​ The earth is ancient memoria. It holds within its layers every happening that ever was.
 – John O’Donohue
 
        The slopes of the lightly frosted path dropped steeply away into a stark winter woods. The narrow, curving trail was an esker in the Kettle Moraine State Forest South Unit in southeast Wisconsin. An esker, formed courtesy of our most recent glaciers ten thousand years ago, is a natural elevated path created by sediment dropped at the base of a melt-stream at the bottom of the ice. I remember its name by means of a visual alphabet: its twists and turns remind me of an “S-Curve.”
        Landscape is a text we can read. Stories accumulate here. I tick off glacial formations like squares on a bingo card as we hike through Kettle Moraine. A kame, shaped like the bottom half of an hour glass sand pile and formed much the same way from sediment dropped when meltwater plummeted down a vertical chute in the ice. A tear-drop shaped drumlin, fashioned from rubble dragged and scraped across the bedrock and whose arrowed edge points in the direction of the glacial crawl.
        Plus the two features for which the state forest is named: a moraine, the steep line of rubble pushed along at the front or side of an advancing glacier; and a kettle, a pot-shaped indentation in the forest floor formed by a huge chunk of calved-off melting ice. When the last of the ice chunk melted away, its indentation in the outwash floor became a kettle pond.
       Such is a reading of Kettle Moraine South Unit, a 22,000 acre state forest that stretches in a northeastly band for 30 miles beyond Whitewater, Wisconsin.
         My wife Dianne and I recently hiked on the Ice Age Trail in Kettle Moraine on a sunny but chilly winter day. More than thirty miles of Wisconsin’s 1,100-mile long Ice Age Trail wind through the state forest, roughly following the furthest advance of the last great glaciers. 
        The winter thus far had been mild, but a stinging wind swiping down from the north offered the imagination a hint of a glacial chill. But only a hint. In truth, the slight dusting of snow served mostly to offer some color contrast to the browned-out woods and brought the sometimes hidden glacial features into relief.
       In addition to glacial features, the forest chapters of oak, pine, and aspen punctuated with prairies, springs, and marshes offer habitat to coyotes, foxes, Cooper’s hawks, and sandhill cranes. Kettle Moraine is an Audubon Society Important Bird Area (IBA), home or breeding ground to 137 woodland, grassland, and marshland species.
       More of the Ice Age Trail climbs through the Lapham Peak Unit of the state forest, rising from a lowland boardwalk crossing over the marsh and scaling up through the woods to the peak. The trail passes alongside the 45-foot wooden watch tower capping the highest point in Waukesha County.
       But the land holds in its pages human stories as well and reminds us that our every footprint is inscribed in the landscape and is eventually swallowed by it.
