Kevin Koch -- ​The Driftless Land
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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
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The overlook at Pikes Peak State Park offers a sweeping view of the Mississippi River near McGregor, Iowa.
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A small stream cascades over a hardened lip of rock at Bridal Veil Falls.
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Fall sumac brightens the view at the Pike Peak overlook.
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The Mississippi River is encased in ice in a winter view from the Point Ann Cliff.
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International Crane Foundation, Baraboo, WI

1/2/2022

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Sandhill crane parents rear their young colts. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)
Out on the bog a crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly hulk into the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings. – Aldo Leopold, “Marshland Elegy,” A Sand County Almanac
 
     We heard them before we could see them. We’d barely exited the car when we were met with that curious call of the sandhill cranes, the short ratchety blasts that sound a bit like backpedaling on your bicycle or the unwinding cast of your fishing reel.
     And then the crane dance followed when we came into view, two enormous birds strutting tip-toed like ballet queens, hopping and unfurling their massive wings.
     My wife Dianne and I have seen migrating sandhill cranes before, usually when we’re on a fall bicycle ride along the Wisconsin River. They’re out slurping invertebrates from the river bank or plucking leftover corn from adjacent farm fields. But this day we were watching them at the International Crane Foundation (ICF) grounds at Baraboo, Wisconsin. The site includes 15 outdoor exhibit pens called Cranes of the World, one for each crane species. Each spacious area is specially designed for the habitat needs of that species’ bonded pair. For example, while each space has a pond for foraging, the Siberian Crane has a larger pool, as it likes to swim like a swan. These cranes are “ambassadors for their cousins across the world,” says Kim Smith, Chief Operating Officer of the ICF.
    The International Crane Foundation is a nonprofit organization centered in Baraboo but working to protect cranes in 50 different countries. They work with governments to protect crane habitat, help native peoples co-exist with cranes in their environments, and breed cranes for re-introduction to the wild. And the Visitors Center and grounds introduce the public to majesty of cranes, educate them about the ICF mission, and provide a “reflective, healing space that is so important right now,” Smith explains.   
     The 15 international crane species share common features of stick-figure legs, long graceful necks, and large, intimidating wings, but they vary in other markings. North America’s sandhills have grey bodies with a distinctive red cap above and surrounding the eyes. The black-crowned crane and grey-crowned crane of east and southeast Africa sport spiky, tan crowns. The demoiselle crane and red-crowned crane of east Asia have stylish black-and-white tuxedoed necklines. And North America’s whooping crane is stunningly white with black-tipped wings and a red-black head.
     Also quite common across the cranes’ physical environs is how they are woven into human spirituality. From Japan to Australia to Mongolia, “cranes are iconic in art and spirituality,” says Smith. Across cultures, she adds, “When you hear that call, it’s a symbol of peace and healing.” In Australian mythology, the yellow yolk of a crane egg begat the sun. In China the crane represents longevity. Their life-long partnering habits symbolize fidelity. For the ancient Celts, cranes were messengers from the gods. Standing upright like people, they were thought to have originally been human. Indian and Nepalese prayer wheels are decorated with images of cranes.
    Some cranes are migratory while others maintain fixed homes. Wisconsin’s sandhills notoriously gather along the Wisconsin River in the fall, cooking up flight plans to winter grounds in Florida and other southern locations with access to open water. “Cranes have strong fidelity to their migrating grounds,” Smith explains. “Parents teach their offspring their paths.” That said, climate change and the need for habitat is leading cranes to more northerly winter grounds, such as southern Indiana.
     Although many of their habitats are threatened worldwide, conservation efforts have helped to bring some of the species back from the brink. Displays in the Visitors Center (open May through October), throughout the grounds, and on the organization’s website track the species’ numbers over time. North American sandhill and whooping cranes are generally increasing. Sandhills fought their way back from near-extinction in the 1940s, although the whooping crane is still endangered. The Siberian crane is critically endangered, and six of the fifteen species are categorized as “vulnerable.”
     In addition to working in the cranes’ home environments, the ICF also operates the  Felburn-Leidigh Chick Rearing Facility—or Crane City—on the Baraboo grounds to hatch younglings (called colts) that can be released into the wild. Crane City houses 80-120 cranes, mostly whooping cranes. Bonded pairs in Crane City have their own “crane condos.”  And the exhibit cranes sometimes incubate eggs from Crane City, too. “Everyone has a job around here,” Smith laughs.
     The international foundation’s headquartering at Baraboo is both fortuitous and logical. Founders George Archibald and Ron Sauey met in ornithology graduate school in the early 1970s. Archibald was a crane enthusiast with a passion for the writings of conservationist Aldo Leopold. Sauey shared the same passions and lived nearly in Leopold’s back yard near Baraboo. The two established the International Crane Foundation on a former dairy farm owned by the Sauey family. “It was a big dream for two graduate students,” says Smith. Today its 70+ staff members work on five continents supporting cranes.
     But the ICF grounds support more than cranes. The property also includes over 200 acres of woodland and restored prairie. Dianne and I hiked the grounds in late October while an overcast sky turned gold beneath the fall leaf cover of the oaks and maples. The trails also open onto prairies seeded from remnant patches on the property and from other sites within 50 miles. The prairie pond offers habitat for frogs, turtles, and waterfowl.
     The conservationist Aldo Leopold’s famous “shack” on the Wisconsin River sat just four crane-flight miles from today’s International Crane Foundation grounds. In his “Marshland Elegy,” Leopold wrote, “The quality of cranes lies…as yet beyond the reach of words,” and yet his own words captured the sublimity of this ancient bird: “When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.”
     Leopold feared in the 1940s that future generations might never encounter the call of cranes. The International Crane Foundation is working to make sure that never happens.
 
