Kevin Koch -- ​The Driftless Land
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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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THE DINKY TRAIL & BIG GREEN RIVER

6/29/2020

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Streams gush fully-formed from springs along the Dinky Trail, joining to form the Big Green River
            The Big Green River arises from numerous gushing springs in Grant County, Wisconsin, and rushes headlong to the nearby Wisconsin River. Perhaps this clear trout stream takes its name from the rich, emerald green of the river valley, a green so brilliant and plentiful in late spring it seems as if the other colors of the palette have departed.
             Departed, too, but still commemorated, is the narrow gauge railway that once chugged up the river valley.  Known to locals as the Dinky Line, the long-defunct railbed has by now disappeared into the landscape.  But its general path is marked today by a back-road bicycle route known as the Dinky Trail, established in 2015, running 16 miles between the towns of Fennimore and Woodman.
            On a day of pastel-blue skies that only late May and early June can produce, Dianne and I laid out a 35-mile bicycling path encompassing the Dinky Trail.  Starting from Lancaster, we climbed a slow ascent past woodlands and corn fields, past two historic churches—Mt. Zion and Mt. Ida—and then began a two-mile descent on County K, laying off the pedals and letting the rear freewheels whiz like the casting sound of the trout fishermen’s reels we’d soon encounter.
            Ordinarily we would have rolled on down to Woodman, where we often disembark from the Wisconsin River on kayak outings, but instead we cut the downhill short and turned right at the Green River Road and onto the Dinky Trail, following the river valley gently upstream.
            From 1878-1926 the Dinky line clawed up the valley from Woodman to Fennimore, but after it was disbanded its railbeds were deeded to adjacent landowners, beginning its long subsuming back into the landscape.
            The Dinky line was once part of a 92-mile narrow gauge rail (with a three-foot rail-width) that traversed southwest Wisconsin. In 1882 the rest of the line was converted to standard gauge (at 4 ft 8 in.), but the Dinky route was too steep and included a horseshoe curve to navigate the hills that prevented its conversion.  So the 16-mile stretch of the narrow gauge Dinky Line remained as a link between the standard gauge rail line along the Wisconsin River at Woodman and the uplands rail line at Fennimore, carrying mail, produce, livestock, and even school children between the two towns.
            The Dinky was Wisconsin’s longest-running narrow gauge line until it was finally disbanded in 1926. Today Fennimore commemorates the Dinky in the old depot museum with vintage ticket booth and telegraph switchboard, model trains, and photos of the Dinky.  The museum grounds display a 1907 narrow gauge engine, replica water tower, and a functioning children’s miniature-scale rail line.
            But that wasn’t on our minds as we cycled up the river valley.  Instead, we passed the time on the long, slow climb admiring the green-saturated swells of wooded knolls and grassy pastures. Here and there an old fence bisected the fields, but elsewhere the pastures stretched unbroken, dotted here and there by oaks and grazing cattle.
            Along the road a spring erupted from the base of a wooded hillside, gushing from the rocks a foot wide and six inches deep, then splashing down small waterfalls enroute to the Big Green River.  The Big Green is fed by numerous such springs, some of which pump thousands of gallons of fresh, cold water per minute into tributary streams, creating excellent trout stream habitat.  We stopped for a while to watch a dozen or so anglers wend their way upstream.
         Bradd Sims, Fisheries Biologist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, explains that the high water table amid the hills, valleys, and bluffs of the Driftless Area act like a water tower pushing water out through cracks and fissures, through springs, at a constant chilled temperature of about 50 degrees.  According to Sims, “The good spring flow and steep gradients keep the streams aerated, making for good for trout habitat,” especially for naturally reproducing brown trout.
           A 1970s easement purchase program gave anglers access for moving along the stream bank without trespassing.  In the 1980s riprap was added for streambed protection and better habitat. The Big Green River has eight miles of public easement, making it one of the more heavily used trout-angler streams in the area.
            For us, this was neither a day devoted to fishing nor to railroad memorabilia.  But a bicycle ride on the gently climbing Dinky Trail along the Big Green River offers a chance to ponder how the landscape connects the past and the present just as assuredly as rail lines, back roads, and bike routes connect people and towns in the Driftless.
 
