Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  It was on another canoe journey, at another time, that we explored Tank Creek, in the spring when the river was high, so different from this summer’s low flows. That day, the rushing dark-tinted waters of the creek, rich with organic aroma as they poured out of the Black, had blocked its narrow channel with debris dams, necessitating several portages. Delicate toothwort flowers carpeted muddy banks and migrating songbirds flitted through barely leafed trees. After one portage, we paddled past the rusted remnants of an iron truss bridge that’s no longer in use. The narrow wooded confines of the lively Tank widened as we neared the Mississippi and the creek slowed, sprawling into marshy bottomland where a vigilant pair of eagles watched us pass their nesting tree. Then the Tank emptied into the quiet of Mud Lake, a shallow backwater connected to the big river by narrow outlet channels, small pieces of the intricate bayou-like puzzle of waterways that is the delta. Across the lake, a long straight margin of islands covered with softly greening trees concealed the Mississippi’s main channel. Against this green backdrop, a slender white bird dropped from the sky, diving beak-first into the shallow water, again and again. Beyond the trees, across the wide valley, we saw for the first time that day the horizon line of distant dark bluffs rising high above the big river in Minnesota’s Great River Bluffs State Park, where the hiker finds a bird’s eye view of the Black’s delta from five hundred feet up.

  When the Corps impounded the Mississippi in the 1930s, the final reach of the Black’s main channel, which runs parallel to the Mississippi for about ten miles, disappeared under the waves of Lake Onalaska, the wide shallow expanse of open water behind Lock & Dam 7, separated from the main channel of the Mississippi by a string of low wooded islands. Within the lake, the Black’s now amorphous main channel hugs the shoreline, forming again when it slides between the shore and French Island. Downstream of an earthen dam and concrete spillway between the island and Onalaska, and downstream of Lock & Dam 7 and the interstate bridge, the Black reaches its historic and true confluence with the Mississippi, slyly subverting the lock.

  Here on the river I feel as though I’m starting to understand this complex confluence, at least a little. These recent chapters in the story of the Black River’s relationship with the Mississippi are on record, but I wonder too what permutations the Black went through before written history. Some clues lie upstream. When Bob and I first canoed the Black, it was between the towns of Irving and North Bend, a particularly lovely and remote stretch of river that rambles through the steep hills of the Driftless. The wide gorge, sandy bottom, and frequent sandbars along this reach reflect the lower Black’s ancient past as an early outlet for Glacial Lake Wisconsin, and the dark water for which the river was named comes from organic compounds at its headwaters in northeastern Taylor County, a little way south of Timm’s Hill, outside the Driftless. After the river crosses into the Driftless at the city of Black River Falls, it traverses the unglaciated area from northeast to southwest. The river valley, carved into the ancient bedrock, grows deeper as it nears the Mississippi River valley, and the underlying geology of the Driftless is visible along this reach. We walked into the mouth of one of its tributaries, Roaring Creek, a small stream with a steep gradient, and up the narrow sandstone canyon that flanks its final drop into the Black, to see a series of small waterfalls drop over sharp-edged hard bedrock ledges. On one tall bluff we paddled next to, the moist Cambrian sandstone bedrock of the sheer cliff face was covered with the small leathery leaves of liverwort plants, anchored by their rhizoids in rock fractures, doing their part to disintegrate this rock face: a very long-term project, and one tiny piece of the Driftless Area’s master plan to erode the Paleozoic bedrock.

  White pines top the bluffs and the lower banks are densely wooded with hardwood trees and river birch. Because little of the Black’s watershed is agricultural and much is forested, phosphorus and other nutrient levels are low compared to the nearby Trempealeau and the water is clear. In the shallows, we spotted live mussels and their tracks in the sand. In deeper water were northern pike, bass, redhorse, and huge schools of minnows. And the many bald eagles that flew over us are further testament to the river’s abundant fishery. That day the river was low, only about a third of its usual flow, and we had to follow quite a meandering downriver course, occasionally grounding in the shallows and wading for a bit. The channel split at one point; searching for higher water, we wandered off into an alternate Black River, a channel with more flow and fewer deadfalls.

