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A GEOLOGICAL ROAD TRIP ACROSS DUBUQUE COUNTY

10/22/2019

Horseshoe Bluff at the Mines of Spain offers a vertical view 450 million years into the past.

A geologist draws conclusions from the evidence and a writer draws a story from the details, Dale mused as we stood in line at Dubuque’s north-end Dairy Queen, about halfway through our recent geological road trip.
            Dale Easley is a geologist who is also a gifted writer. I am a writer with a deep interest in geology. Over the years we’ve struck up a friendship that crosses disciplines and academic institutions (Dr. Easley is a professor of Natural & Applied Sciences at the University of Dubuque; I am an English professor at Loras College.) It was about time, I thought, to put his geologic vision to work on my home landscape. So we set out on an afternoon’s drive across Dubuque County, stopping at several locations to talk about rocks and homespun bedrock philosophies.

Horseshoe Bluff Quarry
            We are looking up from the base of Horseshoe Bluff, an abandoned quarry at the Mines of Spain, fronting a 200-foot sheer downcut through 450 million-year-old limestone formed in a shallow Ordovician seabed.
            Dale points out the neat horizontal layers. “One of the first things that I noticed as a geologist when I came here 15 years ago was that the rock layers were not folded like I’d experienced elsewhere,” he says, recalling the mountains where he’d schooled in North Carolina and Wyoming.
In more stressed landscapes, rock layers have been twisted by the buckling and shifting of continental plates, he explains. Midwest bedrock, on the other hand, formed in gentle ocean bottoms and then ever-so-slowly uplifted—today only 600 feet above ocean level 1000 miles from the sea—keeping the rock layers mostly intact. Elsewhere in the Midwest those horizontal bedrock layers lay hidden from view, buried under the rubble and drift bulldozed along by the glaciers. Here in the Driftless Area—bypassed by all but the oldest of the glaciers—the bedrock pokes out from the surface in bluffs and towers.
Dale is a lot like this, calm and even-keeled, but, with a cup of coffee in hand, as deep as bedrock.
            .
The Mississippi River from Eagle Point Park
            “So what does a geologist see here?”
            Dale frowns. “What I see is a lot of modifications made by humans,” he says, pointing to the lock and dam below us, one of 27 such structures on the Upper Mississippi built in the 1930s to maintain a 9-foot channel for barges through a series of stair-step pools. Commodity transportation may be more energy efficient by barge than by train or semi, but one thing for sure is that this is not the natural river.
            But then the geologist kicks into gear. “We’re looking at half a million years here,” he says, figuring the age of the Mississippi. The river valley we see today, though, was formed by meltwater surges from the northern glaciers only 15,000 years ago. Summer melt and ice-dam breaks sent water coursing down the Mississippi, deepening its channel through the limestone bluffs.
            “The river ran faster then, too,” says Dale. During the Ice Age, the sea level was 500 feet lower than today. As a result, the river ran more quickly along a steeper slope to the Gulf of Mexico.
            When the glaciers had finished melting and the sea level reached its current level, the Mississippi slowed its pace, dropped its load of glacial outwash on the river bottom, and took to meandering through the deep flood plain it had carved.
            Our conversation meanders as well. We are in New Orleans, along this great river, where Dale taught for 15 years. And then we are back again, alongside the Eagle Point Park fishpond, which, I explain to Dale, my father helped build during the Depression.

Balltown Overlook
            From the Balltown Mound, at one of Iowa’s most iconic overlooks, the land drops quickly away across farm and field on its way to the Mississippi River.
            We in the Driftless see our landscape as a realm of rocky bluffs and steep valleys amid the glacially flattened Midwest. But Dale sees a flatland plateau downcut by erosional forces. Looking past the river valley and scanning the horizon, focusing on the river bluffs and beyond, I can imagine a vast, continuous plain. Geologists call it the Paleozoic Plateau. In the midst of the plateau, however, the Mississippi River, its tributaries, and drainage ravines have gouged deep scars.
            Rising above the plateau are the mounds that dot the landscape. Not far from Balltown Mound is the Sherrill Mound, and across the river the Platteville Mound, Blue Mound, and Sinsinawa Mound. The mounds, Dale explains, are called “resistant remnants,” the only remaining segments of a limestone layer that has since eroded away from the rest of the landscape.
            I like the concept of “resistant remnants.” It describes pretty well the pair of us who bicycle or scooter to class against the prevailing culture.

