the base is its geological story: how its bedrock formed and how or whether the glaciers carved it. Above that layer is its human past, the earliest inhabitants who lived not far from the edge of the glaciers, the later peoples who built burial mounds on the river bluffs and the tribes who lived here at the time of Euro-American contact and their forced removal. Above that lie the stories of explorers, settlers, and town-builders. The clay is the place as it exists today, and the dear, sweet topsoil is our personal experiences and memories on the land.
With its exposed bluffs visible nearly down to the river, Pikes Peak State Park offers a visual reminder of the layers of place. But we always add a bit more to the topmost layer with another hike or campout.

-- Kevin Koch
March 2022

The overlook at Pikes Peak State Park offers a sweeping view of the Mississippi River near McGregor, Iowa.

A small stream cascades over a hardened lip of rock at Bridal Veil Falls.

Fall sumac brightens the view at the Pike Peak overlook.

The Mississippi River is encased in ice in a winter view from the Point Ann Cliff.

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International Crane Foundation, Baraboo, WI

1/2/2022

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Sandhill crane parents rear their young colts. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)

Out on the bog a crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly hulk into the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings. – Aldo Leopold, “Marshland Elegy,” A Sand County Almanac

We heard them before we could see them. We’d barely exited the car when we were met with that curious call of the sandhill cranes, the short ratchety blasts that sound a bit like backpedaling on your bicycle or the unwinding cast of your fishing reel.
And then the crane dance followed when we came into view, two enormous birds strutting tip-toed like ballet queens, hopping and unfurling their massive wings.
My wife Dianne and I have seen migrating sandhill cranes before, usually when we’re on a fall bicycle ride along the Wisconsin River. They’re out slurping invertebrates from the river bank or plucking leftover corn from adjacent farm fields. But this day we were watching them at the International Crane Foundation (ICF) grounds at Baraboo, Wisconsin. The site includes 15 outdoor exhibit pens called Cranes of the World, one for each crane species. Each spacious area is specially designed for the habitat needs of that species’ bonded pair. For example, while each space has a pond for foraging, the Siberian Crane has a larger pool, as it likes to swim like a swan. These cranes are “ambassadors for their cousins across the world,” says Kim Smith, Chief Operating Officer of the ICF.
The International Crane Foundation is a nonprofit organization centered in Baraboo but working to protect cranes in 50 different countries. They work with governments to protect crane habitat, help native peoples co-exist with cranes in their environments, and breed cranes for re-introduction to the wild. And the Visitors Center and grounds introduce the public to majesty of cranes, educate them about the ICF mission, and provide a “reflective, healing space that is so important right now,” Smith explains.
The 15 international crane species share common features of stick-figure legs, long graceful necks, and large, intimidating wings, but they vary in other markings. North America’s sandhills have grey bodies with a distinctive red cap above and surrounding the eyes. The black-crowned crane and grey-crowned crane of east and southeast Africa sport spiky, tan crowns. The demoiselle crane and red-crowned crane of east Asia have stylish black-and-white tuxedoed necklines. And North America’s whooping crane is stunningly white with black-tipped wings and a red-black head.
Also quite common across the cranes’ physical environs is how they are woven into human spirituality. From Japan to Australia to Mongolia, “cranes are iconic in art and spirituality,” says Smith. Across cultures, she adds, “When you hear that call, it’s a symbol of peace and healing.” In Australian mythology, the yellow yolk of a crane egg begat the sun. In China the crane represents longevity. Their life-long partnering habits symbolize fidelity. For the ancient Celts, cranes were messengers from the gods. Standing upright like people, they were thought to have originally been human. Indian and Nepalese prayer wheels are decorated with images of cranes.
Some cranes are migratory while others maintain fixed homes. Wisconsin’s sandhills notoriously gather along the Wisconsin River in the fall, cooking up flight plans to winter grounds in Florida and other southern locations with access to open water. “Cranes have strong fidelity to their migrating grounds,” Smith explains. “Parents teach their offspring their paths.” That said, climate change and the need for habitat is leading cranes to more northerly winter grounds, such as southern Indiana.
Although many of their habitats are threatened worldwide, conservation efforts have helped to bring some of the species back from the brink. Displays in the Visitors Center (open May through October), throughout the grounds, and on the organization’s website track the species’ numbers over time. North American sandhill and whooping cranes are generally increasing. Sandhills fought their way back from near-extinction in the 1940s, although the whooping crane is still endangered. The Siberian crane is critically endangered, and six of the fifteen species are categorized as “vulnerable.”
In addition to working in the cranes’ home environments, the ICF also operates the Felburn-Leidigh Chick Rearing Facility—or Crane City—on the Baraboo grounds to hatch younglings (called colts) that can be released into the wild. Crane City houses 80-120 cranes, mostly whooping cranes. Bonded pairs in Crane City have their own “crane condos.” And the exhibit cranes sometimes incubate eggs from Crane City, too. “Everyone has a job around here,” Smith laughs.
The international foundation’s headquartering at Baraboo is both fortuitous and logical. Founders George Archibald and Ron Sauey met in ornithology graduate school in the early 1970s. Archibald was a crane enthusiast with a passion for the writings of conservationist Aldo Leopold. Sauey shared the same passions and lived nearly in Leopold’s back yard near Baraboo. The two established the International Crane Foundation on a former dairy farm owned by the Sauey family. “It was a big dream for two graduate students,” says Smith. Today its 70+ staff members work on five continents supporting cranes.
But the ICF grounds support more than cranes. The property also includes over 200 acres of woodland and restored prairie. Dianne and I hiked the grounds in late October while an overcast sky turned gold beneath the fall leaf cover of the oaks and maples. The trails also open onto prairies seeded from remnant patches on the property and from other sites within 50 miles. The prairie pond offers habitat for frogs, turtles, and waterfowl.
The conservationist Aldo Leopold’s famous “shack” on the Wisconsin River sat just four crane-flight miles from today’s International Crane Foundation grounds. In his “Marshland Elegy,” Leopold wrote, “The quality of cranes lies…as yet beyond the reach of words,” and yet his own words captured the sublimity of this ancient bird: “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.”
Leopold feared in the 1940s that future generations might never encounter the call of cranes. The International Crane Foundation is working to make sure that never happens.