       A hike through the Scuppernong Springs Trail near the north of the forest’s scattered holdings tells how humans have lived both with and against the landscape over time. Archaeological findings of arrowheads and flint flakes point to Native American encampments on high ground overlooking the marsh, the choice of location based on access to plentiful game and fresh water.
       White settlement altered the landscape. The 1½-mile trail brushes past the fading traces of an 1846 sawmill and the still-standing walls of a 1909 marl plant. Marl is a lime-based, grayish white soil formed at the bottom of glacial lakes and used as fertilizer and as building mortar. For six years up to 60 employees dug the clay out of the marsh, processed it, and put it on train cars on rail run specifically to the plant. By 1915 the plant was closed, the railroad abandoned, and the entirety left for the woods and marsh to reclaim.
       A 19th century cranberry bog and a trout hatchery flourished behind man-made dikes. These were removed in the 1990s to restore natural habitat along the Scuppernong River for native wild brook trout, beaver, otter, muskrat, and mink. The springs themselves can still be seen bubbling up from the marly clay bottom.
       At nearby Paradise Springs additional natural springs erupt where the water table is sliced diagonally by the rocky slopes. Thirty thousand gallons of fresh water per hour pour from the rocks at a constant 47 degrees, year round, into a scenic valley. The resources and scenery attracted both entrepreneurs and those seeking an idyllic escape from Milwaukee, about 40 miles away.  A ½-mile leisurely trail—much of it handicap-accessible, winds past the remains of a 1920s horse track and a water bottling plant that once produced the label “Lullaby Baby Drinking Water.” The plant’s foundations and cement stairway are all that remain.
       Beyond these lies the Fieldstone Spring House built in the 1930s to protect the spring waters. The Spring House originally sported a copper-domed roof. Roofless today, all that remains are the fieldstone walls and the spring as it emerges from the rocky hillside. The dammed-up pond still harbors trout. The grounds around the Paradise Springs Hotel, a popular honeymoon resort whose foundation ruins are located near the pond, once boasted a menagerie of peacocks, monkeys, and pheasants. All are gone now, except for the spring, the pond, and assortment of ruins and foundations.
        Historians speak of palimpsests, ancient and medieval texts whose base—whether parchment or animal hide—was so valuable that it was oft-reused. Old lettering was scraped from the pages to make way for new text, but the old still showed through faintly.
       Landscape is a palimpsest. Stories as ancient as the glaciers and first-peoples, as comparatively modern as abandoned factories and fisheries, and even as recent as today’s worn footpath sink back into—but still faintly grace—the land.
 
