Kevin's Nature Blog

Shawnee National Forest & Garden of the Gods, Southern Illinois

8/24/2023

Rain, frost, and wind have sculpted the sandstone into elegant patterns and swirls at southern Illinois’ Garden of the Gods.

We had already crossed the railroad tracks on Highway 29, leaving Makanda, IL, behind in the rearview mirror, when Dianne spotted something interesting on her smartphone. Makanda calls itself Illinois’ “hippiest town.” Naturally, we turned around.
Makanda, population 542, resides in the western wing of Illinois’ 289,000-acre Shawnee National Forest, which in turn sits at the southern edge of the Midwest along the Ohio River. The forest hills’ history seems to suggest that it is good to live at the edge, so long as it’s on the mountain’s terms.
The southern Illinois landscape changed quickly as we entered the national forest from the north earlier in the week. Successive waves of glaciers long ago flattened central Illinois, leaving behind a thick glacial till that ushered in the prairies that, in turn, gave way to the plow in the 1800s. On the long, straight stretches of road we reached often for coffee, snacks, and trivia cards to keep alert.
South of Carbondale, however, beyond the glaciers’ ancient reach, the land began to dip and swell. The roads narrowed and swerved. Forest replaced farmland.
Nineteenth century immigrants to southern Illinois were mostly American citizens moving on from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Carolina wooded highlands. Virgin forests fell quickly to the new arrivals, who logged the hills to supply fuel for area iron furnaces and steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Once deforested, the land was converted to farming.
But the thin forest soil and the era’s erosion-prone farming practices on the hilly terrain made agriculture a short-lived enterprise. By the early 1900s, the soil’s productivity had been depleted. The population peaked and began to decline by 1910. The federal government soon began buying up distressed farms and abandoned property to re-establish the forest, and by 1939 the Shawnee National Forest was created.
Communities adapted or died. Makanda proved a delight with its throw-back, edgy boardwalk shops. In PB & J’s Clothing and Gift shop we spied a vintage Janice Joplin concert poster, tie-died 60’s clothing, and photos from the 2017 total solar eclipse. (On April 8, 2024, a another total eclipse pass across Makanda.) At the Rainmaker Art Studio we wandered into an imaginary underwater dreamworld metal sculpture display and through a whimsical, terraced backyard sculpture garden etched into the hillside. Posters reminded us that we should return in October for Vulture Fest, a quirky celebration of artists, musicians, and fall raptors.
People have been long attracted to the Shawnee Forest and its ancient, rocky landscape. At Giant City State Park, angular gaps in the three-story sandstone bluffs look like narrow city streets and alleyways. The rock havens have offered seasonal and personal protection across the ages. Soldiers from both sides of the Civil War took refuge here. Other people from other times have also found themselves in these stony passageways. Who was “Virdenille” who carved his name in the rock in 1933? Or E. Miller, who did the same in 1886?
Earlier cultures occupied Giant city as well. Ashed-over rock ceilings date back 12,000 years ago to the end of the glacial era. Remnants of Woodland Period (AD 600-900) stone walls lace through the park. No one knows their ancient purpose, whether for defense, to demarcate fields, or for some other community use. In the thick of the woods, Dianne and I imagined the segments back into wholeness.
Ancient peoples inhabited other areas of the Shawnee Forest as well. At the Millstone Bluff Archaeological Site, Mississippian-period (AD 1350-1550) Native Americans built a village 320 feet above the valley floor. Small forest depressions mark the locations of seven family dwelling sites that have been excavated from among 26 thought to have existed at the top of the bluff. A flat clearing in the woods may have served as the town plaza.
Farther into the woods on the half-mile hiking loop we encountered other vestiges of Mississippian life…and death. With the help of an interpretive sign, we picked out petroglyph images on a mossed-over stone: pipes and axes, turkey tracks, and a thunderbird with outstretched wings and claws about to grasp its prey. In another location, rectangular rock slabs outlined a long-ago-looted stone-box burial site.
The most literal edge of the Shawnee National Forest is the Garden of the Gods. Located in the eastern reaches of the Shawnee National Forest, about 12 miles from the Ohio River, these blufftop sandstone outcrops perch 300 feet above the surrounding valley, overlooking a 3400-acre wilderness area. The sandstone here has been shaped like pottery into graceful swirls and columns. Compressed into bedrock 320 million years ago on a sandy sea floor, the land then uplifted and the sea subsided. Rain, frost, and roiling winds have been weathering the stone back to sand ever since.
We ran our hands along the weathered surfaces of sandstone boulders adjacent to the hiking trails. Honeycomb indentations like tiny moon craters had been scooped from soft pockets on the rock surface. Colorful swirls and concentric rings in the sandstone walls resulted from minerals—like iron—leeching from the interior to the rock face. At the base of every rock, small piles of sand gave evidence of the still-active erosional forces. (Remember, stone, that you are sand, and to sand you will return.)
Wind and rain have molded the sandstone into imaginative shapes on the cliff’s edge, like Camel Rock, the Devil’s Smokestack, and Anvil Rock. Gnarled cedars perched on outcrop ledges complete the look of a land sculpted by time.
* * *
When the town of Makanda lured us back to take a second look, it was telling us something about the Shawnee National Forest. While there may be no such thing as a typical Midwest landscape, southern Illinois is definitely an outlier, an edge. To live here, one has to adapt to the land.
If we return, it will be for some future October Vulture Fest. We’ll come for the artists, the musicians, and the forested hills, and to watch the raptors circling and soaring from their blufftop sandstone perches.