Fossil Outcrop at Graf
            I explain to Dale that when our kids were young and the Heritage Trail newly opened, my wife and I would take them to Graf, Iowa, for railroad stories and pie at Smitty’s Tap, but also to hunt for fossils at a nearby rock outcrop. Our bike bags would be heavier on the return trip.
            The sun is sinking low as Dale and I scuttle up to the base of this same outcrop from the side of the road. The rock is thinly layered, fragile, crumbly to the touch. The fossils are squid-like nautoloid cephalapods that lived 440 million years ago.
The limestone here is intermingled with thin layers of dark shale that formed, perhaps, during brief interludes when an ancient river delta shifted, spewing mud into the sea.
I imagine it layering stories into the seabed.
*                      *                      *
The land is a text written in a wordless language. The geologist translates it. The writer gives it shape. And that is how the world speaks across the ages.

October 2019

The locks and dams on the Mississippi have altered the natural flow of the river.

The overlook from the Balltown Mound offers an iconic view of eastern Iowa.

Rock outcrops at Graf, IA, are rich in fossils.

Dr. Dale Easley, professor of Natural & Applied Sciences at the University of Dubuque, offered geological insights across Dubuque County.

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Loess is more at Hitchcock Nature Center: Unique ‘sugar dirt’ covers the land near the Council Bluffs location

8/4/2019

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The ridges of western Iowa’s Loess Hills formed from wind-blown soil particles during glacial times.

“Sugar dirt” is what the pioneers called it, says Chad Graeve in reference to the Loess Hills soils of western Iowa. Graeve, Natural Resources Specialist and Park Ranger since 1997 at the Hitchcock Nature Center about 15 miles north of Council Bluffs, is describing both the unique beauty and fragility of this rare land feature, a small corner of which is preserved and being restored at the Hitchcock Center in Pottawattamie County.
The Loess [pronounced “luss”] Hills stretch in a thin band for 200 miles east of the Missouri River from Sioux City, Iowa, to northwest Missouri. Its 200-foot tall spine-ridged hills formed during the last ice age as powerful winds swept fine particles of glacial outwash, or loess, into the air and dropped them east of the Missouri River in ridges like gigantic snowdrifts. The formation, covering 650,000 acres, is found in such quantity in only one other location on earth, in China.
My wife Dianne and I, and friends Dana and Graciela, hiked some of the ten miles of trails at the 1300-acre Hitchcock Nature Center in the heat of a recent July afternoon. Our hike included the Badger Ridge Trail, which arcs up and down what is called a “razor ridge,” a narrow grassland spine from which the land dips suddenly away in both directions.
The loess ridges rise and fall like camel humps before us, offering sweeping views of distant farmlands, restored prairies, and woodlands of western Iowa. Wildflowers such as the Wood Germander poked out from the prairie in the heat of the day. The thinning of trees has allowed savanna wildflowers and prairie grasses like Silky Wild Rye to return naturally, without reseeding, after a long dormancy beneath the forest canopy.
The sweeping vista and wildflowers exist courtesy of the unique loess soil. A pinch of the fine, yellow-tan dirt exposed on the trail feel like a fine, brown flour between my fingers and thumb, and wafts quickly away in the breeze when released.
The loess soils are both stable and fragile. Left alone and prairie-covered, the hills are resistant to erosion. But when disturbed by development or overrun by forest, erosion can be quick and devastating.