-- Kevin Koch
December 2021
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A black-necked crane enjoys his exhibit pen at the International Crane Foundation. Each pen includes a background mural of the species’ home habitat. (Photo by International Crane Foundation.)
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Red-crowned cranes in their home environment in Japan. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)
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Sandhill cranes awaiting first snow. (Photo by Ted Thousand, International Crane Foundation.)
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Crane eggs in the ICF incubation center nicknamed Crane City. (Photo by International Crane Foundation.)
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The ICF grounds also includes hiking trails through woodlands and restored prairie. (Photo by Kevin Koch)
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Cahokia (Illinois)

11/10/2021

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Monks Mound at Cahokia is the largest Native American mound in North America at 100 feet tall.
        From the platform top of Monks Mound, I can see seven miles across the Mississippi River to the St. Louis Gateway Arch. You might say I’m seeing 900 years into the future.
       Monks Mound is the largest of about 70 remaining Native-American mounds at the Cahokia State Historic Site near Collinsville, IL, not far from the east bank of the Mississippi. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cahokia was a Native American city with as many as 30,000 residents by1100 A.D., larger than London at that time. No American city surpassed its size until 1800.
       The city once encompassed six square miles, including at least 120 mounds of varying types, and was the hub for numerous outlying villages as well.
        By 1300 A.D. Cahokia had disappeared.
                                                               *                      *                      *
        Dianne and I toured the Cahokia grounds on a hot September morning under the tutelage of a young archaeology graduate named Matt. The city, he told us, took hold around 800 A.D. as a renaissance began in the American Bottom, the name given to the fertile floodplain at the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. An agricultural revolution based on the “three sisters” of beans, squash, and especially corn allowed for greater food storage, enabling large populations to live together. The Mississippian culture that flourished at Cahokia reigned from Florida to Wisconsin, but Cahokia was its largest city.
      Cahokia, Matt told us, boasted three types of mounds. Conical mounds were similar to those along the upper Mississippi, though taller at up to twenty feet high. Many of these held burials. The second type were ridgetop mounds, oval-shaped mounds capped off with angular ridges like rooflines. The ridgetops may have been added when a mound’s original purpose was completed. One ridgetop mound, for example, sits atop three separate conical burial mounds.
     But the platform mounds particularly define and identify Cahokia and the Mississippian culture. Platform mounds are like pyramids without angular peaks. The flat platform at the top usually housed temples, council houses, and the dwelling places of shamans and high chiefs.
        Monks Mound was and still is premier among the platform mounds at Cahokia. Standing 100 feet tall on a base of 1040 by 800 feet, it is the largest Native American mound in North America. Slightly larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt and the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico, it was constructed by Cahokians carrying 26 million cubic feet of soil, sand, clay, and rock from nearby floodplain “borrow pits.”
      The Cahokia State Historic Site today encompasses 2200 acres. But we strolled rather than hiked the grounds to maintain a thoughtful presence. Over here had sat the huts of the common people. Over there ran a wooden stockade walling in the inner city. Before us lay the Grand Plaza, a rectangular public space stretching1600 feet from the base of Monks Mound. Cahokians likely gathered in the Grand Plaza for markets and festivals, and for religious, civic, and sporting events.
      Later, we hiked a trail winding in and out of the woods where we found more mounds in a remote clearing. Deer materialized at the edge of the forest, perhaps relieved that they’d arrived 700 years too late to be hunted. In another corner of Cahokia, we walked amid Woodhenge, a reconstructed circle of 48 red cedar posts aligned with the equinoxes, solstices, and other celestial events.
       The Mississippian culture spread well beyond the American Bottom. Wisconsin’s Aztalan State Park (30 miles east of Madison) has three platform mounds at a distance of 300 miles from Cahokia. Trempealeau, WI, nearly 500 river miles to the north, likewise has three platform mounds overlooking the Mississippi, as well as artifacts directly linking the builders back to Cahokia.
       No one is quite sure why Cahokia was abandoned only 200 years after its zenith. The city may have outgrown its natural resources as nearby woods and other needs were depleted. Ill health may have resulted from water and air pollution and limited diets, all of which might have been mitigated in smaller communities. Perhaps they were beset by enemies, although no archaeological evidence points in that direction. As Cahokians dispersed in different directions, they became or melded into historic-period tribes such as the Osage, Omaha, and Kansa.
        The remains of the metropolis nearly disappeared. As St. Louis was founded and grew, its settlers razed regional mound sites west of the Mississippi. At Cahokia itself, French Trappist monks took up residence on the grounds and grew crops on the largest mound, hence giving their name to Monks Mound. A modern four-lane highway slashes through the Cahokian grounds, passing at the foot of Monks Mound. Farmsteads and suburban subdivisions sliced, slashed, and decimated other mounds.
       Some thought the mounds to be natural features that needn’t be preserved, but archaeologists proved otherwise. By 1924 the state of Illinois purchased part of the present-day grounds, eventually growing and leading to today’s State Historic and UNESCO Site.
                                                               *                      *                      *
       Dianne and I saved climbing Monks Mound till the end of our visit. A stairway of 154 steps ascends the mound in two segments divided by a level terrace halfway up.
       At the platform’s top, the view stretches in all directions. Etched stone markers suggest what would have lain within sight in 1100 A.D. To the north lay the stream that linked the city to the Mississippi River. To the east were dwelling huts, the stockade, and more mounds. To the west, Woodhenge and the Mississippi River. To the south, the Grand Plaza stretched out before the mound the length of a football field. Thousands of Cahokians might have gathered there to catch a glimpse of the high chief or shaman on a festival day.
     Today, of course, the St. Louis Gateway Arch is likewise visible on the western horizon, completed in 1965 to commemorate the American westward expansion.
      Whether a shaman with a vision of the future might have seen or sensed it back then, we’ll never know.
​
-- Kevin Koch
October 2021
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Ridge mounds have an oval base capped with a capped off with an angular ridge like a rooftop.
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The Grand Plaza stretches 1600 feet from the base of Monks Mound. The Plaza would have been the center of community events.
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Seven miles distant, the St. Louis skyline and the Gateway Arch are visible from the top of Monks Mound.
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Forty-eight red cedar posts mark a reconstructed Woodhenge, with alignments for solstices, equinoxes, and other celestial events.
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Kayaking on the Niobrara National Scenic River