-- June 2020
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Verdant hills, valleys, and grasslands provide a pleasant distraction on the uphill bicycling climb.
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A sign in Fennimore, WI, announces the back-road trailhead of the Dinky Trail.
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Numerous cold springs unite to form the Big Green River, a favored trout fishing stream with public right-of-way near Fennimore.
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The long-defunct Dinky narrow-gauge rail line ascended through the Big Green River valley in southwest Wisconsin.
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Sinsinawa Savanna Restoration

4/22/2020

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An oak savanna, such as the one under restoration at Sinsinawa Mound, blends prairie and forest ecosystems.  ​

       Ronald Lindblom, Land Stewardship Director at Sinsinawa Mound, has a copy of the Sinsinawa Land Ethic statement displayed prominently in his office.  Among its Guiding Principles is the statement, “Land is sacred.  We are stewards, preserving the land’s natural resources.”  Lindblom points to it and says, “Every day I look at it and think: ‘What am I doing?  I’m doing this.’”
       What Lindblom and his staff are doing—among other stewardship tasks—is restoring a 26-acre section of oak savanna on the Sinsinawa campus.  Sinsinawa Mound, home to the Sinsinawa Dominican sisters, once boasted a natural progression of prairie, oak savanna, and mature woods that was common to this area.  Settlement changed all that. Prairie, by and large, was converted to agriculture and towns, and the suppression of fire led to overgrowth in remaining savannas and woods.
        Prairies and woodlands once stretched across vast areas of the continent, but oak savannas occurred in niche ecosystems such as the Driftless Area.  From Dubuque to Madison, the rolling hills were home to a grass-and-woodland blend in which the prairie was dotted by hardwood oaks.  Prairie fires kept other forest trees at bay, but thick bark protected the oaks, resulting in scatterings of majestic lateral-branched hardwoods amid a rolling mat of tallgrass and prairie flowers. 
       Along with fire, elk provided a second maintenance crew on the oak savanna, says Lindblom.  The prairie had its bison and the woods its deer, but the Driftless Area was once home to the densest concentration of elk in North America.  As grazers, elk helped keep the savanna free of competing woodland species.
       Sinsinawa Mound was subject to the same Euro-American settlement pressures that altered the rest of the landscape, says Lindblom. Even prior to the Civil War, the area’s oaks had been cut for fuel and construction.  But at Sinsinawa, the savanna regrew in non-developed parcels once ownership was transferred to Samuel Mazzuchelli and the Dominican Sisters in the 1840s. The second-growth oak savanna sprouted from acorns already in the ground, awaiting the right circumstances.  And since oaks require open canopy to regenerate, the clear-cut savannas ironically provided the right conditions for regrowth. 
       But other conditions had changed.  At Sinsinawa, as across the Driftless Area, the loss of prairie fire and elk “opened the gates,” says Lindblom, and invasive tree species rushed down from the north and up from the river bottom, choking the savanna and woodlands with maple, cherry, box elder, and elms, not to mention an influx of thick, thorny bushes in the understory.
       The recent deaths of several old oaks provided a wake-up call to Lindblom. Fearing an oak blight infestation, Lindblom invited a specialist to Sinsinawa to examine them. Instead, the specialist simply said that the oaks had died of old age.  Many of these oaks from the 1840s through 1860s still grace the landscape at Sinsinawa, but they are coming to the end of their lifespans.
       The overgrown woods and aging oaks provided a double problem: with no fire and elk to clear the shaded ground, new oaks would not regenerate to replace the old.
So Lindblom is trying to help nature along.
       “We are creating a video in reverse,” claims Lindblom. “If you took out all the trees that were less than 40 years old, you’d see what the landscape looked like 40 years ago, and so forth back 70 or 100 years. We’d like to get the savanna back to the way it looked 150 years ago,” shortly after the Civil War.
        The first step, commencing in December 2018, involved removing invasive plants and all non-oak trees with trunks less than 6 inches in diameter.  After controlled burns planned for 2020-21, Lindblom and his staff will monitor the natural return of oaks and prairie grasses.  Then they will repeat the process with removal of non-oak trees with trunks of less than 8 inches diameter, another controlled burn, and so forth, gradually restoring the landscape to an oak savanna.
      Gradual restoration is important, though.  The current landscape is like a living organism, Lindblom explains, and “we don’t want to shock the system by doing everything all at once.”
Lindblom pauses and ponders.  “Some people ask if it is ‘natural’ to restore a landscape. Why not let Mother Nature take its course?”  Lindblom explains, “Not much of the natural world remains, so while it is artificial to restore nature, it is up to us to manage what is left.”
        By cutting trees we are “putting more light on the ground,” Lindblom explains. “Ideally we want our own oaks and prairie plants to regenerate from the native seed bank that is still in the soil, but we don’t know yet what will still be there. It is tempting to seed the area, but we prefer to wait. Our goal is to wake up the savanna that used to be here,” he says.
       As the Dominical sisters consider their legacy at the Mound, the concept of land ministry has emerged to help carry out their mission. 
       Other restoration goals include recreating the natural landscape progression from prairie to savanna to old growth forest that existed when Mazzuchelli obtained Sinsinawa Mound.  Lindblom is working to replicate the original ecosystem proportions on 160 of Sinsinawa’s 452 acres.  Sinsinawa’s agricultural land, encompassing 246 acres, is already certified organic, with a focus on permanent cover.  
       With much of his work underway and more to come, Lindblom and the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa are in the process of putting some of the land into the Mississippi Valley Conservancy to secure its preservation into the future.
       After restoration, Lindblom hopes to see the oak savanna offering habitat to more prairie bird species like grasshopper sparrows and sedge wrens alongside savanna species like the northern shrike and Bell’s vireo. One way to measure the success of the restoration will be through monitoring these indicator species. 
       “They’ll tell you by showing up if you did it well.”