  To the paddler, Driftless rivers seem to be all about change. Water levels rise and fall, sometimes dramatically. When the river floods, whole trees are scoured from the banks and carried downstream to be dumped carelessly on sandbars or in sandy shallows, where their presence helps shape the ever-shifting sandy outlines of the channel. The Black shares its past with the Wisconsin River—both drained Glacial Lake Wisconsin and both were log transport routes from lumber camps to the Mississippi during the logging of the north woods. Though the Black is a smaller river, in the eyes of the paddler they look very similar, as do their sandbars, ever moving and shifting.

  Near the city of Onalaska, the Black is home to the paddlefish: fascinating, improbable-looking creatures that the fossil record shows have been around for probably three hundred million years, fish that once swam happily throughout the Mississippi’s vast watershed, migrating from north to south as climate change dictated. Imagine the shape of a smallish shark and then attach a long canoe paddle blade to its snout. Though superficially it does resemble a shark, the paddlefish is actually related to the sturgeon family, and is a mild-mannered filter feeder that lives mostly on tiny zooplankton such as daphnia as well as on any edible tidbits like insect larvae and mayfly nymphs that float into its wide-open mouth and get tangled in the comb-like gillrakers at the back. Despite this species’ tenacity over the millennia, the paddlefish no longer thrives in this region, and dams are the primary reason. Dams prevent the paddlefish from following its preferred spawning migration routes, and dams have destroyed both its spawning grounds and the backwaters where it feeds and rears its young. Polluted waters and historic over-fishing can also be blamed, at least in part, for the declining fortunes of the paddlefish. The final suspect is the fisherman who illegally catches the fish for its eggs and sells them as caviar that retails for up to twenty-five dollars an ounce; in recent years, illegal harvesting of paddlefish has increased.

  Now here is the good part to the paddlefish story. In the early 1990s, Steven Zigler, a scientist at the USGS, decided to find out where paddlefish still live in the Upper Mississippi and what their migration routes look like. Along with Ann Runstrom of FWS and other fisheries biologists, he caught a number of adult fish in the Mississippi, the Chippewa, and the Wisconsin rivers, tagged them with radio transmitters, and released them. From 1994 to 1997, the scientists tracked the movements of the paddlefish, by boat, by plane, and by hovercraft.

  They learned that paddlefish like deep slow-moving water, like the final reach of the Black, where groups of the tagged fish congregated in a backwater right next to the interstate bridge I have crossed so many times. Paddlefish also like Pool 5A near Polander Lake, where the eating is good and several deep-water habitats have been dredged out just for them. The team learned that on the Wisconsin River, paddlefish hang out much of the year below the Prairie du Sac dam, where there’s plenty to eat, and then migrate to near Arena to spawn. They learned that some paddlefish migrate to spawn as many as 230 miles, often heading downstream, against their instincts, because of upstream dams. And they learned that paddlefish are able to lock through.

  In the spring of 1996, when the paddlefish were on the move, one of the tagged fish traveled upstream from Pool 8 to Pool 7. The paddlefish swam into the lock alongside a barge headed upstream and when the light turned green, the paddlefish followed the barge out again. The scientists tracked every move of this enterprising creature: the not-so-secret lives of fish.

  Soon after we float under the Interstate 9
0 bridge, Bob spots the daymark sign at the head of Minnesota Island, and we detour into the East Channel that runs to the east of this long wooded island, passing first a group of houseboats and then the official confluence with the Black River. Much of La Crosse is built along a glacial outwash terrace. On the east side, the city backs up to towering Grandad Bluff, 552 feet above the river, a high point on the wooded ridgeline of the bluffs. Its superior height may be somewhat an illusion, however, created by the fact that as we move downstream, the river digs ever deeper, yet the elevation of the ancient Paleozoic Plateau, that level which determines the potential height of the bluffs, remains essentially the same. To the west, islands and more islands braid the river channel: Taylor Island, Barron Island, Isle La Plume, Hintgen Island, Green Island. Further west, a maze of small unnamed islands outlined by sloughs and backwaters sprawls across the wooded floodplain on the Minnesota side, ending as the land rises up to the Great River Road and the railroad line that run along the eastern edge of the little town of La Crescent.