Restoring the prairie is integral to preserving the loess landscape. Graeve, a 1996 Biological Research graduate of Dubuque’s Loras College, explains that Native Americans) routinely burned the prairies, which discouraged forest creep, herded elk and bison to new grazing grounds, and gave the burnt prairie time to recover. “Euro-Americans suppressed fires and kicked out the roaming elk and bison,” says Graeve, and as a result, forests have overtaken where prairie once flourished. Since prairie soaks up rainfall so well, water now runs off the landscape. Graeve adds, “When you deprive a system of water and sunlight, the system collapses.”
Through selective tree-cutting and aggressive annual fall prescribed burns, the prairie at the Hitchcock Nature Center is slowly returning to health.
The Hitchcock grounds might well have gone the way of much of the developed Loess Hills, however. From the 1960’s to 80’s the land served as a YMCA camp that introduced the city youth of nearby Omaha and Council Bluffs to nature, but then was sold to a private developer who intended to fill the steep valleys with refuse shipped in by train from New Jersey.
The developer began bulldozing some paths through the valley, whose scars are still visible today. The bulldozed paths created erosional runoff noticeable to nearby landowners, and a conservation movement arose to stop the landfill project and protect the hills. The landowner eventually defaulted on the property, allowing Pottawattamie County to make the initial purchase of land in 1991. Graeve says the Center hopes to eventually expand the grounds and reintroduce bison where possible.
For Graeve, though, preservation of the Hitchcock grounds is simply one part of the process of leading people back into “right relationship” with the land. “The real challenge,” he says, “is that we live in a society that is inconsistent with how the natural world works, and we have a broken relationship with the land.”
Indeed, Graeve dislikes the word “nature,” a term that creates a mental divide between our everyday experience and the non-human world. “People are related to the rocks, the birds, and the streams. If we can’t overcome that disconnect, we’ll always view the land as subservient to us,” he explains.
Graeve extolls a higher purpose as well. Few of us, he says, “link our food and water to the land, and ultimately to the Creator. We need to recognize our dependence on the land, and its dependence on us [for preservation]. Our relationship to the land needs to be one of respect, not dominion.”
Facilities and programming at the Hitchcock Nature Center are designed to “help people overcome their fear of the natural world and to come into right relationship with the land,” says Graeve. Backcountry hike-in campsites for tents and hammocks spur off from the trails over moderate to challenging terrain. Programming includes summer camps for kids and Owl Prowls and Snowshoe Hikes for all ages.
A 45-foot observation tower adjoins the interpretive center for viewing Iowa’s first Important Bird Area (IBA). Hawks are particularly plentiful as they inventory the prairie for rodents and other small morsels.
Graeve sees some, if slow, progress in Loess Hills preservation. In the past few decades, western Iowa counties have enacted zoning laws to protect the hills from rampant development, he says, and there has been some increase in public ownership. Additionally, conservation awareness of private owners has increased, “which shows that we’ve moved the needle a little bit.” That said, “We still haven’t come to value this landform for its intrinsic value,” says Graeve.
The Hitchcock Nature Center is a small corner of the Loess Hills, itself a thin, though globally significant, landform stretching along one American river. But preserving and restoring this one place, Graeve feels, is one step in bringing people back into right relationship with the land.