-- April 2020
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​Many of the oaks at Sinsinawa Mound date back to the decades just before and after the Civil War.  Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.
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​Oak seedlings need sunlight to sprout. Restoration puts sunlight back on the savanna floor.  Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.
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Some of the oaks at Sinsinawa have reached the end of their lifespan. Thinning of the underbrush and small trees allows oaks to regenerate. Photo supplied by Sinsinawa Dominicans, Inc.
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Mississippi Mounds: Native American Burial & Ceremonial Mounds Line the Upper Mississippi River

3/8/2020

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​The Dunleith Mounds of East Dubuque are visible on the bluff when traveling East across the Julien Dubuque bridge.

        The snow-encrusted brush and loose branches piled into a long-demolished farmhouse’s foundation took a while to set aflame, but when the bonfire took off, it lit and warmed the prairie above the Mississippi River. 
        It was “Bonfire on the Bluff” night at Casper Bluff south of Galena, IL, an archaeological site of 38 Native American conical and linear mounds—including one magnificent Thunderbird mound—cared for by the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation.  Candles placed along the trails ushered night-time visitors to blufftop views of the Mississippi brooding beneath.
        The bonfire was near, but respectfully distanced from, an elliptical Native American earthwork constructed between 700-1000 AD.  Earthen enclosures like this were used for rituals, dances, and gathering spaces.
        That night amid the candle-lit trails, we were not the first to revere and admire the mighty river.  Native American burial mounds constructed during the Woodland Period from 200 -1100 AD dot the length of the Mississippi in the Driftless Area along, attesting to the long draw of the sacred river. Human presence along the river dates back 10,000 years, long before mound-building began.
            It occurred to me then how many mound sites I had visited over the years, all within 250 river miles.
                                                            