-- January 2019

 
            The Wisconsin River roiled and churned and licked at its banks as we drove across the Highway 23 bridge at Spring Green. Recent recurring mid-September rains had emboldened the river with a relentless purpose.
            My son Brian and I were en route to the Spring Green Nature Preserve to meet up with our local hiking guide for the day, conservationist and author Curt Meine. Having gotten ourselves lost and fifteen minutes late, we flew into the Preserve parking lot with as much haste as the rushing river.
            Curt deflected my apologies: “What, so I had to spend a few extra minutes basking in this glorious morning?”
            The Spring Green Preserve embodies both sides of this morning: the gentle swaying of prairie grasses in the early autumn sun belies its thunderous beginnings.
            The Spring Green Preserve is a rare Midwestern sand prairie born perhaps 17,000 years ago in the waning glacial period when an ice dam holding back meltwater in Glacial Lake Wisconsin suddenly burst. The escaping waters carved out today’s Wisconsin Dells and surged down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi. “It must have been an epic flood,” Curt mused.
            Geologists speculate the rush may have been as quick as seven days, during which it flooded the valley and filled it with 100 feet of glacially pulverized sand from the glacial lake upstream. The Spring Green Preserve showcases an 1,100-acre sandy remnant of the outwash and of the blowing winds and dunes that followed.
            As Curt, Brian, and I entered the prairie, a host of grasshoppers flicked across the path ahead of us. As we walked, Curt often stopped us to point out Indian grass, whorled milkweed, blazing star, big bluestem, and little bluestem grasses.
The prairie sports both tallgrass and shortgrass species. Tallgrass like big bluestem is more prevalent in the Midwest where it thrives in the typical rich, black, soil. Here in the sand prairie it grows in the wetter lowlands.  Shortgrass like little bluestem is more common in the drier west. But shortgrass species like little bluestem are quite happy in Midwestern sand prairies, where the soil drains quickly, mimicking drier, Western conditions. Here it begins growing where the prairie rises to meet the bluffs that loom 200 feet above the floodplain .
            More unusual to the Midwestern eye, though, is the prickly pear cactus growing quite nicely, if low, in the Wisconsin sand. No doubt the cactus inspired the sand prairie to have been known colloquially as the Wisconsin Desert.
            Curt points to plant variations just beyond the hiking path. Sand blowouts—temporary exposures of sand caused by winds funneling up the river valley—create their own micro communities where conspicuous patches of prairie cottonweed wave in the wind.  Conversely, small groves of black oak dot the occasional sinks of wetter soil.
            The sand prairie provides niche homes to animal species as well. The Ornate Box Turtle is so rare that conservationists track their movements with radio-transmitters, making sure, for example, that the turtles are burrowed into the sand before the prairie is burned.