-- July 2019

Loess (pronounced ‘luss’) soils are like a fine, brown flour, and are easily erodible when the landscape is disturbed.

Prairie flowers and grasses have returned naturally where the encroaching forest has been trimmed back.

A 45-foot observation tower at the Hitchcock Nature Center near Council Bluffs offers wide vistas and excellent raptor viewing.

Backcountry hike-in campsites for single tents or small groups are available throughout the grounds, including some near the Hohneke Ponds.

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Jo Daviess County Spring Bird Count

6/12/2019

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Laurie Mattas, Chris Larson, and Dianne Koch search the treetops for eastern towhees at Horseshoe Mound Preserve.

We spot our first bird at 6:18 a.m., a killdeer hopping through the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in Galena. “We’re not in our territory yet,” says Chris, “so we can’t count it.”
Four of us had met up on an early May Saturday morning to participate in the Jo Daviess County Conservation Foundation’s (JDCF) annual spring bird count: Chris Larson, Laurie Mattas, my wife Dianne, and me. Chris and Laurie were experienced birders and Board members of the JDCF. Dianne and I were along as novices.
We would be among thirty or so birders divided into ten teams, each with its own “territory” throughout the county in which to count birds and bird species. The results would then be tallied county-wide and submitted to a national data base recording the findings of spring bird observers all across the nation.
JDCF Executive Director Steve Barg describes the task as “citizen science.” With the compiled information, scientists can track population trends—declines or increases or movements of species over time. “Imagine if you had to pay 30 people in every county, every state, to do this. It couldn’t be done,” says Barg.
Our territory takes us first south out of Galena along Blackjack Road. We crawl along the road at a snail’s pace in Laurie’s Honda CRV, alerting drivers who come up behind us with a red “Bird Count Team” sign in the rear window. Laurie scores our first tally: a wren on a telephone wire.
The tally sheet fills with checkmarks as we leave Blackjack and climb the entrance road to Horseshoe Mound Preserve. We see plenty of redwing blackbirds and robins along the road, of course, but also a kestrel on a telephone wire, two bluejays, and a meadowlark.
Exiting the car at the Preserve, Chris and Laurie listen first for the bird calls and then pick out the birds within a “Where’s Waldo” backdrop of trees and bushes. “You learn to filter out the more common sounds, then listen for what’s different,” says Chris. Mnemonics help. Hearing a consistent calling of “Drink your Tea-ea-ea!,” Chris soon spies six Eastern Towhees, more than she’s ever seen in one place.
Laurie also spots a Towhee: “I’ve never seen one, so that’s new for me. See, he’s sitting on that low branch, waiting for someone. ‘Come find me, I’m cute!’”
Our path next takes us along Irish Hollow and several connecting roads. Sometimes we stop and walk a productive area, but frequently we drive slowly along the county roads, spying birds in treetops, fence lines, creeks, and at homeowners’ front-yard bird feeders.
We spot a great blue heron tracing a creek through a valley. Laurie directs our attention to a cardinal’s “pew-pew-pew.” Ten cedar waxwings decorate a pine like flitting ornaments. “You can see the white bands in their wings,” says Laurie. Two chickadees. A red-tailed hawk in a tree branch.
The day is ideal for birding. On a sunny morning we are a week past the last snowfall, before the trees have fully leafed out. And we are in a particularly rich environment, in the Driftless region and along the Mississippi River corridor. “There is a huge variety of bird species here because of the terrain,” Laurie explains, noting, too, that we are still in season for neo-tropical migrant birds.
Jo Daviess County both reflects and runs contrary to trends across the country. In assessing the data, JDCF Director Barg says, “We look for birds we know are Illinois ‘species of concern,” i.e., those not currently listed as threatened or endangered but known to be in decline, such as red-headed woodpeckers, bobolinks, Henslow’s sparrows. “With climate change, we are seeing that birds whose northern range used to be southern Illinois are now much farther north.” But Barg adds that while some of these trends are likewise apparent in Jo Daviess County, in other cases birds that are becoming rare elsewhere are still thriving here. “Jo Daviess County is one of the remaining refuges,” he says.
The region’s plentitude is apparent as we stop on a small bridge over Smallpox Creek. Chris and Laurie spot a belted kingfisher and count four wood ducks in the creek, a phoebe on a fence, two cowbirds. The lattermost, Chris explains, will lay her eggs in another bird’s nest, toss out the nesting bird’s eggs, and let the hostess raise the cowbird’s hatchlings.
A next stop takes us to the Witkowsky Wildlife Area. “OK, there’s something flitting around in there,” says Laurie before Chris finally spots a palm warbler, a tropical bird that winters in Central America. Next up is a private pond, where Chris and Laurie debate whether the distant bird is a cormorant or a wood duck. Chris sets up her spotting scope on a tripod for a closer look before deciding it’s a wood duck. “You have to work for some of these,” she explains.
But there is a lot of laughter as well. Back on the road, Chris spots a bird out of the corner of her eye. “Did you catch what that was?” she asks Laurie.
“Oh, just another lbj.”
“An lbj?” I ask from the back seat.
“A little brown job.”
Dianne and I have only half a day to dedicate to the bird count. Laurie and Chris will spend the rest of the afternoon counting species before sharing their information with all the county observers at the JDCF potluck dinner.
But as we head back to Galena we encounter a couple of last finds: a bald eagle roosting in a roadside tree and three sandhill cranes combing through a hillside meadow. In all we’ve spotted 44 species on this early May morning.
The bird count, says Barg, brings together people highly involved in conservation with those who are backyard bird-feeder enthusiasts. “People who love birds,” he adds, “care for the things that don’t have a voice in our world.”
Except, of course, voices that trill, warble, and remind us to “Drink your tea-ea-ea.”