9/1/2021

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Nebraska’s swift-moving Niobrara River is a designated National Scenic River.
       The Niobrara River was eating its bed.
The day before, we had been kayaking the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, occasionally dodging submerged boulders in its swift-moving, clear waters. And now we were standing on the river bank a few miles downstream at the Norden Chute, watching the river plunge fifteen feet over a lip of bedrock that marked the Niobrara’s progress in downcutting its streambed.
     The Niobrara flows over 500 miles from eastern Wyoming through the northernmost tier of Nebraska counties before linking up with the Missouri River. Seventy-six miles of its mid-section are preserved and protected as a National Scenic River. Backpacker magazine has designated the Niobrara as one of the ten best rivers for canoeing in the United States.
    My wife Dianne and friend Dana had set up camp the night before at Dryland Aquatics, a kayaking, canoeing, and tubing outfitter located in Sparks, Nebraska, a few miles north of the river. Owners Ed and Louise Heinert had “bought the town” in 1998 when they began operating the outfitting service. They run their business from the General Store, where local ranchers drop in for morning coffee and conversation.
    The unincorporated town of Sparks consists of the General Store, the owners’ family, and whomever might be setting up a tent or sleeping in the bunkhouse prior to their river excursions. At the far end of the campground an 1888-constructed community church harkens back to when the region was more populated than today. Euro-American settlers learned the hard way that the surrounding sandhills were more suitable for spread-out prairie cattle ranches than for small tillable farms.
     But in the summer, the Niobrara valley today is typically well-populated with river enthusiasts. Even so, we avoided the crowds by kayaking on a Monday morning, after the weekend revelers had left. We had the river to ourselves for several miles, putting in upstream from the tube-renters, who float along at a slower pace and generally cover fewer miles. And even when we caught up and overtook them, the river was far from crowded. Sometimes Dana, Dianne, and I paddled together and talked about the river, the valley, and the sandhills, and sometimes we spread out, each of us in our own space and thoughts.
      Unlike most rivers on the Plains that wander listlessly through broad valleys, the Niobrara is a youthful stream that careens between tall bluffs on either side. Boulders in the riverbed are prizes it has licked away from the cliffs. In places, the river has downcut 300 feet into the surrounding plains. Locals have watched the Norden Chute creep upstream over the course of a few decades as the Niobrara continues carving out its bed. Here the river narrows considerably and plunges over an edge of bedrock as if draining from the lip of an oversized pitcher.
     Assuming one avoids the Chute, kayaking the Niobrara doesn’t require expert skills. But the river still commands a kayaker’s attention more than most Midwest streams with its swift current and boulders that could upend one’s boat.
     The Niobrara also sits at the northern range of the Ogallala Aquifer that feeds the nation’s midsection from South Dakota to Texas. In northern Nebraska the aquifer lies near ground surface, and where the water table sits on top of impermeable layers, the aquifer spills into the river valley through a series of waterfalls and fast-moving streams. The tallest is Smith Falls, which drops over 60 feet from the blufftop and rushes the length of a football field to reach the river. Other falls are at river level, viewable from the kayak. Over 230 waterfalls drop into the river valley.
      Over the years, the erodible cliffs have offered up occasional fossils of now-extinct, early-edition mammals: three-toed horses, rhinos, saber-toothed cats, and more. Ed gave us a short tour of his own collection, which includes an early bison skull and a mammoth jaw.
        But the entire river valley might have disappeared in the in the 1970s when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation proposed to build a dam that would have inundated twenty miles of river valley, including the Norden Chute, for irrigation canals to outlying areas of questionable agricultural quality. Local opinion was divided—and still is—as to whether the dam should have been built, but an unlikely combination of conservationists, canoe/kayak outfitters, and ranch owners successfully stopped the proposal.
      The Nature Conservancy played an important role as well in the battle against the dam. In 1980 the Conservancy purchased two ranches along 25 miles of Niobrara shoreline to create the Niobrara Valley Preserve (NVP). Today they act as good neighbors, paying property taxes on the land they own even though not legally required to do so as a non-profit organization. The NVP pays its way and protects the ecosystem by other means as well, by leasing lands to local ranchers for cattle grazing and by grazing over 1,000 bison in its 56,000-acre prairie. They likewise invite research teams and interns to the NVP to study the prairie and the river.
      “We are so lucky to still have the valley, due to the all the local people who wanted to preserve it,” says Amanda Hefner, Conservation Assistant at NVP.  “Other Nebraska rivers have been heavily impacted by crop agriculture,” Amanda says, referring both to agricultural runoff and the effect of heavy irrigation in drawing down the river levels. “The Niobrara feels like a river is supposed to feel.” 
      Ed and Louise were among those who opposed the dam. “People back then didn’t see the river as part of an ecosystem,” Ed says. “A lot of people didn’t agree with us.”
      “But their grandkids might,” adds Dana.
      Indeed, a church youth group were among the tubists ahead of us on this hot August Monday. We all exchanged simple greetings, looked about in wonder, and slipped quietly past the sandstone cliffs where the Niobrara River continued its work of cutting through the sandhills.
 
-- August 2021
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Tall bluffs along the Niobrara River’s bends occasionally offer up fossils of ancient mammals.
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The Ogallala Aquifer lies near the surface along the Niobrara and offers up numerous waterfalls.
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The Norden Chute gives scenic evidence of the Niobrara River’s continued downcutting action.
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Sunrise at the 1888-constructed Community Church at nearby Sparks, Nebraska.
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Geologic Mounds of the Driftless Area

7/11/2021

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The iconic M on the Platteville Mound recalls UW-Platteville’s inception as a School of Mining.
     How does the landscape first whisper that you are nearing home? If you dwell in the hills of the Driftless Area, as I do, it may be that point where the flattened, glaciated plains from Chicago to Freeport and westward first wrinkle and fold into the ridges and valleys of northwest Illinois. If returning from western Iowa, you may count off the river valleys until you arrive at the biggest of all, the Mississippi.  But if you are returning from central Wisconsin, you will know you are nearing home when the great geologic mounds faintly appear on the horizon.
   Blue Mounds. Belmont Mound. Platteville Mound. Sinsinawa Mound. This succession of mounds marks my passage home.
     The mounds’ origins confound many a local person. Some mistakenly think they are Native American structures, confusing them, no doubt, with the area’s many burial mounds. Others mistakenly wonder if the glaciers scooped away their edges, but this is the Driftless Area, precisely where the glaciers never reached.
     Rather, the series of mounds are monadnocks, individual freestanding remnants of an ancient topography that once covered the Driftless. In these last remaining fragments, a hard Niagara limestone cap that formed 430 million years ago at the bottom of Silurian seas sits atop a crumbing shale. Eventually these too shall pass.
     The Niagara layer becomes more prominent and intact to the northeast, stretching to the Great Lakes and ultimately to Niagara Falls.
But although the mounds are all of a type and kind, each has its own story to tell. Each welcomes me back to my own personal landscape.
 