        Furthest north on my personal list is Perrot State Park just north of Trempealeau, WI, home to more than a dozen mounds.  A trail rising 500 feet above the river culminates at Brady’s Bluff, where several extraordinarily-preserved mounds tower above the river. 
          Above the town of Trempealeau, archaeologist Ernie Boszhardt once showed me platform mounds constructed by Native Americans from Cahokia (near today’s East St. Louis), who were moving up the river during the Mississippian period, around 1100 AD.
       Downstream from Trempealeau lies Effigy Mounds National Monument near Marquette, IA.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve been there.  In one of the most significant Native American sites in the nation, Effigy Mounds preserves almost 200 burial and ceremonial mounds, 29 shaped as bears and raptors. 
        My most recent visit was with a friend who’d not been there before. We hiked to the Marching Bears formation featuring ten bear-shaped mounds arranged head-to-tail in single file pointing southward 450 feet above the Mississippi.  Three raptor effigies accompany the bears, their wings spread as if in flight and their heads pointed toward the river beneath the bluff.  Two of the raptors scout out ahead of the marching bears while the third corrals the rearmost into line.  The largest bear measures 137 feet from nose to tail, and the largest bird’s wingspan is 212 feet.
       Burial and ceremonial mounds were meticulously constructed.  Burial chambers were dug into the landscape, and mound soils of varying types and textures carefully layered above to withstand erosion through the ages.  Soils from the river bed were carried basket by basket up the bluff trails—perhaps the very one we’d hiked—to be placed upon the mounds, suggesting the sacred regard given to the Mississippi.
       While most such burial mounds are located on bluffs above the river, the Effigy Mounds Sny Magill Unit lies at river level, several miles south of the bluff-top mounds.  Here 100 conical, linear and effigy mounds have withstood a thousand years of repeated flooding.  When I returned from a three-month stay in Ireland a few years ago, on my first day home I walked amid these mounds with my wife Dianne to reorient myself to my own sacred places.
       On Dubuque’s north side, 32 mounds grace the Little Maquoketa Burial Mounds site on a bluff a short distance from the Mississippi.  East Dubuque is home to the Dunleith mounds, where four magnificent burials keep watch over the Mississippi.  Prairie restoration at the site has returned the mounds to their original look.  These mounds are clearly visible on the Illinois bluff when driving east across the Julien Dubuque bridge.
       I have encountered burial mounds in the bluffs at the Mines of Spain.  Once, on a woods hike by myself, I came upon a depression I assumed was a lead mine of the type the Mines is known for.  But when I spied three adjacent mounds, I had a sinking feeling that the depression was a long-ago desecration of the grave.  But I have no way of knowing.
         I’ve taken students hiking at Bellevue State Park.  The northern end of the bluff offers an iconic overview of the town and the lock and dam alongside it.  A southern overlook is reserved for burial mounds scanning the Mississippi.
      The river bluffs above Albany, IL, harbor 26 mounds constructed between 200 BC and 300 AD.  The mounds are located in a 205-acre state historical site of woods and prairie.
        The Black Hawk State Historical site in Rock Island memorializes the Sauk village that prospered there before the 1832 Black Hawk War.  But it also preserves burial mounds that long pre-date the village.  I once visited these mounds before retracing, by car, the 500-mile trek of Black Hawk War. 
      No doubt I have overlooked many mound groups, and I have not even mentioned mound locations away from the Mississippi.  These are merely the ones I have visited along a 250-mile swath of sacred river.
                                                                             
        Just before it was dark enough for the bonfire at Casper Bluff, Dianne and I gazed quietly at the Mississippi from a bench among the mounds. From here it was easy to imagine sacred burial mounds once lining the length of the river.
       And why not?  In Dubuque the Linwood and Mt. Calvary cemeteries lie near the Mississippi as well. Hasn’t the river mesmerized us for 10,000 years?  
       I try to be cognizant of cultural appropriation these days.  I make no assumptions about the lives and ways of the indigenous peoples who built these mounds.  Instead, I focus on what I believe we hold in common, though it often bears repeating, reminding, and re-teaching. 
        That the land that holds our dead is sacred. 
        That the land that bears and cradles our lives is sacred.
        That sacred lands be treated with reverence.

-- February 2020
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​The Effigy Mounds National Monument near Marquette, IA, preserves nearly 200 Native American burial and ceremonial mounds.
Picture​The Albany Mounds are located in a 205-acre woods and prairie State Historical Site in Albany, IL.