-- May 2019

Teams counted 149 wood ducks scattered throughout Jo Daviess County. (Photo by Rich Mattas, contributed by Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation)

Red-bellied woodpeckers were among the favorite finds on the Spring Bird Count. (Photo by Rich Mattas, contributed by Laurie Mattas)

The Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation’s spring bird count winds through the back roads to tally bird species each year.

Spring bird count teams stop at wildlife preserves in addition to combing the roadsides.

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THE ICE AGE TRAIL

4/16/2019

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The Ice Age Trail

An overlook from the trail at Table Bluff peers 200 feet down across a gravelly outwash valley formed during the melting of the glaciers. For we are near the divide where parallel bluffs mark, on one side, the end moraine of rubble pushed along by the last glacier and, on the other, the defiant limestone outcrops of the Driftless Area that never submitted to the great ice.
Table Bluff, located just northwest of Cross Plains, Wisconsin, is a small but noteworthy segment of the 1,100-mile Ice Age Trail (IAT) that winds from northwest to southwest Wisconsin, then pivots toward a northeast bent, roughly following the final edge of the glacier.
IAT is a national scenic trail, one of eleven across the U.S. that includes such well-known giants as the Appalachian Trail. Established in 1958, the trail is managed by the nonprofit Ice Age Trail Alliance and is maintained by volunteers along its corridor. Parts of the trail are owned variously by nature organizations, private landowners, state and county parks and forests, and the IAT Alliance. Almost 800 miles of an anticipated 1,200 miles are signed and open to the public, with the remaining miles on connecting road walks.
On an early winter day, I spoke with Mike Wollmer, Executive Director of the IAT Alliance, at the organization’s headquarters in Cross Plains. One difference Wollmer sees between the IAT and other national scenic trails is that Wisconsin’s never strays far from local communities. “We value the communities the trail passes through,” Wollmer says, adding that “meeting landowners and people in trail communities is part of the experience of hiking the trail.”
Indeed, twelve “trail communities’’—towns and cities along the path, including Cross Plains—act as unofficial hosts. The trail has been “woven into the fabric of these towns,” says Wollmer, a factor that contributes to the vast volunteer network that assists the handful of full time Alliance staff.
Over 2,600 volunteers in local chapters contribute 82,000 hours per year maintaining the trails by mowing, clearing fallen trees, restoring habitat and more. “Volunteers are our eyes and ears, telling us about weather damage and potential properties for sale,” adds Wollmer. They advocate for the trail in their communities, increasing its presence on maps and promotional plans.
Although 180 hikers are known to have completed the entire route, including two who ran the trail in twenty days, most walkers are not interested in records. “You’ve got to ‘hike your own hike,” says Wollmer. Most people walk short segments of the Trail rather than straight-through. It can even be good for a quick mental release: “You can yell at a tree and just keep walking!”
Or you can, like Wollmer, meet your spouse on the trail and marry her there, too.
My hike at the Table Bluff segment resulted from Wollmer’s advice on how to fill the remainder of an afternoon. The trail here runs 2½ miles through the 73-acre Holmes Preserve, owned by the Alliance, and on through a 460-acre site owned by a local group called the Swamp Lovers.
Table Bluff offers a mix of open prairies, oak savannas, stream valleys, and steep forest ravines. Big bluestem grasses top out above eye level on the highland prairies. A hardwood forest snuffs out the sunlight where it swallows the trail. The trail lulls a while through the woods before switch-backing in swift descent to the wide glacial outwash valley and ascending again into another thick forest with impressive overlooks.
Ten thousand years ago the valley rushed wide and deep with runoff from the nearby melting glacier. When the meltwater receded, it left behind a thick layer of pebbly sand. Today’s remnant creek gallops along through a thin slice of the valley.
This valley wetland and surrounding forest inspired four local friends to purchase and preserve the land over thirty years ago, says Lee Swanson, one of the four. The property’s former farms were quite small and the land not that productive. Gently mocking themselves for buying agriculturally “unproductive” land, they called themselves the “Swamp Lovers” to celebrate the preservation of the property’s rich wetlands. The group put the land in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and began to plant native prairie and encourage regrowth of dormant native plants.
When one of the four owners was tragically killed in a plane crash, the remaining three began to consider what to do with the land on a permanent basis. The Wisconsin DNR suggested they talk with a land trust that could preserve the property they had fallen in love with. “The IAT stepped up with a solution and we put a conservation easement on the property and set up a foundation to support it,” says Swanson. The Swamp Lovers site will be deeded to the Alliance within the next few years.
The Table Bluff segment of the IAT links to the town of Cross Plains via low-travelled Scheele Road, one of many such on-road segments. Maybe one day the trail will be entirely off-road, but in the meantime, says Wollmer, hikers say the backroads segments are part of the overall experience where they often meet adjacent landowners.
The trail enters Cross Plains along Main Street and passes alongside several local bars, restaurants, and coffee houses before pausing at the IAT Alliance headquarters. It loops briefly north of town and then exits along Black Earth Creek, flowing through another glacial outwash valley.
The town of Cross Plains takes its name from the intersection of early roads headed to Green Bay and Madison. But here on the Ice Age Trail along Black Earth Creek, in full view of the parallel ridges of the glacial moraines and the Driftless bluffs, Cross Plains might as well have been a command, or a siren song, calling hikers to the Ice Age Trail.

-- March 2019

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Kettle Moraine State Forest (Wisconsin)

2/20/2019

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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

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KETTLE MORAINE STATE PARK - SOUTH UNIT

2/20/2019

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Upper Mississippi River National Fish & Wildlife Refuge: Savanna District