-- Kevin Koch
December 2021

A black-necked crane enjoys his exhibit pen at the International Crane Foundation. Each pen includes a background mural of the species’ home habitat. (Photo by International Crane Foundation.)

Red-crowned cranes in their home environment in Japan. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)

Sandhill cranes awaiting first snow. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)

Crane eggs in the ICF incubation center nicknamed Crane City. (Photo by International Crane Foundation.)

The ICF grounds also includes hiking trails through woodlands and restored prairie. (Photo by Kevin Koch)

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Cahokia (Illinois)

11/10/2021

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Monks Mound at Cahokia is the largest Native American mound in North America at 100 feet tall.

From the platform top of Monks Mound, I can see seven miles across the Mississippi River to the St. Louis Gateway Arch. You might say I’m seeing 900 years into the future.
Monks Mound is the largest of about 70 remaining Native-American mounds at the Cahokia State Historic Site near Collinsville, IL, not far from the east bank of the Mississippi. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cahokia was a Native American city with as many as 30,000 residents by1100 A.D., larger than London at that time. No American city surpassed its size until 1800.
The city once encompassed six square miles, including at least 120 mounds of varying types, and was the hub for numerous outlying villages as well.
By 1300 A.D. Cahokia had disappeared.
* * *
Dianne and I toured the Cahokia grounds on a hot September morning under the tutelage of a young archaeology graduate named Matt. The city, he told us, took hold around 800 A.D. as a renaissance began in the American Bottom, the name given to the fertile floodplain at the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. An agricultural revolution based on the “three sisters” of beans, squash, and especially corn allowed for greater food storage, enabling large populations to live together. The Mississippian culture that flourished at Cahokia reigned from Florida to Wisconsin, but Cahokia was its largest city.
Cahokia, Matt told us, boasted three types of mounds. Conical mounds were similar to those along the upper Mississippi, though taller at up to twenty feet high. Many of these held burials. The second type were ridgetop mounds, oval-shaped mounds capped off with angular ridges like rooflines. The ridgetops may have been added when a mound’s original purpose was completed. One ridgetop mound, for example, sits atop three separate conical burial mounds.
But the platform mounds particularly define and identify Cahokia and the Mississippian culture. Platform mounds are like pyramids without angular peaks. The flat platform at the top usually housed temples, council houses, and the dwelling places of shamans and high chiefs.
Monks Mound was and still is premier among the platform mounds at Cahokia. Standing 100 feet tall on a base of 1040 by 800 feet, it is the largest Native American mound in North America. Slightly larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt and the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, it was constructed by Cahokians carrying 26 million cubic feet of soil, sand, clay, and rock from nearby floodplain “borrow pits.”
The Cahokia State Historic Site today encompasses 2200 acres. But we strolled rather than hiked the grounds to maintain a thoughtful presence. Over here had sat the huts of the common people. Over there ran a wooden stockade walling in the inner city. Before us lay the Grand Plaza, a rectangular public space stretching1600 feet from the base of Monks Mound. Cahokians likely gathered in the Grand Plaza for markets and festivals, and for religious, civic, and sporting events.