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Trempealeau Mountain in the Mississippi River is part of the view from the mounds of Brady’s Bluff in Perrot State Park, Wisconsin.
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A late-autumn view of the Mississippi River from Casper Bluff, south of Galena, IL.
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Whiting Forest of Dow Gardens Allows Visitors to Enjoy the Bird's Eye View

12/8/2019

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The rope hammock suspends visitors 25 feet above the Whiting Forest floor in Midland, MI.  Visitors can get an upclose view of birds.

       Suspended twenty-five feet in the air, my wife Dianne and I took turns lying back in an oversized rope hammock in the canopy walk amid the pine branches of Whiting Forest of Dow Gardens in Midland, MI. Beneath us strolled forest visitors, and among us flitted a range of Midwestern birds chattering about their fall migration plans. On this September weekend, Whiting Forest was hosting a major regional birding festival, but in between events we hung out for a while in the trees.
      Whiting Forest is part of the adjacent Dow Gardens, a botanical garden located on the former estate of Grace and Herbert Dow.  Herbert Dow was  founder of the Dow Chemical Company still headquartered in Midland, not far from Lake Huron. The Dows built their family home amid a sprawling property purchased in 1899.  In 1936, a few years after Herbert’s death, Grace created the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, and eventually turned the family property over to the Foundation to be operated as a botanical garden (with no direct ties to the chemical company).
       Today the 110-acre Dow Gardens boasts 35,000 annuals and 22,000 flowering bulbs laid out in geometrical patterns amid a wandering stream, ponds, and gently rolling hills. On this early autumn afternoon red Canna and Sunpatiens and yellow-petaled Brown-Eyed Susans popped brilliant against a light-blue sky. 
       The weekend we visited also featured a temporary outdoor metal origami sculpture exhibition by Santa Fe artists Jennifer and Kevin Box.  Amid the garden’s blooming treasures were origami-like sculptures of swans, butterflies, ponies, and bison.
          The 54-acre Whiting Forest became part of Dow Gardens in 1991—also by way of Dow family descendants—and was opened to the public in 2004.  The forest includes a mix of planted and natural regrowth red pines, tamaracks, and assorted hardwoods on lands that were logged in the 1870s and later reforested.  
      Kyle Bagnall, Advanced Learning Program Manager, calls the forest “a green oasis in an urban area,” although the city of 44,000 and surrounding area boasts several additional significant green spaces and wildlife refuges as well. Whiting Forest’s bird diversity is particularly pronounced, with native woodland species mingling with migratory birds in a flyway that emanates from nearby Saginaw Bay.
       In 2015, prior to Bagnall’s arrival, the Foundation commissioned the design of a handicapped-accessible canopy walk to bring visitors into the tree level and to overlook the surrounding landscape, pond, and apple orchards.  Ranging from twenty-five to forty feet in the air, the ¼-mile elevated canopy walk brings visitors eye-to-beak with birds at tree-top and mid-branch levels.  “Encouraging play at any age,” says Bagnall, the canopy walk also features two wooden tree pods and the rope-netted hammock for those wanting to nest for a while amid the pines.  
      When Bagnall came on board in 2017, he brought with him a combination of environmental education experience, birding enthusiasm, and historical awareness that perfectly suited Whiting Forest. With a college degree in Public History, he is aware of the need to preserve the legacy of the founding Dow family.  His environmental education experience was honed over twenty-two years at his previous position at the nearby Chippewa Nature Center. And birding has been in his blood since he was a small child, when his father would wake him for 4 a.m. local birding expeditions.  Kyle started making his own life-long birding list at age 10.
      At Whiting Forest, Bagnall soon set about planning the first Birding Festival for Dow Gardens. Like everything Kyle does, the event bustled with activity. Local and regional experts led over 150 participants to enjoy activities such as bird banding at Chippewa Nature Center, viewing herons, gulls and other waterfowl at the Nayanquing Point Wildlife Area, searching for woodland migrant species at the Pine Haven Recreation Area and Albert Szok Preserve, and scouting coastal birds along Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Kyle himself blended history and nature, helping birders spot migratory species in Midland County’s historic cemeteries.
         Dianne and I hopped on board the two-mast Tall Ship Appledore, setting sail for Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, as part of yet another outdoor excursion.
        Indoor sessions included presentations on raptors, wetland preservation, “birding by ear,” and creating a bird-friendly yard.  Additional Festival workshops included nature writing, art, and photography. 
Culminating the festival was the keynote address by David Allen Sibley, author and illustrator of the New York Times best-seller The Sibley Guide to Birds, a work that participants look upon as the premier guide to birding.
 