The prairie provides habitat for all sorts of crawling and winged critters with menacing names: tiger beetles, wolf spiders, black widow spiders, predatory wasps. The three of us amused ourselves for a while watching two beetles waddling along with a chunk of insect. We couldn’t decide if they were ineptly trying to cooperate or if beetle #1 was trying to steal the prize. 
For those who prefer avian wildlife, the sand prairie is home to dickcissels, grasshopper sparrows, indigo buntings, orchard orioles, and many other species that nest in the grasses or stop over during migration.  The Preserve is a favorite location for birding enthusiasts.
“This is the place to find the lark sparrow,” a grassland bird listed as a Species of Special Concern, Curt explains. “They like the open ground and patches of sand.” Not so the sandhill crane, another rare bird found in Autumn along the river. “We’re wetland birds,” Curt says on their behalf as we watch a pair circle the rim of the prairie and disappear beyond the terrace bluff. “This place is not for us.”
            Sand prairies made for challenging agricultural conditions because they drain so quickly and are not nutrient-rich. Even so, much of this habitat has been lost. Curt points out that today’s Spring Green Preserve was identified early on in the 1940s for preservation by conservationist Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries. Leopold “wanted to protect the best gems,” Curt says, and included this site due to its niche plant and animal communities.
Preservation didn’t happen overnight, however. The land was eventually purchased by the Nature Conservancy beginning in 1971, and restoration began shortly thereafter.
Prairie restoration and maintenance is labor-intensive. In the absence of prairie fire in the post-settlement era, sand prairies tended to be overtaken by red cedars. Many of the nearby bluff terraces are cedar-draped, but due to tree removal and controlled burns, the Spring Green Preserve looks more like it did in the early 1800s. Often times a burn will bring about its own reseeding, Curt adds, “releasing prairie seed already in the ground.”
            As we finish our sand prairie hike, Curt resituates us in the sand-rich Wisconsin River valley that resulted from the break in the ice dam holding back the waters of Glacial Lake Wisconsin. The Wisconsin River, he says, is known as the river of a thousand islands, always shifting “islands, shifting because the river floats on a bed of sand.” “The river is a paddler’s delight because it contains no dams for 92 miles, a direct result of the deep sand, Curt says, pointing out that “it’s hard to put a dam on a sand foundation.”
After the hike and a lunch, we depart in our separate directions: Curt to his nearby home; Brian back to Chicago where he lives; and me back home to Dubuque.
          I cross the rain-swelled Wisconsin River one more time and imagine its waters chasing me downstream to the Mississippi where it will crest past my hometown in a few days’ time.
As it has done through the ages. 

​-- October 2018

 ​    On either side of Devil’s Lake—bookending one of Wisconsin’s most-visited and largest parks—lie two tiny gems, Natural Bridge State Park and Parfrey’s Glen Natural Area.  At roughly 500 acres each, they can be easily combined with a visit to the more popular park, or can be enjoyed in leap-frog fashion, bypassing the crowds and parking hassle.
      On a late-autumn Sunday afternoon, we chose to leap-frog. 
      It seems we leap-frogged across the seasons and centuries as well.
 