  We float slowly past Barron Island, where the beaches and sand volleyball courts of Pettibone Park are empty on this cool gray June morning. Across the river is a brightly painted riverboat, the La Crosse Queen VII, a modern tour boat disguised as a nineteenth-century paddle-wheeler. Unlike many replicas, this boat is truly driven by its big paddle-wheel, rather than by modern propellers, though its engines are modern diesel rather than wood-fired. Today, empty benches lend the boat an air of abandonment.

  There’s more, as there always is, and the story began, according to historian Richard Durbin’s The Wisconsin River, in the early 1850s when many wealthy Europeans and Easterners took the “Fashionable Tour.” Tourists, for this is who they were, would board a fancy steamboat, typically in St. Louis, cruise up to St. Paul, and return downriver to Prairie du Chien, admiring the majesty of the river and the bluffs and the picturesque wildness of the land and its inhabitants. From Prairie du Chien, they might return to St. Louis to conclude a round trip journey of about eight or nine days. Or, a smaller steamboat might carry some passengers up the Wisconsin River from Prairie du Chien to Portage, then down the Fox River to Green Bay where they would book passage east through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast. Minnesota historian Theodore C. Blegen claims it was George Catlin who in 1835 first proposed this grand concept, as a way for citified people to sample the “Far West,” for this midsection of the continent was indeed still wilderness, the front edge of the vast unknown west.

  The tour became quite fashionable, and in June of 1854 “The Grand Excursion” was held to celebrate the opening of the first railroad line from Chicago to the Mississippi River, or in the words of the railroad developer, “the nuptials of the Atlantic with the Father of Waters,” the railroad link that would allow travelers to go from New York City to the Mississippi in less than two days. After riding two Chicago & Rock Island Railroad trains from Chicago to Rock Island, a group of between 700 and 1,200 (estimates vary considerably) wealthy and influential east coast travelers, among them former president Millard Fillmore with his daughter and son, along with various artists, ministers, and reporters, boarded seven steamboats for a festive sightseeing expedition up the Upper Mississippi to St. Paul and back: Eastern elites meet Wild West.

  Back in the day, the Upper Mississippi was a destination. Today, however, on a cloudy cold Tuesday, everyone is at work, and the forlorn tour boat floats quietly, moored near the wooded mouth of the La Crosse River, the city’s second confluence, the river known to Nicollet as Prairie à la Crosse R.

  I have never paddled the La Crosse, but I do know that the Wisconsin DNR views this river as a great example of the federal Clean Water Act at work. In recent years, wastewater treatment plants along this river have reduced their phosphorus discharge by 90 percent, a dramatic and highly commendable change. This quiet but accomplished river passes through Fort McCoy, Sparta, Rockland, Bangor, and West Salem as it meanders over the wide valley, dammed four times in its sixty-one miles, toward its namesake city and the Mississippi. Below the dam at West Salem that impounds the river in Lake Neshonoc, the river is more turbid and prone to algae blooms. Within the city of La Crosse, a large wetland on the river’s floodplain divides North La Crosse and South La Crosse and extends upriver beyond the city limits. When I look at a river, I always wonder what it would be like in a canoe. When DNR fisheries biologist Jordan Weeks looks at the La Crosse upstream of the dam at West Salem, he sees a big trout stream. Downstream of the dam, he says, it is home to muskies: the river seen through the eyes of an angler.

  Near the tail of Barron Island, the twin spans of the Mississippi River Bridge are ahead, one bridge built in 1940 and the other in 2004, carrying Highway 14 and Highway 61 across the big river. From this angle their shapes overlap to form an elegant pattern of arched and trussed blue-painted steel. When I was a child journeying east with my family we crossed the older of these two bridges, and I still remember my first glimpse of its iron lacework and graceful curves.