Blue Mounds
     The Blue Mounds are two interconnected mounds rising 300 to 500 feet above the surrounding landscape near Mt. Horeb, WI. My wife Dianne and I know Blue Mounds mostly in winter, as we travel to the state park at least once each year to cross-country ski on the miles of groomed trails tracing the base of the mound and winding into the valleys.  Last winter we ascended a side-spur to the top plateau, where we looped between the East and West viewing towers. The downslope was too steep for our tastes, though, so we carried our skis down a switch-backing foot trail to rejoin the ski paths. Each year we add another layer of memory to Blue Mounds.
 
Belmont Mound
     We’ve long known the base of Belmont Mound from a bicycle loop that takes us past the park and the neighboring historic site where a cluster of white buildings once housed Wisconsin’s first state capital. But only recently did we venture on foot to the top of the 400-foot mound that caps the tiny Belmont State Park.  As at Blue Mounds, a viewing tower rises above the tree level. It once offered expansive views across the Driftless, but access to the tower has now been cut off. Over the years the tower has brought trouble and tragedy along with its scenic overlooks, and is slated for demolition.
     Our hike through a typical Driftless woods took a curious turn, though, when we descended into a playground of tossed and tumbled rocks, the most impressive of which is the Devil’s Table, a towering flying saucer-shaped wedge of bedrock with its base nearly eroded from beneath.
William Randolph Smith, a delegate to the Wisconsin Constitutional Convention of 1846 hosted at Belmont, described the view from the top of the mound long ago when the prairie had not yet fully succumbed to the plow: “An ocean of prairie surrounds the spectator, whose vision is not limited to less than thirty or forty miles.… In all directions, are scattered the incipient farms of the settlers.”
 
Platteville Mound
     When COVID restrictions began in Spring 2020, Dianne and I blew away our housebound blues by climbing the 266 stairway steps alongside the iconic letter M that we’d most often viewed from a distance. The 241-foot tall, 214 foot wide letter M had been constructed in 1937 to commemorate the University of Wisconsin-Platteville’s original status as the Wisconsin School of Mining. The M is revitalized each year with a fresh coat of whitewash.   
     We’d climbed it once or twice years before. But this day, at the top of the mound, we found and hiked a trail along the spine of the elongated mound. Here, too, at the far edge of the trail, lay a playground of immense, tumbled boulders lying askew in every direction imaginable, as if the bases of the rocks had been kicked out from beneath.
 
Sinsinawa Mound
     Sinsinawa Mound was established in 1847 as a motherhouse to Sinsinawa Dominican sisters, but before then had been Meskwaki land. Sinsinawa Mound is private property, but guests may request to hike its trails and must register at the office. A hike at Sinsinawa begins amid modernistic and historical architecture and rises into the silence of the woods.
     Of the four mounds, I knew Sinsinawa first because its sisters taught me in elementary school in Dubuque. The sisters treated us to occasional visits to the then-brand new round church and Sinsinawa facilities. As a teacher myself, I’ve brought my own students to Sinsinawa Mound for nature writing retreats, completing the circle.
                                                                              *          *          *
     Knowing a landscape, I tell my students, is like studying a rock cut along a road. At the base, know its geology, how the land was formed, shaped, and shifted. At the next level above, learn about the ancient ones who once lived there and the tragedies of the forced removal of the indigenous peoples. In the next layer, learn the pioneer and Euro-American settler story. As you near the modern surface, listen to what the land is saying today. What harms has it suffered, and how may it be healed? The topsoil is your personal experience on the land: sink your feet into it and add your story.
     Then, when you are returning from away and you see your landscape emerging at the horizon, you will know that you are home.

-- Kevin Koch
June 2021
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View of the landscape from atop the Platteville M.
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The Devil’s Table is among a rich array of tumbled rock formations at the top of Belmont Mound.
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A cross-country ski trail at Blue Mounds State Park disappears into a stand of tall pines.
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Sinsinawa Mound watches over the Tri-State area.
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An Irish Spring at the Proving Grounds