NATURAL BRIDGE STATE PARK
     On a blustery, late-November afternoon, early winter was practicing at misery.  My wife Dianne and I had brought bikes along for a day-adventure in case we found some new Wisconsin back roads, but the north winds convinced us otherwise.  We left the bikes on the hitch-rack and instead hiked into the woods at Wisconsin’s Natural Bridge State Park.  The hardwood forest would provide some shelter.  Inside the woods it was late autumn again.
      The park, established in 1973, lies 15 miles southwest of Devil’s Lake.  Its namesake sandstone arch popped into view when we turned a corner on the Indian Moccasin Trail.  The natural bridge spans 80 feet across a valley, capping a 15-by-25-foot oval-shaped hole in the sandstone, eroded over the eons by wind and water.  The brown and yellow layered arch sits atop its bedrock base like a giant old-time telephone receiver on its mount.
      At the base of the arch, time had carved another indentation, a rock shelter that was home to some of the Midwest’s earliest inhabitants. At 60 feet wide x 30 feet deep, the rock shelter revealed its story to archaeologists through remnant meal-bones, mollusk shells, and fire-pit charwood dating back to 10,000 B.C.  Paleo-Indians sheltered at this site as the nearby glaciers retreated.  Ancient soot is still visible on the sandstone walls.
      A spur off the Moccasin Trail leads to a cliff face overlooking the edge of the glacier-free Driftless Region.  The bluff top prairie is graced with Indian grass and little blue-stem as well as  numerous ferns, and even cacti.
Back on the main trail and beyond the natural bridge lies a hardwood forest and a guided trail indicating how Native Americans used the forest plants and trees: quaking aspen bark for pain relief and poultices; witch hazel for skin irritants; wild black cherry for coughs and colds. 
       As we left the autumnal shelter of the woods, we re-emerged into the blustery winds.  Twelve thousand years ago we might have stocked the rock shelter with supplies for the upcoming winter.  Instead, we took refuge in the Honda and drove away.
           
PARFREY’S GLEN STATE NATURAL AREA
            It was a good day to keep driving, so we sailed seven miles east of Devil’s Lake to our second stop at Parfrey’s Glen.
The glen, or valley, was settled in the mid-1800s, the fast-moving Parfrey’s Glen Creek offering power for an assortment of saw and grist mills.  It takes its name from its last inhabitant, Robert Parfrey, who ran a grist mill there from 1865 to 1876.  The site remained a favorite of visitors thereafter, and in 1952 it became Wisconsin’s first State Natural Area.
      Hiking upstream through Parfrey’s Glen is like pacing out a song that starts softly with violins, builds steadily, and crescendos with crashing cymbals, timpani, and bass drums.  The first quarter-mile edges gently enough through the prairie alongside a kittenish stream that tumbles out of the forest and hurries across scatterings of well-worn stones. 
      But the serene bottom-glen is deceptive. The change begins gradually, with the forested creek edge giving way to small outcrops that the stream burbles past.  From there, by twist and turn the path leads upwards into an increasingly steep splashing Jurassic-Park-like gorge of purplish quartzite. 
     In its uppermost reaches, the rock walls of the glen are 100 foot sheer drop-offs carved into the angular bedrock 12,000 years ago by glacial meltwater.   Potholes dot the ledges, round-shaped hollows in the rock scooped out by swirling boulders that had been caught up in the eddies of the rushing meltwater.
      This wasn’t the first time the glen had seen dramatic waters.  The walls of the glen are sandstone embedded with quartzite conglomerate—rounded pebbles and boulders seemingly cemented in the sandstone.  These were formed on tropical seashores 500 million years ago when equatorial storms tossed and smoothed the stones before they settled to the ocean floor and mixed into the hardening bedrock. 
      Cool summer seepage from the rocks creates a microclimate, harboring more-northerly, and often rare and threatened species of plants and animals like northern monkshood, false foxglove, cerulean warblers, and diving beetles.  
      On this November day the glen, protected and warm, felt like spring.  Green leaves still clung to the wind-sheltered trees.  Trunks and boulders were green with abundant moss.  Stream water rushed everywhere, cascading off boulders, pooling into rock-lined ponds, and sliding through the gaps. 
      The uppermost reach of the gorge is fed by a waterfall.  Here the stream exits a serene forest and plunges into the time hole before emerging calmly again at the lower end of the glen.
      Our hike wasn’t wall-to-wall people, but it wasn’t solitary either.  At the lower reaches of the glen we watched two young siblings testing their ability to hop-scotch across the stream atop a few exposed boulders while their parents encouraged them.  Further up the gorge, young couples crawled across the ledges and leaped across stream crossings. While an early winter wind blustered outside the park, inside the glen it felt like a new vernal season had just begun.
                                                                         *                      *                      *
            Summer days are meant for big parks with lakes for swimming and kayaking and long, challenging trails that work up a sweat.  In the off-season we chose to visit two tiny parks instead. 
            Almost forgotten, Natural Bridge State Park and Parfrey’s Glen took us to forgotten time as well,  leap-frogging us across the seasons and across the ages.
 