  It’s late June. And it’s cold. It shouldn’t be this cold in late June. I’m trying to keep the complaints chorus mostly reined in. But it is cold, and the damp air combined with the wind makes it feel even colder. It’s also mayfly season, though, and we should probably be grateful for the cold and the wind, which will delay any hatch that may be pending. Hexagenia hatches on the Mississippi are legendary. Vast numbers of nymphs crawl out of the Mississippi mud, morph into their winged adulthood, take flight in great clouds, and land on every surface in sight, all at once and all in one or two days. The fact that they swarm to mate, lay eggs, and die is well-known, but the environmental cue that prompts all the mayfly nymphs on the Mississippi from Iowa to Minnesota to hatch at once is apparently still a mystery. The bulk of the hex hatch often happens at night, and lured by the highway lights to die on a bridge roadway, mayfly bodies will pile in drifts on bridges over the Mississippi, drifts so deep that road crews get their snowplows out of storage to remove the slippery mess. On the Johnson Mayfly Emergence Scale, a hatch of that size would rate five out of five points.

  Despite the fact that many find the clouds and piles of smelly bugs a source of incredible irritation, mayflies are ecologically exciting and important. Not only is a hatch an enormous food hit for many creatures, mayflies cannot thrive in an unhealthy river. Though by 1927 the mayfly had pretty much disappeared from the heavily polluted Mississippi, the creature staged a strong comeback after water quality improved in the 1980s. In the words of Kenny Selway, mayflies are “the Mississippi’s barometer. A big hatch means a healthy river.” Just not today, please.

  Here’s a note for the tech crowd. The National Weather Service at La Crosse recently began tracking the mayfly hatch every year, using Doppler radar to follow the largest swarms up the river valley from Davenport, Iowa, to the Twin Cities, and posting the results online. Imagine, a cloud of insects large enough to show up on radar!

  At the Municipal Harbor on La Plume Island, Luke stands on the pier, our new camera in hand. We are chatting with him about family and about how grateful we are for the camera rescue when the door of his minivan slides open and his two young daughters and their two friends tumble out, all four dressed in various shades of pink. All talking at once, they chatter about tending their 4-H goats and about going to Wabasha this afternoon to see the eagles. Their young energy and enthusiasm is a warm radiator on this chilly damp day.

  Leaving La Crosse, we paddle hard and my cold wet feet begin to warm. At least it’s not raining. In fact, it hasn’t rained once since we left Faribault. Bob clicks on the weather radio and we listen for a while to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) channel describing the weather for everywhere else in the Upper Midwest before finally getting around to the La Crosse area. We learn that it is still only sixty degrees and the north to northwest wind is gusting to almost twenty miles per hour. But I knew that without listening to NOAA. I’m still cold and the wind is briskly herding our little
boat down the river. NOAA National Weather Service features synthetic voices in both genders. Today, Donna speaks like the machine that she is, intoning “These are the eleven a.m. central time conditions on Tuesday, June 30 …” with the telltale hypnotic cadence and odd pronunciations of synthetic speech. She does sound better than the former robotic voice of NOAA known as Paul, strange and disconcerting. On past river adventures, when the afternoon doldrums arrived, we would switch on a radio with a windup battery charger, cranking up the volume and singing along when the music was good, and once ran a winding rapids while the radio rollicked with Irish fiddle music. But when the radio broke, we didn’t get another. Today as we resort to Donna’s pontifications for entertainment, I know it’s getting boring on the river.

  At the wooded mouth of Minnesota’s Root River, I perk up. The Root is one of my favorite paddling streams, though it doesn’t look like much at the confluence, where it’s just another slow-moving river adding its heavy, brown sediment load to the Mississippi. To confuse the uninitiated, the Mississippi disguises its confluences in wooded backwater tangles, where all the trees seem to be silver maples. Fremling writes that the native silver maple is the floodplain survivor of the impoundment stresses, thriving where other species give up.