-- August 2023

Garden of the Gods’ “Camel Rock” overlooks a 3400-acre wilderness area within the Shawnee National Forest.

Located within the Shawnee National Forest, the town of Makanda calls itself “Illinois’ hippiest town.”

At southern Illinois’ Giant City State Park, gaps in the sandstone bluffs appear as “city streets” and alleyways.

A thunderbird petroglyph in the Shawnee National Forest speaks of Native American civilizations that inhabited the region.

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The Driftless Area Conservancy - SW Wisconsin

7/6/2023

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A signpost marks the way on a developed portion of the planned Driftless Trail near Dodgeville, WI.

“Walking ferns, the way the fog settles into the valley, how cliffs arise out of nowhere,” these are among the landscape traits that drew Jennifer Filipiak to her position as Executive Director of the Driftless Area Land Conservancy (DALC) back in 2019.
Founded in 2000, DALC is a nonprofit land trust organization centered in Dodgeville, WI. Over forty such land trusts are scattered throughout the state, Filipiak explains, but at the time there was a “donut hole” in southwest Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Driftless Area landowners were seeking to preserve beloved landscapes with steep, forested hills and valleys, rock outcrops, and spring-fed trout streams.
The Driftless Area Land Conservancy serves both the land and the people of the unglaciated Southwest Wisconsin. DALC counsels landowners through the conservation easement process to protect designated private properties from development, manages habitat on its own preserves, and connects people to the land by providing access to nature and through volunteer restoration efforts. DALC also works with agricultural landowners to help them protect waterways.
For Filipiak, the Driftless Area is not just about the landscape. “The culture here is defined by our geology,” she says. “We know why we have rock outcrops here and groundwater seeps there. We have smaller farm fields and more grazing with our hills. And there is a Driftless community here who connect to nature through the arts.”
One such artist, Roland Sardeson, helped DALC secure one of its nature preserves when he donated his 12-acre wooded site near Mineral Point upon his death in 2016. Sardeson was a potter, stone mason, and beloved community theatre actor. “Everyone knew Roland,” Filipiak says, which may be why the Mineral Point community has been so helpful in building trails, an informational kiosk, and a parking area at what is now called the Sardeson Preserve.
The Sardeson Preserve offers a one-mile wooded hiking loop among 30-foot sandstone bluffs, tumbled boulders, through a stream-bottom valley, and across a dry-bed creek bed that occasionally gifts arrowheads to passersby. “If I were someone who lived here before development, this is where I would have hung out,” Filipiak muses.
My wife Dianne and I first visited the Sardeson Preserve in April 2023. I was quickly drawn to the sandstone bluffs. The surface of the yellow, tan, and green-streaked sandstone undulates in whorls and waves reminiscent of the primordial seashores in which it was formed. Brush your hand against the stone and you are immediately wearing remnants of this ancient sandy beach. Wind and water have continued sculpting its pottered texture.
Though it was a spring day, winter hadn’t yet released its hold on the forest floor, so the tumbled boulders were in easy view. Large and scattered on one slope, the boulders are plentiful though smaller across the valley. There they were stacked and layered as if waiting to be redeployed, and in fact some past landowner had built a handsome stone fence—dry-stacked, Irish-style—to mark the edge of the property.