-- Kevin Koch
March 2018

      Bird specialist Jon Stravers and I are driving through leaf-strewn dirt roads along the river bluffs of Alamakee County.   We bounce over a few ruts, occasionally pausing to peer through the woods at the old oaks and hickories where Jon tracks cerulean warblers each spring and summer.  But in general our movement is upward, ascending through the forest to a cliff face where Jon has constructed, rock by rock, a 1000-stone raptor effigy.
        Stravers, who lives most of the year in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, conducts bird-nesting inventories for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, Yellow River State Forest, and other environmental groups and agencies.  His work has resulted in much of the region encompassing Yellow River State Forest, Effigy Mounds National Monument, the Upper Mississippi National Fish & Wildlife Refuge, and Pikes Peak being designated a 35,000-acre Globally Important Bird Area (IBA) in 2014.
        Parking where the road ends fifty yards from the overlook, we swish through fallen leaves till we emerge at the cliff-face with its view clear to the east, save for one tenacious old cedar clinging to the limestone edge.  “That gnarly old dog, how long do you think he’s been here?” Jon rasps.  Stravers, with a headful of unruly gray hair, rumpled outdoor clothing, and cargo pockets filled to the brim, looks at home in these woods.
        Before us lies the 35-foot wing-spanned stone raptor, its left wing a few dozen feet from the overlook.  It looks much lighter than its rocky weight, as if it might take flight at a moment’s notice.
The spacious forest is both home and migratory haven to a wide range of birds, including coopers hawks, scarlet tanagers, and Jon Stravers’ favorites, the red shouldered hawk and cerulean warbler.
         Stravers’ bird inventories, for example, have identified 190 territories of the cerulean warbler, which is in 75% decline nationwide but thriving in the Driftless. The Effigy Mounds-Yellow River IBA provides habitat for over 100 bird species, including tropical migrants that seasonally inhabit the area. The IBA also includes nesting sites of rare and reintroduced raptors like the peregrine falcon.
       Across the river, Wyalusing State Park is included in a separate Wisconsin IBA program, adding to the overall bird sanctuary.   But, says Jon, “The birds don’t pay any attention to political boundaries, and I try to ignore some of that as well.”
                                                                             *                      *                      *
         On our way to the stone raptor, Jon stopped to point out the 30-inch diameter cottonwoods, ancient oaks and black walnuts that his cerulean warblers live among.  Their choice of tree “perhaps has something to do with tree structure and topography–open spacing in the upper branches,” Jon said, exercising his Audubon thinking.         Then Jon engaged his mystical side: “Or perhaps it could be the cerulean recognizing the wisdom of an ancient tree.”
        Cerulean warblers migrate to the Driftless Area from Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and the northern Amazon.  Jon marvels at the mystery: “How do they find their way over 3000 miles, a forest bird crossing the Gulf of Mexico trusting the compass in their heart and the elders of their clan?”
       The cerulean warblers usually arrive around May 5.  In May and June, as early as 4:30 a.m. Jon is at the Yellow River Forest or nearby to be in the best location when first light arrives.  He has been tracking about 200 ceruleans in the region, learning where they nest and how they defend their territories.  “They talk differently when they court, when the eggs are laid, and when their chicks are hatched,” Jon explains.  After the young reach adolescence, the parents stop singing and the family unit blends into the surrounding clan of warblers.  They leave Yellow River by the end of August to return south.  
       Jon is as much caught up in the mystery as the science of migrating birds.  “I’m trying to figure out what draws them in, what brings them back.”  The mystery, for Jon at least, largely resides in the Driftless landscape, particular the region encompassing the Yellow River State Forest and nearby Effigy Mounds National Monument.
        “Something happened to me where I first visited the bird effigies at Effigy Mounds,” he says, describing the nearby national monument along the Mississippi bluffs that protects almost 200 Native American mounds, including 30 in the shapes of bears and birds.  “I loved that view, that feeling, that remoteness when nobody else is up there.  There began a longing within me to be close to that place.  Though I knew little about the people who built them, I felt connected to them.”
       In 2015 Stravers first began building a stone raptor on a cliff overlook.  His current raptor sits atop Andy Mountain near Harper’s Ferry.   On his regular travels along the forest roads, he picks up fist- to lap-sized rocks and hauls them to the overlook, where he places them, stone by stone, in the outline or interior of the growing bird.  Like the mound-builders who placed heart-stones collected from far away at the center of their effigies, Jon has also collected rocks from Idaho, where his daughter and grandchildren live, and added them to the raptor.
      He has built similar stone raptors in northeast Iowa, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Florida in places where he senses a sacred landscape.
        Today Jon pulls a new stone from the back of the car to place on the wing.  Some stones, he says, are placed for symbolic value (such as the red stone at the raptor’s heart), while the rest are placed for the shape and fitting of the rock. 
       “I come here to become centered,” Jon reflects after placing the stone.  “We all need ‘spiritual exercise’ like we need physical exercise.  It only works if you consistently practice it.” 
So we place a new stone on the effigy, turn back to the car, and descend through the gray and golden light, giving space for the spirit of the raptor to take flight.