Later, we hiked a trail winding in and out of the woods where we found more mounds in a remote clearing. Deer materialized at the edge of the forest, perhaps relieved that they’d arrived 700 years too late to be hunted. In another corner of Cahokia, we walked amid Woodhenge, a reconstructed circle of 48 red cedar posts aligned with the equinoxes, solstices, and other celestial events.
The Mississippian culture spread well beyond the American Bottom. Wisconsin’s Aztalan State Park (30 miles east of Madison) has three platform mounds at a distance of 300 miles from Cahokia. Trempealeau, WI, nearly 500 river miles to the north, likewise has three platform mounds overlooking the Mississippi, as well as artifacts directly linking the builders back to Cahokia.
No one is quite sure why Cahokia was abandoned only 200 years after its zenith. The city may have outgrown its natural resources as nearby woods and other needs were depleted. Ill health may have resulted from water and air pollution and limited diets, all of which might have been mitigated in smaller communities. Perhaps they were beset by enemies, although no archaeological evidence points in that direction. As Cahokians dispersed in different directions, they became or melded into historic-period tribes such as the Osage, Omaha, and Kansa.
The remains of the metropolis nearly disappeared. As St. Louis was founded and grew, its settlers razed regional mound sites west of the Mississippi. At Cahokia itself, French Trappist monks took up residence on the grounds and grew crops on the largest mound, hence giving their name to Monks Mound. A modern four-lane highway slashes through the Cahokian grounds, passing at the foot of Monks Mound. Farmsteads and suburban subdivisions sliced, slashed, and decimated other mounds.
Some thought the mounds to be natural features that needn’t be preserved, but archaeologists proved otherwise. By 1924 the state of Illinois purchased part of the present-day grounds, eventually growing and leading to today’s State Historic and UNESCO Site.
* * *
Dianne and I saved climbing Monks Mound till the end of our visit. A stairway of 154 steps ascends the mound in two segments divided by a level terrace halfway up.
At the platform’s top, the view stretches in all directions. Etched stone markers suggest what would have lain within sight in 1100 A.D. To the north lay the stream that linked the city to the Mississippi River. To the east were dwelling huts, the stockade, and more mounds. To the west, Woodhenge and the Mississippi River. To the south, the Grand Plaza stretched out before the mound the length of a football field. Thousands of Cahokians might have gathered there to catch a glimpse of the high chief or shaman on a festival day.
Today, of course, the St. Louis Gateway Arch is likewise visible on the western horizon, completed in 1965 to commemorate the American westward expansion.
Whether a shaman with a vision of the future might have seen or sensed it back then, we’ll never know.

-- Kevin Koch
October 2021

Ridge mounds have an oval base capped with a capped off with an angular ridge like a rooftop.

The Grand Plaza stretches 1600 feet from the base of Monks Mound. The Plaza would have been the center of community events.

Seven miles distant, the St. Louis skyline and the Gateway Arch are visible from the top of Monks Mound.

Forty-eight red cedar posts mark a reconstructed Woodhenge, with alignments for solstices, equinoxes, and other celestial events.

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Kayaking on the Niobrara National Scenic River

9/1/2021

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Nebraska’s swift-moving Niobrara River is a designated National Scenic River.