12/18/2018

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When I arrived at the Spring Lake overlook on a clear October morning, the ducks and geese splashing and honking away in the Mississippi backwater sounded curiously like kids at the city pool. Summer was fading, but not, at this point, any too quickly.
I saw no long V-formations across the sky. No one was in a hurry to leave.
* * *
Ed Britton has been District Manager for twenty-three years at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge--Savanna District. Most wildlife managers move from place to place in their careers, and for a while so did Britton, but when he landed at the Mississippi Refuge, he settled in. “I love being on the river,” he says, and from his perch of longevity he’s been able to watch conservation projects be birthed, nurtured, and come to fruition. And he’s seen the river suffer environmental degradation as well.
The Upper Mississippi Refuge stretches 261 miles from Wabasha, Minnesota, to Rock Island, Illinois, covering 240,000 acres of backwaters and islands. It is divided into four districts, of which the Savanna (Illinois) District constitutes the southernmost 80 miles.
The Refuge was established in the early twentieth century amid counter-pressures to drain Mississippi backwaters for agriculture. Conservationist Will Dilg and the Izaak Walton League took the opposite approach, successfully lobbying Congress to establish the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge in 1924. “When I see the river above and below the Refuge today, I’m delighted that our forefathers had the foresight to protect these waters,” says Britton.
The Refuge lives up to its name. The Savanna District typically sees tens of thousands each of canvasback, mallards, Canada Geese and other migrating waterfowl each fall and spring as they use the Mississippi River valley as an arterial flyway. The Refuge provides rest havens and sanctuaries as well. Duck and goose hunting is allowed on most of the river during specified seasons, but certain areas like the 3600-acre Spring Lake prohibit hunting year-round for migratory birds and are off limits to boaters during migration season.
In contrast to the upper three divisions, the Savanna Distract has a much wider flood plain and is not as hemmed in by river bluffs. Unlike the northern districts, it has levees, “not to keep the water out,” says Britton, “but to keep water in. The levee system is used to raise and lower backwater levels to best serve migratory waterfowl.” Backwater levels are lowered in the summer to encourage plant growth, and then raised in the fall and winter for migration seasons so that geese, ducks, and other waterfowl can have a swim-up-and-dine experience. The levee backwaters are likewise managed for fish, shore birds, and waterfowl. Hundreds of bald eagles over-winter on the Refuge.
The Savanna District is likewise unique in having 4,000 acres of upland sand prairies formed by ice dams during glacial melting periods. The resulting glacial lakes dropped prodigious amounts of sand on the lake bottoms, which remained on the uplands when the ice dams melted, the glacial lakes drained, and the Mississippi River assumed its modern valley. Some of the sand prairie includes the Lost Mound Unit, i.e., the former grounds of the Savanna Army Depot. Much of the Depot is now part of the Refuge, but largely off-limits to visitors due to soil contamination and potential unexploded ordnance from its Army legacy.
The sand prairie, largest in Illinois, continues south of the former Depot as well in uplands surrounding the Refuge Visitors Center. Three miles of the Great River Trail wind through the sand prairie, offering bicyclists and hikers eye-level views of big bluestem and prairie compass plants. Pull-out spots provide river overlooks, shoreline hiking, and informational kiosks explaining the eco-system of the prairie and its protection of rare species like the ornate box turtles that had already burrowed into the sand for the winter on this crisp October day.
Back at the Visitors Center, Britton expresses his pride in the Refuge’s collaboration with various management agencies and conservation organizations like state DNR’s, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Nature Conservancy. “It’s a big family looking out for the natural environment,” says Britton. He takes joy in having watched numerous habitat reconstructions take shape, often over a several-year period.
But the river faces serious, ongoing threats. Invasive fish, mollusk, and water plant species can monopolize habitat, having no natural predators in the area. Siltation has increased with upriver development, agriculture, and more numerous high-volume rains. “Areas that used to see ¼-inch of annual siltation may now see five inches,” says Britton.
Indeed, climate change and development have brought higher water levels. “The river is 7-8 feet higher than usual right now,” Britton says, pointing out the window, “and has been 4-5 feet higher all summer. This is the new normal” that’s prevailed over the last 4-5 years.
Any habitat restoration project on the river now takes into account the likelihood of more frequent high water, resulting in different tree species planted and different shoreline configurations.
The river’s health depends on informed and caring citizens, and both the Visitors Center and the Stewards of Upper Miss Refuge (Friends program) work to bring that about. The Visitors Center broadcasts from live web cams set up throughout the Refuge, trained on a bald eagle nest, Spring Lake waterfowl, and an island pelican view. The Stewards offer golf cart tours through the prairie during the summer. And a Junior Stewards program for kids and parents meets once a month year-long to get kids connected with the outdoors.
* * *
Although I had other tasks to attend to back home, I finished my day at the Refuge with a thirty-mile bike ride on the trail. The sky was a crisp blue devoid of summer’s haze, the day neither too warm nor cold. Ed Britton likes it here. The geese and ducks—for a while at least—were in no hurry to leave.
Why should I?

-- November 2018

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SPRING GREEN SAND PRAIRIE

10/8/2018

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            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

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A Confluence of Nature & History: Wyalusing Canoe Trail