Winter-melt had caused some mild flooding in the valley floor on this April day, and Spring Peeper frogs ratcheted their wet delight as we hiked.
I returned by myself in late May. In the stream bottom, just beyond the preserve, lowing cattle had replaced the Spring Peepers now that the bottomland had dried up and spring grasses were thriving. Ferns, mayapples, prairie grasses, and (yes) poison ivy had softened the tumbled boulders. Hillsides were lush with Dame’s Rocket, an invasive yet striking forest flower that had turned the woods into a sea of purple and white.
The Sardeson Preserve is one of three properties owned by the Driftless Conservancy. But much of its work also involves collaborating with private landowners. One such privately owned property with a conservation easement overseen by the DALC is the Weaver Road trail segment of what will eventually become the Driftless Trail.
Located seven miles north of Dodgeville, the one-mile hiking trail begins along the perimeter of Seven Seeds Organic Farm and then dips down into a wooded valley. Three “Leopold benches”—a simple wooden bench design made popular by the famed conservationist Aldo Leopold who lived not far from here—announce the pathway into the forest.
The trail glides along a hogback ridge, a landform in which a narrow spine of hard bedrock straddles above steep downward slopes on either side. At the end of the ridge, the trail switchbacks down into a valley of 90-year-old oaks and walnuts. This isn’t virgin timber. It was likely once cleared for pasture, but long-ago abandoned, its native trees are returning to glory. The return trail is more overgrown, its canopy having been decimated by a 2014 tornado. But that simply means to wear long pants and walk the trail often to better establish the path!
For now, the trail loops back to its beginning, with about a 250-foot drop from trailhead to valley floor. Eventually it will become part of the 50-mile Driftless Trail that DALC is helping to piece together. Although it is a thirty-year vision, when completed, the Driftless Trail will take hikers across private and public lands passing through Governor Dodge State Park, Taliesin (Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural studio and school) and Tower Hill State Park near Spring Green. The trail will provide a wildlife corridor from Military Ridge (an existing trail originating in Dodgeville) to the Wisconsin River.
Privately-owned trail segments will be negotiated only with willing landowners. “Many landowners enjoy sharing the natural wonders of their lands,” says Filipiak, and DALC will work with them to create permanent easements for the Driftless Trail.
Many such landowners are area farmers. Having previously worked for both the Nature Conservancy and the American Farmland Trust, Filipiak is convinced that “agriculture and conservation need to, and can, work together, not be fighting each other.”
After all, the goal of the Driftless Area Land Conservancy is to serve people, not just the land, Filipiak insists. “We’re not protecting land from people; we’re protecting land for people.”

-- June 2023

Rain and wind-carved bluffs adorn the Driftless Conservancy’s Sardeson Preserve near Mineral Point, WI.

Dame’s Rocket covers the valley floor at the Sardeson Preserve in late spring.

The Weaver Road segment of the Driftless Trail dips down into a second-growth forest.

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The Flint Hills, Eastern Kansas

5/8/2023

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Canada Wild Rye frames a view of the Flint Hills landscape.