5/18/2021

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Bellwort drapes its flowers upside down, like chandeliers.
      “It’s like an Irish spring,” Tom Davis said to Dianne and me, referring to the season’s slow unfolding as we started up the path at the Proving Grounds County Park. Winter had broken early, but then spring retreated. By mid-late April, trees were still mostly bare. Tom had been on the lookout for spring wildflowers the past week, with none in sight.
      He’d finally spotted some a few days back and we’d set up a time to walk. But overnight freezes and near-freezes had caused the resilient flowers to curl their buds and leaves in protection. In the cool afternoon air, they were cautiously re-opening.
     Dr. Tom Davis has been a Professor of Biology at Loras College for over 30 years. A native of Oconomowoc, WI, he is an expert on Midwest and Driftless Area plants and birds. But his knowledge and professional experience is much broader, as he has led students in studying nature in such faraway places as Ireland and Costa Rica, and led summer Sierra Club hikes in the American West.
     Tom had suggested the Proving Grounds for today’s hike. Resilience could describe this 137-acre Dubuque County Park. It had long been owned and used by John Deere Tractor Works as an outdoors testing grounds for the machinery produced at the factory just across the road. The rugged hills offered the perfect site to prove the mettle of earth-moving equipment. How much soil could be dozed or lifted, how much slope could a dozer withstand?
       John Deere had long ago moved its testing site to a new location, and in 2018 donated the land to Dubuque County to be developed as a park. The grounds have new life now with hiking paths and a highly reputed and challenging mountain bike trail. A disc golf course is under construction near the top of the bluff.
     No mountain bikes were around on this early spring afternoon, so we started up the rocky switchbacks of the bike trail. I worried for a moment whether the still-fresh trail cuts would harm the plant life, but Tom assured us that these, too, would heal.
      And so began the parade! Dutchman’s Britches hung out their upside-down white pantaloons. May apples had been spreading their “baby umbrellas” for less than a week. Tom explained how their leaves spiral as they unfurl from the plant stem emerging from the earth. Their fruit begins as a poisonous white “apple,” but becomes edible when it matures and turns yellow.
     Dainty star-shaped lavender hepatica flowers had burst from their hairy stems amid three-lobed leaves that turn liver-colored as they age. Bloodwort had already completed its bloom. Tom identified it by its blood-red leaf stems, which Native Americans used as a dye. Each wild ginger plant cradled at the base of its spade-shaped leaves a single maroon flower the size and shape of a radish with a tri-pointed cap.
       This was exercise for the eyes, not the legs, at least initially. In a forty-foot stretch of ascending trail, Tom looked right and left, up and down, discovering something new every few moments. I took notes while Dianne took photos. Our particular talent, we told Tom, is learning these flowers each spring and forgetting them each winter, so that each year’s growth is a “new discovery”!
     Giant trillium showed off its three-petaled white flowers. Yellow bellwort draped its flowers upside down, like chandeliers.
       Not all of our discoveries were flowers. On an outcrop shelf of splintered rock, Tom showed us the shell of a snail, about half the size of a fingernail, that thrives in the cool microclimate of a Driftless woods.
       We did finally take to the trails and talked for a while without looking for plants. Our lives have intersected in many ways. Before we knew each other well, years ago, our paths would literally cross as Dianne and I kept encountering Tom and his wife Barb on local woodland and prairie trails. We’ve taught in each other’s classrooms. Our mutual interest in Ireland has led us to hike together in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin and to climb Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain of St. Patrick on Ireland’s west coast. Tom, with his long legs, made it to the peak well ahead of Barb and me.
       But there was more to discover here today at the Proving Grounds in Driftless northeast Iowa. Descending from the bluff top, Tom showed us goldenrod galls. Goldenrod gall flies bore into the plant stem in the late fall to lay their eggs, forming a gall or swelling in the stem. The larvae overwinter in the gall and emerge in the spring, that is if they survive the woodpeckers, who will peck into a certain number of the pods for a larvae lunch.
       It shows resilience that the woodpecker, the gall flies, and the goldenrod all seem to make do with this arrangement.
        Our hike ended, appropriately enough, with Tom showing us the walking fern near the base of a rock cut. The untrained eye might never guess it is a fern at all, as it has none of the showy, spiraling fronds often associated with woodland ferns. Its plain green leaves, shaped like a spear tip, are fern fronds nonetheless, harboring rows of spores on the underside until they disperse. But the plant has found a new way to spread as well, “walking” across the landscape as each front tip elongates and sends out a shoot that anchors to the ground a half a foot away and grows anew.
     We live in this world with both resilience and beauty. Landscapes are scarred and recover. Spring promises and the overnight freeze returns. But the spring flowers come again, as they have always come.
       And friends find yet another landscape in which to walk.
 
-- April 2021

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Dutchman’s Breeches look like upside-down pantaloons hung out to dry.
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Lavender hepatica rises above its three-lobed leaves
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Wild ginger harbors a single radish sized-flower at its base.
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Snow-shoeing & Solitude at the Mines of Spain