8/10/2018

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The Glenn Lake Canoe Trail at Wyalusing State Park weaves about the Mississippi backwaters like a line of stitching uniting nature, history, and a gentle Friday afternoon’s summer float.
Wisconsin’s Wyalusing State Park lies nestled at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers in southwest Wisconsin, fifteen miles south of Prairie du Chien. The sandy Wisconsin River provides the northern boundary to the park and the muddy Mississippi its western reach. Across the Mississippi at its northwest corner sits Iowa’s Pikes Peak State Park overlooking the confluence, and just slightly further north lies Effigy Mounds National Monument with its ancient, mysterious bear, bird, conical, and linear Native American mounds.
With the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge likewise weaving through adjacent river bottomlands, and with Iowa’s nearby Yellow River State Forest, the region protects and preserves over 35,000 acres of natural and cultural heritage.
None of this, of course, is chiefly on my mind as my wife Dianne, brother John, and I kayak through the twists and turns of the six-mile Wyalusing canoe trail. We are infinitely more focused on trying to spot the blue trail markers variously nailed to trees and stumps amid the wet and weaving path. It’s a bit like a Where’s Waldo game, but one punctuated by long stretches of dreamily watching herons flap into long-legged flight, spotting the occasional bald eagle in overhead branches, taking stock of the water lilies about to bloom, and looking for the mussel-shelled remains of a raccoon’s late-night dinner.
The trail begins at the Refuge boat landing centrally located on the backwater Glenn Lake. Officially, the trail first twists north and west through backwater sloughs to the Mississippi channel, then backtracks along the same path before heading south beyond the landing to another opening to the channel, and reverses along its path again. Unofficially, we usually connect the weaves by venturing down the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River, hugging the shoreline and bobbing in the somewhat more agitated waters. There we can usually find a sand bar on which to have a sandwich and a drink, and to watch the world float by.
Here, too, is where history intersects with the natural world. Jacque Marquette and Louis Joliet were the first Europeans to have passed this way in 1673, having paddled down the Wisconsin River and entered the Mississippi. Marquette marked the occasion in his famous journal:
“We safely entered the Mississippi on the 17th of June, with a Joy that I cannot Express….[The Mississippi] is narrow at the place where Miskous [Wisconsin] empties; its Current, which flows southward, is slow and gentle. To the right is a large Chain of very high Mountains, and to the left are beautiful lands; in various Places, the stream is Divided by Islands.”
The confluence of the rivers looks much the same today, with islands shifting and rebuilding amid ongoing cycles of flood and drought, replenished by Mississippi mud and Wisconsin River sand.
Joliet kept a journal as well, but his was lost along the way when his canoe overturned in a rapids. I would have been Joliet.
Off the channel and having paddled back up the southern loop of the canoe trail, we exit Glenn Lake and load the kayaks onto our trailer. In other visits to Wyalusing we have explored the trails, but not yet to due diligence. Trail names and park features, however, speak to the blend of nature and history here: the Old Wagon Trail, Sand Cave Trail, Old Immigrant Trail, Prairie Trail, Sugar Maple Trail, Sentinel Ridge Trail with its Native American mounds, and the Mississippi Ridge Trail, among others. Hikers can pick up a bird checklist of 199 species to test their luck and eyesight while on the trails.
A pavilion name is all that remains of Chief Green Cloud’s Ho Chunk village, a holdout settlement on the current park grounds that defied an 1829 “treaty” until the village was forcibly abandoned in 1882. CCC/WPA pavilions built from 1936-1941 dot the grounds, another link to history.
The park was established in 1917, one of Wisconsin’s earliest state parks, although initially under the name of Nelson Dewey State Park, until that name was utilized at the nearby Cassville, Wisconsin, site of the first governor’s birth home.
My brother, our kayaking guest for this excursion, lived in Prairie du Chien long ago, so we capped off this outing with a side-trip to his former home, thus completing our weave of history.
The Mississippi-Wisconsin confluence area had been a neutral grounds among at least fourteen tribes who lived, visited, and traded there. Just a decade after Marquette and Joliet’s excursion, Nicolas Perot established a trading site in 1685 at the Meskwaki village in the location of present-day Prairie du Chien.
Later French and French-Canadian traders, miners, and explorers intermarried with the Meskwaki, forming a Metis—or mixed-ethnicity—village that eventually took the name of the Meskwaki chief Alim, whose name meant “Chien” in French, or “Dog” in English.
Prairie du Chien and the surrounding area would continue to play important historical roles throughout the next centuries. The town was captured by the British in 1814, and after its recapture, the American government built Fort Crawford in 1816 to defend the Upper Mississippi. The Sauk leader Black Hawk surrendered himself at the fort in 1832, days after his people had been massacred by government forces thirty-seven miles north along the Mississippi.
Happier days included riverboat and rail visitors to the region.
Layered on top of this deep history was my brother’s personal past and family memories. We drove past the house he lived in at the time.
Returning from Prairie du Chien, we ventured again across the clean-sanded Wisconsin River, past the turnoff to Wyalusing State Park, back home again to Dubuque. The waters we’d kayaked on a lazy Friday would soon roll past our home, the final stitch in the weave of nature, history, and our personal lives.