“Red Buffalo is what the Plains tribes called prairie fire,” says Heather Brown, Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Services at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Kansas’ Flint Hills region. Driving across the rolling landscape, Dianne and I could imagine bison and fire in equal measure leaping across these hills.
The Red Buffalo keeps the prairie alive. Prescriptive burning of the prairie regenerates grasses to their nutritional best. “Prairie thatch blocks the sun from reaching the soil,” Heather explains, “squelching off new growth.” Fire puts the sun in contact with the land.
Prairie once covered 400,000 square miles of North America from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River and beyond. Before Euro-American settlement, 30% of the North American landscape was grass-covered. Less than 4% of that original prairie has remained. The Flint Hills harbors 80% of that surviving prairie, stretching for 90 miles east-west and 160 north-south through most of east-central Kansas.
* * *
Author Willa Cather wrote, “It takes a soul to love the prairie.” At the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Eric Patterson, Lead Park Ranger, is one such soul. Eric offers this advice to anyone who lacks the prairie eye: “Don’t expect things to leap out at you. The prairie isn’t one of those environments that will knock you over. It’s more subtle than that. On the other hand, it often offers a vast scenery where you can see for ten or twenty miles.”
But once you’re done looking at the vista, look at what’s in front of you. The Flint Hills sports 70 varieties of grasses and 400 wildflowers and other forbes. Wildflowers take turns blooming from late spring through fall, each attracting their own set of pollinators.
For those of us whose idea of grass is the lawn we mow every Saturday, it can be a steep learning curve. “Your front lawn at home is the definition of a disturbed landscape,” Eric laments, “a monoculture of plants that have just one skill.”
In fact, much of the skill of the prairie is unseen, underground. The root systems of prairie plants are vast, sinking ten to fifteen feet deep, enabling them to weather droughts and long, cold winters. Their thick, intertwining roots also hold the soil in place. “Three-fourths of the plants’ biomass is underground,” Eric explains. Above ground, the annual cycle of decay and regeneration of plant matter built up the Midwestern topsoil, in some places up to eight feet deep.
“Grasses are pretty resilient,” he continues. “If it’s dry, they simply slow their growth and store their energy in their roots. In wet periods the grasses grow more full and tall.” Prairie grasses are “the meek that have inherited the earth,” he says. “They don’t necessarily blow their own horn.”
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve manages a mere 11,000 acres of the Flint Hills’ 4 million prairied acres. Most of the Flint Hills’ natural prairie lies in private ownership and is maintained by cattle doing the former work of bison, eating and trimming the prairie grasses and setting the stage for regrowth.
The proximity of limestone bedrock to land surface is the main reason that so much of the prairie remains intact here. In the Flint Hills, limestone lies just inches below the soil and frequently protrudes, ensuring that much of the Flint Hills was never plowed, except in the stream bottoms where the soil covering was thicker.
Instead, the Flint Hills prairie has been cattle-grazed since the arrival of Euro-American ranchers, In the absence of bison, cattle grazing protects the prairie to a reasonable degree. “Ranchers recognize that they are dependent on the long-term health of the grass,” Eric maintains. “If the grasses fail, so do they. And grasses do need to be grazed. Bison were the natural grazers, but now that task falls to cattle.”
There are differences between the grazing habits and behaviors of bison and cattle—with cattle being rougher on the landscape. Bison, for example, might graze a section bare and then not return to it for several years, while cattle are typically confined to limited, albeit large, acreages. Ranchers simply have to “find the delicate balance between economic and ecological needs,” says Eric.
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve grazes both cattle and bison. Its trails make no pretense of separating the hiker from the bison by fence or vehicle. “Keep your distance”—about 100 yards—is all the warning given on refuge signs, with no particular suggestions about how to do that should a bull decide to charge. But in the heat of our July visit, the bison had apparently retreated to some tucked away glen. One bull was visible in the distance, lounging in the sun and then rising to eat, turn around, dust him himself off, and lounge again. We kept our eyes glued on him, out of wonder and respect, and to make sure that he stayed in place. What we would’ve done if he’d bolted, I have no idea. Dianne can probably run faster than me.
But the trail did offer evidence of bison wandering. Here and there was a “buffalo wallow” formed by bison rolling in the grass to cool and dust themselves off. Their weight in the soft prairie soil creates a hollowed-out depression that in turn becomes a tiny mud-pond in the next rainstorm, a haven to an array of smaller prairie creatures. In this totally second-hand manner, bison aid other life forms on the prairie.
At various times throughout the growing season, the prairie bursts with coneflowers, wild bergamot, flowering splurges, showy evening primrose, and more, each taking is individual turn racing across the prairie as red, orange, yellow, and purple buffaloes. Prairie grasses include big bluestem, sideoats grama, Indian grass, hairy grama, and switchgrass.
The Preserve’s ridge top trail makes for impressive vistas. The land stretches out for miles, with only a scattering of barns and other outbuildings visible in the vast horizon beyond the Preserve. Nothing here but wind, a prairie non-enthusiast might deduce.
But the wind, too, was a Red Buffalo racing across the expanse, bending the grass tips in waves that rolled across the hills. You just have to stop to watch it.

-- April 2023

Compass Plants reach up to the big sky in Kansas’ Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

Flint rock at and near the surface hindered the plow in east-central Kansas, preserving 80% of the nation’s remaining tallgrass prairie.

A butterfly flits amid wild bergamot.

The Flint Hills defies the stereotype of unending Kansas plains.

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Hoosier National Forest, Indiana

3/19/2023

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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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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.
*                      *                      *
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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