3/10/2021

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Sunrise over the Mississippi River at the Mines of Spain.
          In this time of COVID isolation, why would anyone seek more solitude? That was just one of the questions I mulled as I snowshoed alone on several occasions in the Mines of Spain this winter. Although I’m as social as the next person, I find that a good solo trek through the woods teaches me the patience and humility that comes from confronting one’s place in the trajectory of time.
          The Mines of Spain is a 1400-acre State Recreation Area on the southern edge of Dubuque, featuring wooded bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, upland prairies, wetlands, and other habitats. A National Historic Landmark, it retains the name given it by Julien Dubuque when he received permission from the Spanish Governor in Louisiana to mine lead in 1796, after previously receiving permission from the Meskwaki.
           I took to another kind of digging in my recent solo treks. Mine was an excavation of the long story of this place.
      Nature unfolds daily. Along the edge of woods and prairie, last night’s winter fog has crystalized this morning in contact with the branches and smaller twigs. Known as a rime frost, the heavy coating likewise drapes and bows the grasses and browned-out wildflowers of the open plain. Mouse prints padding the snow surface must be recent as well, arriving at a spray of prairie seed still scattered at the base of their stems.
         One of my paths leads me past an old farmhouse foundation that has sunk back into the wild. Maybe a century old, it was razed shortly before the Mines of Spain opened as a state property in 1981. I’m old enough to remember the farmhouse sitting near the road leading to the still-operating quarry. Today the abandoned quarry known as Horseshoe Bluff is a key attraction of the Mines of Spain, offering a 200-foot sheer downcut view through the ages of bedrock.
       Inside the woods I greet a few old friends, the 150-year-old oaks I recognize from previous solo visits. These oaks date back to shortly after the end of the lead-mining period when most trees had been felled to feed ore-smelting furnaces. These had not been thick forests, but oak savannas boasting intermittent hardwoods amid a prairie floor. When mining ceased, a thicker forest overtook the bluffs, starting with these now-massive oaks but eventually closing in with scrub trees, vines and ivies. The old oaks with their lateral, outstretched branches are reminders of the savanna past.
       Slightly older than the oaks are the lead mine pits now overgrown by the woods. Old lead mine pits are scattered throughout the Driftless Area, but this spot overlooking the Mississippi harbors nearly 800 hand-dug craters that dot the bluff, some as large as eight feet deep and 15 feet wide. Here I imagine 1800s-miners chipping away at the bedrock to strike at surface-level veins of lead.
       On another hill I encounter Native American burial mounds arched slightly above the lay of land on a hogback ridge with steeply sloping hills on either side. These burial mounds date back to the Hopewellian period from about 500 B.C.-1200 A.D., when flourishing villages lined the length of the Upper Mississippi. Small clans would disperse in winter to maximize the hunt, but regather again in communities in spring, summer, and fall to plant, hunt, harvest, and celebrate, and to bury the dead. A few of the mounds are visible to the naked eye. Others have slumped under the weight of time.
        The hills are even more ancient. Finding the best place to cross a ravine in snow shoes is more art than science, an art that I won’t claim to have mastered. Too far down into the valley, the trench is steep and treacherous. The upland start of the ravine may be gentler, but buried in a tangle of fallen trees. There’s no other human tracks in here to show me the path, but I follow the deer tracks instead, figuring they know their way through these woods.
       Even this ancient landscape has been reshaped in recent times—recent, at least, in geological years. While this Driftless Area was left untouched by the glaciers, the big melt that concluded 12,000 years ago gouged a deeper valley for the Mississippi River passing alongside the Mines of Spain. With a sharper slope from the uplands to the river, rainwater and snowmelt over time carved steeper ravines and made my crossings today more challenging. With a newfound robust energy, Catfish Creek on the north side of the park cut a new, more direct path to the river, hugging the base of the bluff that is home to the Julien Dubuque Monument and grave.
      The hogback ridge that beds the mounds descends gradually to the oldest layer, where weather-beaten limestone columns poke through the eroded topsoil. Now we’re back 450 million years ago, at the bottom of a shallow, equatorial sea where the shells of Ordovician sea creatures are collecting in the mud. The weight of sedimentary accumulations transforms the shells into fossils and the sea bottom into limestone.
         The land uplifts, the oceans recede, the ages wear on, and I am here.
       Amid the weight of the ages, my solo snowshoe trek through the woods deepens the present moment. The deliberate pace of lifting each over-sized shoe slows me down. The only sounds I hear above the sigh of wind are the crunch of my shoes in the snow and my own breath.
      We all feel too solitary in these COVID-restricted times. But solitude is different from being solitary. Confronting the ages alone in these Mines of Spain woods, I am in the company of all time and all beings who have graced this patch of land. 

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A heavy rime frost coats the seed heads of the prairie grasses.
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A deep depression in the snow reveals the site of an 1800s lead mine digging at the Mines of Spain.
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A farmstead house foundation is being reclaimed by the woods.
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Boscobel Bluffs, Wisconsin

1/2/2021

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Three cone-shaped goat prairies are being restored by the Mississippi Valley Conservancy at Boscobel Bluffs in southwest Wisconsin.
       In 1853, as the story goes, an editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, travelling with a team of railroad executives, admired an oak forest along the Wisconsin River and, trying out his Italian, called it the “belle bosc,” or beautiful woods.  Three years later the town of Boscobel, Wisconsin, was platted.
     Boscobel Bluffs, a 389-acre Wisconsin State Natural Area owned by Mississippi Valley Conservancy (MVC), preserves a slice of that beautiful woods for today’s and future generations. The tract boasts a progression of steep hillside prairie, oak forest, pine plantings, and upland prairie along its 1½-mile trail that climbs 400 feet from base to plateau, with several out-and-back spurs.
       Dianne and I squeezed in a late autumn hike at Boscobel Bluffs between deer hunting season and December’s first snowfall. The sun was trying its best to melt a thick frost as we started the upward trek. Looming above us from the outset were a succession of three steep-sided natural prairies, more commonly known as goat prairies.
       MVC Conservation Director Abbie Church explains that the goat prairies are in the process of being restored. Red cedar stumps are a reminder of the fate that goat prairies suffer when they are not periodically cleared by wildfire or prescribed burns and their dry, rocky soils are overtaken by cedars. By cutting the cedars, says Church, “we are bringing sunlight back onto the ground” to restore the health of the natural grasses and its prairie habitat.
       The transition from prairie into deep forest used to be more gradual, says Church, and Dianne and I note the instantaneous shift into a thick, oak forest. In a telephone conversation prior to our hike, Church told us to note the shape of the oaks in the deep forest, with their lateral, spreading branches. This indicates a past oak savanna habitat that would have harbored occasional oaks with prairie grass at their feet. In the absence of prairie fire, “the forest has filled in with scrub trees.” Oak savanna restoration lies ahead on Church’s list of land management.
     The pine planting is up next—literally up, with tall, straight trunks stretching skyward, nearly branchless until the canopy. Here the forest floor is clean, devoid of scrub trees and bushes, and underlain by a soft mat of pine needles in a sandy soil halfway up the climb.
    Yellow sand gives way to a soft, brown loess as the oak forest re-emerges at the plateau. Although Boscobel Bluffs lies at the edge of the unglaciated Driftless Area, the last glaciers halted not many miles away, and loess deposits resulted when prevailing winds blew sand, dust, and pulverized soil off the ice and dropped it on the rock outcrops lining the southern shore of the Wisconsin River. The fine loess, mixed with the decay of thousands of years’ worth of oak leaves, feels like talcum powder when rolled between one’s fingers.
     Upland prairies pop out here and there along the trail.  These grow from wetter soils than the goat prairies, though they’re far from being marshes.  Again, Church had instructed us what to look for in a late fall hike: “Look for the colors. Native prairies have much deeper hues than non-native bromes. See the reds, burgundies, and golden hues in the dried prairie grasses.”
       Preservation and ecological management of lands such as Boscobel Bluffs are at the root of the Conservancy’s mission.  The organization took root in 1997 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, when blufftop development took off and local citizens formed a non-profit land trust to try save what they could. Since then, the organization has grown to protect 21,000 acres in nine southwest Wisconsin counties.  Five thousand acres, such as the Boscobel Bluffs, are open to the public, while the remainder lie in conservation easements on private property.
     Church has been with the Conservancy since 2007, and has been associated with Boscobel Bluffs “from the first phone call till now,” as she continues to be involved in the area’s land management. Boscobel Bluffs became a Conservancy property in 2013 when the family of late landowner Dr. J.R. McNamee contacted them with a desire to preserve the land. A DNR stewardship grant was used to purchase the property.
     “This area is ecologically rich,” Church says, referring to the multiple habitats present in a relatively small space. This is important in an era of climate change as the variety of habitat means that “diverse species can fill niche areas where they will best thrive.” The habitat is buffered, too, by adjacent private property likewise protected by the local Prairie Enthusiasts chapter.
       Most of the property has never been farmed, Church points out, “which is one of the reasons for its high quality habitat.” The Bluff property has remained largely untouched since before Euro-American settlement. “Everything that is there was there on its own or has been re-seeded from its own seedbank.”
      As a result, Boscobel Bluffs supports a wide range of rare and unusual plant and animal species. Throughout the seasons, a hiker might encounter hooded warblers, hognose snakes, purple milkweed, clustered poppy mallow, wild petunia, and more.
As Conservation Director, Church works on private conservation easements, land acquisitions, grant applications and land management. While all aspects of her job are important to the Conservancy, one senses her particular enthusiasm for caretaking on the properties themselves. “Last week was fall burn season!” she exclaimed during our call.
       Much of the land management is assisted by volunteers, who help with selective tree thinning, invasive species removal, and prairie restoration.  Oftentimes day-long programs are scheduled for volunteers to come together, work, socialize, and enjoy the beauty of nature.
      These “beautiful woods,” prairies, and towering bluffs of Boscobel Bluffs, having been spared from future development, appear massive and indestructible. But humans have so altered the environment that simply leaving the land alone will not preserve it in its natural state. Stewards such as the Mississippi Valley Conservancy and its volunteers are needed to mimic natural forces that have been altered or destroyed.
 