        On Friday evening, nearing sunset, Dianne and I sat quietly at a table outside the Whiting Forest Café, while other festival-goers mingled nearby. Bagnall chatted with everyone.  Soon his phone buzzed, a text from birders in the nearby forest who’d spotted some specimens Kyle would want to see. 
       We all flocked, then, to the canopy walk, where the setting sun was bringing out new voices. Forty feet above the ground, we listened to the nighthawks.         
 
-- November 2019
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The 1/4-mile  Canopy Walk at Whiting Forest of Down Gardens puts visitors at bird's-eye view.
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​A pair of origami swans grace the Dow Gardens during a metal sculpture exhibit.
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​The Dow Gardens of Midland, Michigan, is awash in color in the early fall. 
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A GEOLOGICAL ROAD TRIP ACROSS DUBUQUE COUNTY

10/22/2019

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​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

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The locks and dams on the Mississippi have altered the natural flow of the river. 
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​The overlook from the Balltown Mound offers an iconic view of eastern Iowa.
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​Rock outcrops at Graf, IA, are rich in fossils. 
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​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
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​Loess (pronounced ‘luss’) soils are like a fine, brown flour, and are easily erodible when the landscape is disturbed.
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​Prairie flowers and grasses have returned naturally where the encroaching forest has been trimmed back. 
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​A 45-foot observation tower at the Hitchcock Nature Center near Council Bluffs offers wide vistas and excellent raptor viewing.
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​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
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Teams counted 149 wood ducks scattered throughout Jo Daviess County. (Photo by Rich Mattas, contributed by Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation)
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Red-bellied woodpeckers were among the favorite finds on the Spring Bird Count. (Photo by Rich Mattas, contributed by Laurie Mattas)
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The Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation’s spring bird count winds through the back roads to tally bird species each year.
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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

4 Comments

 
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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Upper Mississippi River National Fish & Wildlife Refuge: Savanna District

12/18/2018

3 Comments

 
          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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Natural Bridge State Park & Parfrey's Glen Natural Area, Wisconsin

4/11/2018

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

2/21/2018

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

12/10/2017

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

9/29/2017

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

           
 
 

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Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary

7/10/2017

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            Christie is trying to disentangle the call of the Bobolink from the web of bird song at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary. “Hear that beep-boop-beep?  It sounds like R2-D2!” she laughs, likening it to the whirrings of the lovable Star Wars robot.
            My wife Dianne and I are guests of Christie Trifone-Simon, Director of Development for the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation (JDCF), hiking a one-mile loop of the organization’s newly acquired 410-acre property located southwest of Stockton, IL. The rich range of habitat at Valley of Eden—tall and short grass restored prairie, brome grass, hardwood and orchard forest, wetlands and intermittent streams, and Rush Creek—are home to over 70 as-yet-identified bird species, including 15 species listed in “need of conservation” and/or “state-endangered.” 
            The result on this mid-June morning walk is a symphony of bird song.
            JDCF is a private non-profit organization in northwest Illinois’ Jo Daviess County that protects and restores environmentally significant lands based on the support of members, donors, and volunteers.  JDCF currently owns over 1,100 acres of woods, prairie, marsh, and archaeologically significant lands throughout the county available to public access, and they help other owners establish conservation easements on private lands as well.  
            Christie, who has led us on hikes before, is her usual enthusiastic self.  She points out a pair of bobolinks perched on a prairie bush swaying in the breeze.  The Bobolink is a migrant bird that spends part of its year in Panama, Christie explains.  A grassland bird, it has been in decline in recent years as more land is cultivated and developed.
            We also spook up a Meadowlark and several Red-Winged Blackbirds as we walk.  The blackbirds’ nests in the grass “look like a woven piece of art,” Christie says.
            As we turn a bend along the trail, we encounter the forest edge and a whole new set of birds.  An oriole is swooping among the orchard trees and a woodpecker is drumming a deadwood tree stump somewhere out of sight.  
            The list of rare or threatened species also includes Henslow’s Sparrow and Dickcissel on the prairie grasslands, the Great Egret in the marshes, the American Woodcock and Yellow-Billed and Black-Billed Cuckoo from the forest, and the Brown Thrasher and Savanna Sparrow in the edgewood.
Future plans for the property include bird watching and photography blinds. The bird sanctuary has drawn the interest of organizations like the Audubon Society.  It could well become a destination site for birders, says Christie.
            “It’s like a symphony of bird calls out here,” Dianne says, and suddenly the conversation turns to the aesthetics and psychological benefits of nature. 
            “The experience of nature is about sight, sound, texture, and colors,” Christie responds.  She tries to get kids, especially, to see nature up close.  Her sentences sometimes stop mid-stream as she points out swallowtail, monarch, wood nymph, and skipper butterflies that have fluttered across her train of thought, calling out to be noticed.
            The Monarch, Christie says, has a special relationship to the milkweed, and she takes us off the trail midsentence to show us the plant.  Monarchs feed off its milky sap, ingesting cardenolids, which in turn make the monarchs toxic to potential predators.  The loss of grassland milkweeds has contributed to the steep decline of monarchs.
            Everything in nature is woven together, and Christie leads our attention next to the underside of the milkweed leaves where ants, she explains, are “farming” aphids. The ants herd the nearly microscopic insects, protecting them from predators and feeding off the aphid excretion called honeydew.  “Look at the size of those ants’ mandibles,” Christie says with delight and amazement as she unfurls the milkweed leaf and examines the ants up close.
            We trade the microscopic view for a broad sweeping vista from the upland forest edge down through the valley grassland and across to the woods and farm fields that rim the horizon.  From here the wide range of habitat and land use is apparent.
From beyond the trail but still within the sanctuary grounds rises the lowing of cattle.  Another unusual feature of the Valley of Eden sanctuary is that cattle will continue to graze certain areas to keep the forest from encroaching on the short grass habitat that some birds require for nesting.  A farmhouse and cattle shed will also continue to grace the sanctuary entrance to help visitors “appreciate the history of our farming heritage,” Christie adds.
            Indeed, the Valley of Eden takes its name not from the Biblical garden but from the family name of its past owners who farmed the land.  But the bird sanctuary will be donated anonymously to the JDCF by its current owner who has been actively restoring the land the past 25 years, including planting prairie and new stands of hardwood forest.  Having seen habitat disappear elsewhere in the country, the owner has worked to preserve and improve the grasslands and woods that sweep across this sun-drenched valley and uplands.
            “The intention of the donor,” says Christie, “was to create a sanctuary for birds of many habitats.  We intend to carry on that dream forever.”
The Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary will be open to the public sometime in 2018.
            There is plenty of work to do in the meantime.  A new road and gravel parking lot had just been laid down the week before our visit.  Volunteers can get a sneak preview by offering to pull weeds, manage a bluebird trail, take part in birding inventories, help with wildlife interpretation, and more.
            A symphony of bird calls trill across the grassland at the Valley of Eden Bird Sanctuary.  Bird interweaves with butterfly, ant with aphid, cow with grassland, and grassland with forest. 
And as with any good orchestra, each instrument is part of the song.
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Canoeing the Wisconsin River

5/10/2017

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CANOEING THE WISCONSIN RIVER

“The Round River, a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit”
  -- Aldo Leopold, “The Round River”
 