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Sacred Lands of the Portage Preserve

6/18/2018

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“I heard gasps as we neared the overlook,” said Chloris Lowe, past-President of the Ho-Chunk Nation. With a sweep of his hand he explained, “The reason these burials are here is because it is a beautiful place.”
As if on cue a pair of sandhill cranes trumpeted 300 feet beneath the bluff. They rose from the Mississippi River floor, circled, and flew off across the tree tops till their honking could be heard no more.
* * *
Almost forty people had gathered in the Jo Daviess County Conservation Foundation (JDCF) land stewardship shop at the Portage Preserve on a Saturday morning in May, preparing for a two-mile hike back into the woods despite a forecast hinting at rain. Chloris Lowe from the Ho-Chunk nation and regional archaeologist Phil Millhouse would be our guides to interpreting the Native American burial mounds tucked deeply away in the woods near the confluence of the Galena and Mississippi Rivers.
The Portage Preserve, located southwest of Galena, is a 316-acre farmed and forested refuge owned and maintained by JDCF, a non-profit conservation land trust organization whose mission is to preserve lands in Northwest Illinois with natural or cultural herite. The site is home to over 50 Native American conical and linear mounds dating from 200 BC to 800 AD. The property’s valleys also cradled rock shelters and Native American villages.
“This area was a central place for indigenous groups who lived here for thousands of years,” said Millhouse, who had developed his love for archaeology walking these grounds repeatedly as a youth growing up on a neighboring farm. “Once it became sanctified as a burial ground, people kept coming back to. There are layers of history here.”
Steve Barg, Executive Director of JDCF, next introduced Ho-Chunk past-President Lowe, reminding the audience, “We often honor our fourth and fifth generation landowners, as we should. But we also have among us peoples whose ancestry on the land goes back hundreds of generations. Should we not also honor them?”
Lowe spoke of his own ancestors, his grandfather, who “taught me to hunt and fish and who lived to be almost 103.” Some 15,000 years before him, the first humans set foot on this landscape, Lowe explained, hunting mammoths and other prehistoric wildlife at the edges of the glaciers that lurked only a hundred miles to the north.
“This is all sacred land, but the mounds are special places,” he continued. “The life and spirit we have continues on forever. Our bodies will return to the earth, but our life and spirituality goes into the soil and regenerates back out. Everything we have comes from the earth and returns to it.”
Lowe then reminded the audience of their own sacred duty as we headed out on the two-mile walk: “You are the latest generation on the landscape. Someday people will look back at your impact.”
* * *
The hike took us first along the edges of the Portage Preserve’s leased farmland to the edgewood where JDCF has built berms and slow drainage features to stem the spread of massive ravines that threaten the surrounding woodland.
Then we entered the woodland where the mounds ride the ridge down to the river overlook.
Millhouse paused at Mound 16, a conical mound dating to the Middle Woodland period between 200 BC – 400 AD. In addition to burials, such mounds often contained copper, obsidian, and other artifacts from across North America, indicating extensive trade networks even in these early times. “Wealth was often buried so it wouldn’t accumulate” with individuals and families, he explained.
Millhouse admired the mound builders as “brilliant soil scientists” who constructed the mounds so that they have stayed intact over thousands of years. The process itself was complex. First, the mound builders leveled off a ridge or bluff top before construction. At a mound site they would next remove the soil and dig a burial chamber into the yellowish subsoil, erecting a log crypt in the center. After burial—often of several individuals—the builders mounded topsoil over the crypt in layers in such a way as to resist erosion. Soils for the mounds differed from the surrounding landscape, often hauled up from the river to the ridge tops, basket by basket.
Lowe paused the group at one of the mounds as well. Shifting our attention from death to life, he described a Ho-Chunk wedding, picking up on Millhouse’s point about avoiding the accumulation of wealth. In a Ho-Chunk wedding, said Lowe, the families exchange gifts of Native American heritage, but the bride and groom themselves do not receive gifts. “They leave the ceremony with the gift of each other’s families.”
From there we walked slightly downhill along a path lined with mounds. Some had been desecrated by looters and early archaeologists, who have since developed non-intrusive means of studying mounds. Some had been damaged by trees that had toppled over time. But many of the mounds were fully intact, some of them as tall as a standing man.
Burials were not limited to the mounds, either, but occurred between and among the mounds as well. Nevertheless, a line of mounds continued down toward the overlook. Mounds nearer the overlook were smaller and constructed more recently, from 400-800 AD. Stone box graves—burials and artifacts capped with slabs of local dolomite dating to about 1400—likewise dot the bluff top.
Along the way we marveled, too, at a giant oak whose girth it would have taken several of us to encircle. This oak would have been here when the land was less forested, when it was instead oak savanna with prairie grasses spreading beneath the occasional hardwood on the river bluff.
Then came gasps as the river valley came into view. Another oak bent crooked near the bluff and framed the backwaters among its branches. “Can you imagine what has happened on this landscape?” Lowe said in contagious joy. “The ceremonies that must have occurred here.”
And the mated pair of sandhill cranes honked out their reply and took flight.

(Unlike many of the JDCF properties that are open to the public, the Portage Preserve is accessible only for occasional staff-led events.)

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