-- January 2021

PictureA fine loess soil that covers the rocky bluff was blown in from the glacier’s edge 12,000 years ago.
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Tall red pines were planted in the 1970s but are not native to the property.
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Showy goldenrod seed heads adorn the late-season prairie.
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Gateway Park, Galena, IL

11/6/2020

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         From a bend on the American Disabilities Act (ADA) trail at Gateway Park, the view across the valley to the next far hill offers a glimpse of Galena, IL, with historic church steeples and brick facades poking through the tree cover.  It is a picture of the past that local residents worked hard to preserve.  
          By car, Gateway Park bursts into view just east of Galena where Highway 20 takes a long arc around the base of Horseshoe Mound.  Passengers are treated to a sweeping view of the landscape while their drivers hug the curve.  “The view presents the Gateway to Galena,” says Christie Trifone Millhouse, Associate Director of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF), a nonprofit land and cultural heritage preservation organization whose inception dates back to the Gateway preservation efforts. “Coming around that bend, the whole world opens up.”
          The land offering the view—today’s Gateway Park—was prime real estate for development in the 1990s.  Proposals for the 180-acre site included a resort hotel, golf course, and condo.  Local citizens rose up in opposition, and the Zoning Board denied its approval.  But that was only a partial victory for preservationists.  The next step was to protect the land indefinitely. 
It wasn’t just that that the property offers breathtaking views.  The acreage harbors a wide range of natural habitat and at least 1500 years of human history.
          Today’s ADA crushed-limestone upland trail passes along 80 acres of restored native Illinois prairie.  A late summer stroll offers a sea swell of brown-eyed susans and compass plants amid big bluestem grasses and Canada wild rye, among others. 
      Beyond the ADA trail and the upland prairie meadows, grass paths dip away into steep ravines.  Valley trails wind among restored oak savannas, a Driftless Area land feature of hillside prairies dotted by ancient burr oaks spreading their lateral branches wide and long as if blessing the land.  Occasional splashes of white birch flash in the soggy bottomlands.
           An isolated copse of Kentucky Coffee trees, used medicinally by Native Americans, as well as some time-worn burial mounds “tell us that this land was inhabited in some form by prehistoric native people for at least 1,500 years, likely longer,” says JDCF Director Steve Barg.
          History is heaped on the landscape.  A freed slave by the name of Moses Prophet Lester, who came to Galena after the Civil War, is known to have prospected for lead on property.  The Galena Tribune noted his death in a 1906 obituary.  A rusted windmill along a long hillside trail is all that remains of a 20th century farm.
       It took three attempts before the JDCF succeeded in securing the property to protect its natural and historic features.  Despite significant fundraising and successful grant applications, initial efforts to secure the land came to a standstill in the late 1990s.  A second effort in 2007-08 was stymied when a crucial matching grant fell through.
        A third, and successful, attempt took root on the heels of the second when Friends of the Galena Gateway Park teamed with JDCF to secure enough pledges and approved grants to purchase 100 acres in 2011.  An additional purchase of 80 acres was added to the park in 2016.
         Gateway Park was officially opened to the public in 2014.  In 2015 and 2017 JDCF donated the respective purchases to the City of Galena, with a conservation easement being held by the JDCF.  The City of Galena agreed to maintain the trails and parking lot, while care for natural and culture resources remains the responsibility of JDCF.  A crew of about 15 volunteers called the Galena Area Land Enthusiasts (GALE) work alongside JDCF personnel to maintain and preserve the grounds.
          Gateway Park is just one of eleven sites covering 1800 acres owned or maintained by JDCF in northwest Illinois.  But its significance to the natural and cultural preservation of the Galena area is immense, as it provides the connecting link between two other JDCF properties on the outskirts of town.  Gateway Park lies nestled between the Buehler Preserve to the north along the Galena River and Horseshoe Mound Preserve to the south with its sweeping tri-state views of the Driftless Region. 
       The three properties together total 400 acres of preserved lands, but their continuity is disrupted by a railroad crossing and highway, respectively.  “We consider the entire 400-acre complex to be ‘The Gateway’ to Galena. Our vision is to connect all three properties by tunnel under route 20 and a bridge or grade crossing over the Canadian National rails someday,” says Barg. When completed, the hike from the Buehler Preserve to the top of Horseshoe Mound will offer 600 feet of climb, the most of any public trail in Illinois.
      Such plans will take time.  But ancient mounds and ancient prairies, oak savannas and Kentucky Coffee trees, and sweeping views across the Driftless, all could have been lost to bulldozers.  Preserved by the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation and the City of Galena, what Gateway Park now has, and holds, is “time.”
 