A PRAIRIE RESTORATION
By Kevin Koch
 
            Daryl guided the prairie burn like a sheepdog nudging the flock around the bend and tucking it into the valley.  He dribbled out the first flames from his drop torch along an edge of winter-browned tallgrass, forcing a line of fire to crawl against the wind for 20 feet until it petered out.  Then he circled back across the prairie and drop-torched bits of flame along another line.  This flame roared to life and rode the wind with soaring abandon till it reached the previous burn line and sank away.
          Dave Cushman, the owner of this private patch of prairie, had hired Daryl Parker of Tri-State Habitat Specialists, to conduct a safe burn on the 453-acre property. Dave had invited a few friends to help out, which mostly consisted of walking along the burn line and tamping down any flames that threatened to go rogue.
          This was Dave’s second annual prairie burn on his Jackson county property.  Along with restoring natural tallgrasses and wildflowers, he has constructed ponds for wildlife, built berms to minimize erosion, and revitalized the health of acreage’s forests.  Managing a prairie woodland ecosystem in the absence of the full range of natural inputs is a bit like a sheepdog’s task: nudging here, tucking there. 
           Dave and his wife purchased the property in 2001.  The previous owner had put much of the hilly, erodible land that that had been farmed continuously since the 1840s into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).  But, having retired the land, the former owner was ready to retire himself. 
          Dave’s intentions for the property developed gradually.  The CRP lands at the time of purchase were planted in bromegrass, a non-native shallow-rooted grass that holds the soil but can be easily reconverted to agriculture. Bromegrass does little to attract wildlife.  But Dave was increasingly drawn to the land’s original survey from the 1840s that recorded elk, deer, and wild turkey in an oak savanna landscape.
          Dave and I toured the property in late fall, bouncing along mowed paths in a pickup truck, winding among the prairie, ponds, and edgewoods.  A rooster pheasant waddled out into the path in front of us, strutting down the lane, reluctant to fly off, though he finally did.  “He must have someone interesting back in the grass,” chuckled Dave. 
            The 196 acres that have been restored to prairie are divided into three sections, one of which is scheduled for burning each spring.  As we circled the prairie, the three sections were easily distinguishable.  This year’s burned acres were vibrant with big bluestem, side oats grama, switchgrass, goldenrod, coneflowers, blackeyed susans, prairie dropseed, and other prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Last year’s burn was healthy as well, just a bit more unkempt.  The third parcel, never yet burned but scheduled for next spring, was in definite need of a haircut.
           Dave hired local forester and grassland expert Kevin Oetken to help with the conversion to native prairie grasses and wildflowers.  Dave doesn’t like using chemicals on the land, so the first step pained him, but was necessary.  First, the bromegrass had to be mowed low and killed off with herbicide in the fall and following spring.  Once the bromegrass had been removed, the next step was to plant a 39-seed variety mixture of native grasses and wildflowers in the late fall.
          Around the same time, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) approached Dave about building berms and ponds to reduce runoff from the steep-sloped property as part of a plan to reduce erosion throughout the region and limiting runoff.  Over the last few years Dave has constructed four ponds and 10-12 berms and basins for erosion control. 
          The ponds, Dave says, “are wildlife magnets.”  As we drove past we noted a ring of beaten-down grasses around each pond resulting from the wildlife drawn to the water.
          Next, Dave turned his attention to improving the timber stands of oak, hickory, and walnut by removing scrub trees so that the hardwoods can flourish and replenish. He has recently planted some American chestnut trees.
          Dave’s father was a forester, and he and his brothers grew up with a love of the outdoors.  “I probably spent 30 weekends a year from the time I was 5 or 6  hunting, fishing, and hiking while growing up.”
          Dave and his family—across three generations—enjoy hunting on the property, but also enjoy watching the re-established wildlife. “Before the restoration,” Dave says, “we really only saw red-winged blackbirds out here.  Now we see orioles, wrens, red-tailed hawks, tanagers.  There are deer, pheasants, lots of butterflies.”
          One hundred fifty years of farming on the steep-sloped acres depleted much of the topsoil, but over time, the prairie will restore the soil.  Deep native roots aerate the soil, providing places for organisms to grow, which feed insects, which in turn feed birds and butterflies and draws back a wider array of wildlife.
         “I don’t think that this property should ever be put back into production,” Dave says, contemplating future plans to assure this.
          Dave is proud of what has been accomplished on the farm, but insists the story of his prairie farm is not about himself, but about the land.  In addition, he points out that his prairie is an isolated plot.  “Corridors of native plants are needed,” he explains, in order to attract migrating and nesting birds, butterflies, and more.  
          A month before Dave and I bounced along the grassy lanes in his pickup, I had come out to the acreage on my own.  It was the first I had seen the property since Daryl had managed the fire and the straggling band of helpers.
          That April I had seen a scorched, black earth unfolding behind a sweeping orange and golden prairie fire.  Now, in early fall, the golds and oranges were back—in brown-eyed susans and compass plants and golden rod, and in the monarch butterflies that flitted about like so many prairie plants with wings.
 
-- Kevin Koch
December 2017
 
 