 
            On any given summer’s day—and they are all “given”—there are numerous locations from which to launch a canoe or kayak for a day-trip on the lower reaches of the Wisconsin River. 
            You can spend a weekend watching outdoor theater at Spring Green, then hop in the canoe near Tower Hill State Park and take out at Muscoda, where, if you time your trip for late May you can join in on the annual Morel Mushroom Festival. You can float to the mouth of the Wisconsin and recreate the 1673 canoe journey of Fr. Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, whose crew were the first Europeans to navigate into the Mississippi River.
            But for reasons of easy access and favorite scenery, my wife and I have returned again and again each summer to a stretch of Wisconsin river in between these locations, embarking at Boscobel and taking out nine miles downstream at Woodman.  When we are by ourselves, I toss my old bicycle into the canoe, and shuttle back to Boscobel to get the car, completing the loop.
            The Wisconsin River offers some of the best canoeing and kayaking in the immediate area.  From Sauk Prairie to the Mississippi River, paddlers enjoy 92 miles of dam-free river flowing through the steep bluffs of the Driftless region.  Along the way you’ll spot egrets, sandpipers, turkey vultures and bald eagles.  In the fall you may find yourself puzzled by the manic laughter of migrating sand cranes.
            But the crown jewel of the Wisconsin River is its impeccable sand. Whereas most Midwestern rivers have a muddy bottom and shoreline, the Wisconsin River is underlain and rimmed with a thick coat of rich, clean, tan-colored sand, perfect for squelching between the toes and brushing as a coarse grit from sun-dried skin.
            Because on the Wisconsin River, you won’t stay in the canoe all afternoon.  Depending on the season and your misjudgments on choosing a flow route, you may have to climb out and walk your canoe across a low spot or two.  There will be sand islands where you’ll stop for lunch. (You’ll joke, of course, about the sand that inevitably ends up in your sandwich, adding a bit of crunch.)  The water may be cold, but you’ll suck it up and take a life-jacket float through the straits, for the sandy bottom makes this among the clearest waters of the upper Midwest.
            This lower stretch of river bisects what conservationist Aldo Leopold called the “sand counties” of southwest Wisconsin.  The sand originates from a central lowland that 15,000 years ago formed the bed of the ice-dammed Glacial Lake Wisconsin situated near the retreating edges of the last glaciers.  When the ice dam melted and burst, the glacial lake drained quickly, gouging out the Wisconsin Dells and coursing through the Wisconsin River valley and down the Mississippi.  When the rush of water slowed, it dropped its load of lake-bottom sand that the glaciers had been grinding up for millennia as they scraped across the up-state bedrock.  The result is the sand-rich shores of the Wisconsin River.
            Today as you slide over the shallows in a canoe, you can watch the sand still pushing downstream, grain tumbling over grain in the low spots, spilling over underwater ledges into the deeps, endlessly creating and erasing islands. 
            The constantly streaming sand gives the illusion that the supply must be endless, that it must somehow feed back into itself and flow again downstream.
            In his essay “Round River,” Aldo Leopold re-told the old Paul Bunyan legend of a river “that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around in a never-ending circuit.”  In the tall-tale, Bunyan the sawyer floated felled timber down Round River, but even after he finished his work, the water remained plentifully stoked with logs, as the river circled back around floated past again.
            Leopold turned the story into a parable about ecosystems.  What goes into the river stays in the river and cycles endlessly through the food chains of bass and crane and hawk.  A healthy ecosystem sustains itself.  A poisoned one retains toxicity.
            Conversely, what comes out of the ecosystem stays out.  First it was Paul Bunyan’s hardwood forests that disappeared.  Along with it went habitat for a wealth of creatures. 
            Today, ironically, it is the sand counties’ clean, rich sand that is mined and shipped downstream—by rail and barge—for use in fracking operations down south. 
            The sands of the Wisconsin River are not in danger of entirely floating away or being hauled off by rail.  But Leopold’s parable serves as a reminder that whatever damage we do to our environment stays arounds to haunt us later.
            I keep a Round River of my own.  Nearly every summer I will hit an antsy day and tell my wife, “It’s time to return to the Wisconsin River.”  I’ll toss the bike in the canoe alongside the cooler and paddles at Boscobel, we’ll eat our sandwiches on an island, we’ll float and paddle and talk and stay quiet, we’ll pull the canoe from the river at the wooden dock at Woodman.
            And I’ll bike back to get the car, completing yet another cycle.


-- Kevin Koch
​May 2017
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