-- October 2020
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A sea swell of prairie flowers and grasses have been restored to the Gateway Park property.
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Gateway Park offers a far-off glimpse of historic Galena.
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An old windmill is a reminder of past uses of the property. 
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Gibraltar Rock & Columbia County, Wisconsin

9/10/2020

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Gibraltar Rock is a 200-foot sandstone cliff overlooking Columbia County and the Wisconsin River.
     A half-dozen raptors rode the thermals just beyond the 200-foot sheer cliff face at Gibraltar Rock State Natural Area near Merrimac, Wisconsin. This, no doubt, was the best way to take in the views of the sandstone bluff and the valley farms beneath, as well as the Wisconsin River and the Baraboo Hills on the horizon. For Dianne and me, it would take a full day of  hiking, bicycling, and touring by car just to dip lightly into what southern Columbia County, located about 30 miles northwest of Madison, had to offer.
     We started our day at Gibraltar Rock, hiking a four-mile leg of the 1100-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail. The Ice Age Trail winds through Wisconsin, roughly following the end moraine of the last glacier. The Gibraltar Rock segment of the trail pads upward along a slightly twisting trail softened by pine needles dropped from towering white pines. The soil is cushioned, too, by sand that had been ground up and dropped by the continental glacier that once topped the 200-foot bluff with another 1000 feet of ice until its retreat 10,000 years ago.
      Gibraltar Rock itself is a sandstone butte, formed in shallow Ordovician seas 450 million years ago and then uplifted along with the rest of the Midwest. More tightly compacted in comparison to neighboring sandstones, Gibraltar Rock held together when water and ice eroded the surrounding bedrocks, resulting in the 200-foot cliff face.
      Ten thousand years later, Dianne and I enjoyed the results, eating our packed lunch at the cliff overlook while watching raptors glide in the updrafts.  We sat on a natural stone bench a safe and comfortable ten feet from the drop-off, but wondered at the scattered, gnarled cedars that overhung the cliff face like reckless gawkers.
     Later, we swapped our hiking gear for sandals and shorts and drove the short distance to the south shore of Lake Wisconsin, a 7200-acre reservoir on the Wisconsin River impounded by the Prairie du Sac hydropower dam. The dam, southernmost of 25 hydroelectric stations on the Wisconsin River, has been generating electricity since 1914.  Today the lake above the dam is a haven for boaters and fishermen, kayakers and canoeists.  Below the dam, the Wisconsin River flows naturally, dam-free and unobstructed, for 93 sandy miles from Prairie du Sac to its confluence with the Mississippi.
      We took a casual walk to watch cars, trucks, and motorcycles disembark from and load onto the cable-drawn Merrimac Ferry that crosses Lake Wisconsin and returns every 15 minutes from mid-April through November.  Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the ferry dates back to 1851, when it began linking the “settlements” of Madison and Baraboo along what is today Highway 113.  It is the last remaining ferry among 500 that once plied across the Wisconsin River at various times and locations. The State of Wisconsin has operated the ferry since 1933. The price is right: vehicles, bicycles, and foot passengers alike cross the lake for free.  Indeed, the ferry is the official pathway across the Wisconsin River for through-hikers on the Ice Age Trail.
     Lake Wisconsin may be an artificial wide spot on the Wisconsin River, but not far upstream once sat Glacial Lake Wisconsin. This glacial-period lake, 160 feet deep and eight times the size of  Lake Winnebago (Wisconsin’s largest modern-era lake), was fed by the Wisconsin River and dammed by a wall of glacial ice.
     As the glaciers melted, the river wore away at the ice obstruction, and when the wall of ice finally gave way, Glacial Lake Wisconsin drained quickly and catastrophically, carving out the renowned Wisconsin Dells, flooding the lower Wisconsin River valley, and even barreling down the Mississippi River and deepening its valleys. When the lake was fully drained, the deep, clean, shifting sands of the lower Wisconsin River and its valleys—the famed “sand counties” of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac—were left behind. 
      Standing on the shore of today’s Lake Wisconsin or viewing the river from the distant Gibraltar Rock, I could only imagine the long-ago wall of water plundering down the valley.     Our final venture for the day sprawled out over 23 miles of countryside via bicycle. (Columbia County publishes a bicycle route map with 14 loops on low-traffic roads, with routes ranging from 10 to 34 miles.) For a long while we passed in view of the Gibraltar Rock cliff face, experiencing the sandstone bluff from the valley base upward. Later we reached some inland lake country roads winding between Crystal and Fish lakes. Recent rains had flooded shoreline marshes and boat ramps. Along a stretch of road closed to vehicle traffic, lake waters were spilling across farm field fences and flooding into fields through an eroded nine-inch canyon in the pavement.
     A series of hill climbs took us back out of the lake country till a final, steep descent led us back to the Wisconsin River, where we’d parked the car. We’d covered a lot of ground in a single day.
We got a taste of Columbia County on foot-trails ascending Gibraltar Rock, at Lake Wisconsin watching the ferry transporting cars across the Wisconsin River, and inland, by bicycle, watching floodwaters racing into fields.
    I thought back to the raptors, though, circling beyond the cliff face while we ate our lunch. They’d seen it all—the cliff, river, and valleys, the wall of ice at the glacier’s edge and the deluge of water racing downstream when it all gave way.
     Theirs was a more patient existence than mine, taking it all in, circling in the thermal updrafts over time.

August, 2020
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Gnarly cedars line the overlook path at Gibraltar Rock State Natural Area near.
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Lake Wisconsin is the southernmost dam-impounded lake on the Wisconsin River.
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The Merrimac Ferry, free to vehicles and foot-passengers, has been crossing the Wisconsin River since 1851. It is the last remaining ferry on the river.
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