The Niobrara River was eating its bed.
The day before, we had been kayaking the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, occasionally dodging submerged boulders in its swift-moving, clear waters. And now we were standing on the river bank a few miles downstream at the Norden Chute, watching the river plunge fifteen feet over a lip of bedrock that marked the Niobrara’s progress in downcutting its streambed.
The Niobrara flows over 500 miles from eastern Wyoming through the northernmost tier of Nebraska counties before linking up with the Missouri River. Seventy-six miles of its mid-section are preserved and protected as a National Scenic River. Backpacker magazine has designated the Niobrara as one of the ten best rivers for canoeing in the United States.
My wife Dianne and friend Dana had set up camp the night before at Dryland Aquatics, a kayaking, canoeing, and tubing outfitter located in Sparks, Nebraska, a few miles north of the river. Owners Ed and Louise Heinert had “bought the town” in 1998 when they began operating the outfitting service. They run their business from the General Store, where local ranchers drop in for morning coffee and conversation.
The unincorporated town of Sparks consists of the General Store, the owners’ family, and whomever might be setting up a tent or sleeping in the bunkhouse prior to their river excursions. At the far end of the campground an 1888-constructed community church harkens back to when the region was more populated than today. Euro-American settlers learned the hard way that the surrounding sandhills were more suitable for spread-out prairie cattle ranches than for small tillable farms.
But in the summer, the Niobrara valley today is typically well-populated with river enthusiasts. Even so, we avoided the crowds by kayaking on a Monday morning, after the weekend revelers had left. We had the river to ourselves for several miles, putting in upstream from the tube-renters, who float along at a slower pace and generally cover fewer miles. And even when we caught up and overtook them, the river was far from crowded. Sometimes Dana, Dianne, and I paddled together and talked about the river, the valley, and the sandhills, and sometimes we spread out, each of us in our own space and thoughts.
Unlike most rivers on the Plains that wander listlessly through broad valleys, the Niobrara is a youthful stream that careens between tall bluffs on either side. Boulders in the riverbed are prizes it has licked away from the cliffs. In places, the river has downcut 300 feet into the surrounding plains. Locals have watched the Norden Chute creep upstream over the course of a few decades as the Niobrara continues carving out its bed. Here the river narrows considerably and plunges over an edge of bedrock as if draining from the lip of an oversized pitcher.
Assuming one avoids the Chute, kayaking the Niobrara doesn’t require expert skills. But the river still commands a kayaker’s attention more than most Midwest streams with its swift current and boulders that could upend one’s boat.
The Niobrara also sits at the northern range of the Ogallala Aquifer that feeds the nation’s midsection from South Dakota to Texas. In northern Nebraska the aquifer lies near ground surface, and where the water table sits on top of impermeable layers, the aquifer spills into the river valley through a series of waterfalls and fast-moving streams. The tallest is Smith Falls, which drops over 60 feet from the blufftop and rushes the length of a football field to reach the river. Other falls are at river level, viewable from the kayak. Over 230 waterfalls drop into the river valley.
Over the years, the erodible cliffs have offered up occasional fossils of now-extinct, early-edition mammals: three-toed horses, rhinos, saber-toothed cats, and more. Ed gave us a short tour of his own collection, which includes an early bison skull and a mammoth jaw.
But the entire river valley might have disappeared in the in the 1970s when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed to build a dam that would have inundated twenty miles of river valley, including the Norden Chute, for irrigation canals to outlying areas of questionable agricultural quality. Local opinion was divided—and still is—as to whether the dam should have been built, but an unlikely combination of conservationists, canoe/kayak outfitters, and ranch owners successfully stopped the proposal.
The Nature Conservancy played an important role as well in the battle against the dam. In 1980 the Conservancy purchased two ranches along 25 miles of Niobrara shoreline to create the Niobrara Valley Preserve (NVP). Today they act as good neighbors, paying property taxes on the land they own even though not legally required to do so as a non-profit organization. The NVP pays its way and protects the ecosystem by other means as well, by leasing lands to local ranchers for cattle grazing and by grazing over 1,000 bison in its 56,000-acre prairie. They likewise invite research teams and interns to the NVP to study the prairie and the river.
“We are so lucky to still have the valley, due to the all the local people who wanted to preserve it,” says Amanda Hefner, Conservation Assistant at NVP. “Other Nebraska rivers have been heavily impacted by crop agriculture,” Amanda says, referring both to agricultural runoff and the effect of heavy irrigation in drawing down the river levels. “The Niobrara feels like a river is supposed to feel.”
Ed and Louise were among those who opposed the dam. “People back then didn’t see the river as part of an ecosystem,” Ed says. “A lot of people didn’t agree with us.”
“But their grandkids might,” adds Dana.
Indeed, a church youth group were among the tubists ahead of us on this hot August Monday. We all exchanged simple greetings, looked about in wonder, and slipped quietly past the sandstone cliffs where the Niobrara River continued its work of cutting through the sandhills.

-- August 2021

Tall bluffs along the Niobrara River’s bends occasionally offer up fossils of ancient mammals.

The Ogallala Aquifer lies near the surface along the Niobrara and offers up numerous waterfalls.

The Norden Chute gives scenic evidence of the Niobrara River’s continued downcutting action.

Sunrise at the 1888-constructed Community Church at nearby Sparks, Nebraska.

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