 THE  PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS
By Kevin Koch
 
     Growling thunder and a darkening sky to the west put a quick retreat to our second day’s hike on the Escarpment Trail in the Porcupine Mountains.  The rush lay in contrast to the leisurely lunch my wife and I had enjoyed on an outcrop 500 feet above the Lake of the Clouds a few minutes earlier. 
     The Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park offers a dose of both urgency and calm as it stretches 60,000 acres along the south shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan.  The primacy of the present moment quickly dissipates into the eons here.
       Known colloquially as the Porkies, the range rises 1000 to 1600 feet above Lake Superior, forming parallel ridges a mile or so inland.  The parallel ridges are separated by glacial lakes, marshes, and old-growth, virgin forest.  From a fire tower at the crest of the Summit Trail, the highest point in the Porkies, the ridges undulate from peak to peak, forming a silhouette against the horizon that supposedly reminded early inhabitants of the hunched-up back of a porcupine.
     Dianne and I spent most of our hiking time on the Escarpment Trail, whose sheer basalt cliffs drop precipitously into the Lake of the Clouds.  It was a clear day on our first hike, so the lake reflected the deep blue of the seemingly-near sky instead.
     The escarpment—the term meaning a long, steep-sloped ridge—was formed a billion years ago when the earth’s crust began to pull apart in this region, forming the Midcontinent Rift. Volcanic magma rushed in to fill the void.  Uplifted 40,000 million years ago, the escarpment layers were later scoured by glaciers.  As we hiked along the ridge, we could still see scratch marks left on the exposed bedrock by the grinding glaciers.
     The Porkies are home to over 30,000 acres of old growth virgin forest, including the largest stand of hardwood west of the Adirondacks.  Towering eastern hemlocks—100-foot-tall, short-needled pines—shade large sections of the forest floor, preventing other trees from getting established and resulting in a “clean” understory from which the hemlock trunks arise like cathedral columns.
     Human habitation came early to the Porkies, with archaeological evidence dating back 8000 years.  The Ojibwe were the last indigenous peoples of the region.  The initial Euro-American appearance was quick, furious, and destructive.  Large swaths along Lake Superior were logged until the remaining old-growth forest was preserved when the Porkies were declared a wilderness park in 1945.
     Copper mining blew through the region like a wildfire as well.  Although intermittent mining dates back thousands of years, the mid-1840s saw a short-lived copper mining rush.  We hiked the Union Mine Trail through the bottomlands where interpretive signs point out the eroding evidence of an 1846 company mining community.  In October 1846 a miner named William Spaulding wrote home that “everything seems to prosper at this location; we are not only turning out copper, but children.  Mrs. Shin gave birth to a whopping baby boy today.” 
            The boom ended quickly.  The tone of Spaulding’s February 1847 message home foreshadowed the gloom that would soon overtake the mining community: “A man by the name of Baily was found frozen to death 4 miles from the mouth of the Iron River.”  The Union Mine was abandoned later in 1847 due to slumping copper prices.  It was reopened briefly in the 1860s and early 1900s, but each time closed quickly due to the vagaries of the market and limited ore deposits.
            The Union Mine trail led us past several mostly disappeared shafts as well some small waterfalls. Indeed, one of the biggest draws to the Porcupine Mountains—and to the Upper Peninsula in general—are the innumerable cascades.  The topography of the region creates a small “continental divide,” with waters south of the park embarking on a leisurely 2300-mile path to the Gulf of Mexico while waters from the Porkies plummet the few short miles to Lake Superior with great urgency.
            Our campsite was near the Presque Isle River.  Here the wooded Presque River Trail edges alongside numerous jagged waterfalls and bouldered rapids.  Further downstream, the river tumbles through a basalt valley, pounding through narrow draws and doubling back on itself to carve out “potholes” in the black rock. 
            Finally the Presque Isle River eases out into Lake Superior.  Our introduction to the mouth of the river came at sunset.  We caught the lake in summer calm as it drew the sun down into its belly.
            Lake Superior is, of course, the largest of the Great Lakes, but with depths reaching to 1330 feet, it could hold the waters of the four other lakes combined.  The most northerly of the lakes as well, its waters are bone-aching cold.  I swam briefly along the shoreline, hugging the top six inches as much as possible to float along a thin, sun-warmed layer. 
            The deep, clear Superior waters can turn urgent quickly, though, with November gales notoriously welling up to pull down yet another forlorn shipwreck.
          Both urgency and calm vie for the upper hand in the Porcupine Mountains.  Adrenaline pumps in proximity to a rushing waterfall while a quiet lunch on a basalt cliff outcrop above the Lake of the Clouds soberly reminds you of the power of the ages.
            But in a small corner of the Porkies—in a section added later and not subject to the park’s environmental protections—new exploratory drillings for copper mining erupted in the winter of 2017, accompanied by the usual voices pitting jobs against preservation. 
            Is there an urgency here?  Is there a long view?