Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  I’m no angler but my fascination with watching fish dates way back. The rivers and lakes of my childhood were typical southern Minnesota waters, murky places for the most part. The Zumbro and Cannon rivers often ran thick with eroded sediment. Only during an extended dry period was the river clear enough to see the bottom, and then only in the shallows, where I liked to wade and hunt for rocks. Cedar Lake would begin the year with crystal clarity, but by the end of June, suspended algae would tint its eutrophic (nutrient-rich) waters a pale chartreuse, and a thick belt of pond lilies, cattails, rushes, and coontail would ring the perimeter. In the intense heat of late July or early August, a spectacular algae bloom would usually coat the water, sometimes more than once, calling a temporary halt to our swimming.

  I knew, but only because I had been told, that Cedar Lake is almost fifty feet deep at points, but when I swam or canoed on its surface, even when I was over what I knew to be the deepest point, this depth seemed abstract, hard to comprehend, impossible to visualize. Because I couldn’t see down into those cloudy depths, I couldn’t think about them. So for me, a lake was all about the surface. This changed when I was twelve years old and went for two weeks one summer to Camp Olson, a YMCA camp on Little Boy Lake, just south of Leech Lake in northern Minnesota. Deep in the forest on the west side of the camp’s acreage were the Shurds, a chain of three small, deep, mysterious lakes where we campers sometimes canoed. I still remember the first time I looked over the gunwale of the canoe into one of the little lakes, staring down through the clear water and realizing that what I saw down there was the trunk of a large dead tree lying on boulders and that the large tree was so far down that it looked quite small. Yet through the lens of the still water I could see it clearly. A long thin fish, possibly a northern, slid along the tree trunk and out of sight. At first, I was gripped with the same fear that I always have in a high place, a weak-kneed fear of falling, this time down into the depths of the Shurds. But fascination quickly replaced the fear, and I stopped often to peer over the gunwale, wishing to see all that was down there, until the girl paddling in the bow told me the other kids had moved on to the next lake and we better catch up.

  Though the Wisconsin is a shallow river on average, there are many depths where exotic creatures like paddlefish and gar make their homes. When it’s deeper than about two feet, though, the water of the Wisconsin is too murky for my fish-spotting ambitions. I won’t be able to pass the time by looking over the gunwale.

  We cruise upstream at the satisfying pace of two miles an hour, soon passing under the bridge where the Great River Road crosses. Though we are now officially in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, where glaciers never ventured, geologists suspect that glacial ice once did move up the Wisconsin River, a little way at least. The evidence is here at Bridgeport, where Highway 60 comes in from the east, along the north side of the river. In Roadside Geology of Wisconsin, Robert Dott and John Attig write, “Wisconsin 60 is on a high bench with sandstone cliffs to the north and the river below it to the south. This bench, the Bridgeport terrace, is the dissected remnant of an outwash plain deposited by a river flowing eastward from a glacier that advanced from the west and blocked the mouth of the Wisconsin River. The exact time … was probably before 790,000 years ago.” The mighty Wisconsin has not always flowed westward, and part of the Driftless was actually glaciated! This shifts what I thought I knew about the river. Layers of glacial time seem to appear in the bedrock outcrops as we pass the terrace and head toward the geologically true Driftless.

  Upstream at the Millville landing, the Wisconsin is suddenly a busy, noisy place, an explosion of people playing in the river, the parking lot filled with cars, minivans, trucks, and trailers. Though the day has not yet acquired the intense heat of midsummer, everyone is swimming and splashing. A shirtless old man, already sunburnt, calls happily to us from his fishing boat, “Great day for it!” On the other side of the river, three teenagers slither like otters in and out of a small boat, chasing each other, hooting with laughter.

  During the next few miles we work hard, still learning to read the water backwards. Around its many sandbars and islands, the river plaits a braided channel, and the flow changes from strand to strand of the braid. Where the strand is narrow, the current runs deeper and faster than average. Where the water spreads out over a broad shallow strand, the current slows. On our many downstream journeys on the Wisconsin, we tried to follow what we call the “fast lane,” the serpentine line of the thalweg that meanders across the riverbed, swaying from side to side, skimming the outside of river bends, carving ever deeper into the sediment of those outside banks.

  “One might think that this constant erosion would cause the river to become ever wider and shallower,” explained Matt Diebel of Wisconsin DNR, “but at the same time, sediment is deposited on ‘point bars’ on inside banks, balancing the erosion. Because water is constantly transporting sediment downstream, the migration of a river’s meanders tends to march downstream. Through this process, the location of a river channel in its floodplain is constantly shifting, while the dimensions— width, depth—of the channel remain approximately constant. This ‘dynamic equilibrium’ is one of the basic principles of fluvial geomorphology, which is the physical science of rivers.” Ever changing, the river is constant.

  Headed upstream we seek the slow water, the shallows. Sometimes we walk these shallows, towing the canoe with the bowline. It’s a welcome break for our butts, but a slow slog. Mostly we focus on finding that elusive strand of river deep enough to paddle and yet slow enough to let us make good headway. There’s no rest for upstream paddlers. If we stop paddling, we move backward, so we must try to keep an even steady pace, a pace we can sustain for hours, ever scouting the water ahead for the best route. It’s satisfying work. We feel a kinship with the Native Americans and the voyageurs, able to travel both ways on the river, under their own power, truly using the river as a highway. We are voyageurs, voyageurs with cell phones.

  Past the Millville landing, the Wisconsin is once again quiet and secluded, buffered from the outside world by high wooded bluffs. From its confluence with the Mississippi to the Prairie du Sac dam over ninety-two miles upstream, the river, its floodplain, and its bluffs are protected territory. This stewardship is rooted in the 1980s, when the environmental protection movement had gained significant traction.

  According to David Aslakson, the Wisconsin DNR’s lead planner for the project, it began in 1980, when Richard Chenoweth at the University of Wisconsin–Madison realized that the increasing level of blufftop and riverside development would eventually threaten the area’s remarkable scenic beauty. Chenoweth and his colleague Bernard “Ben” Niemann went to people at the DNR and to politicians such as Spencer Black and Russ Feingold and told them that if something wasn’t done, this beauty would be lost. The DNR and the politicians listened. In Aslakson’s words, Chenoweth was “the burr under the saddle,” the reason the project went ahead. The times were right: environmental issues were on everyone’s minds then. And the way the project was developed—by building consensus, not by dictate—was right. In 1989, after almost a decade of planning by DNR, the state legislature created the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway—77,300 acres of riverine sandbars, islands, bluffs, and lowland forest—to protect this natural beauty from excessive development, and Governor Tommy Thompson signed it into law. The text of the legislative proposal characterized the Riverway in scenic terms: “one of the longest remaining free flowing stretches of river left in Wisconsin and possibly in the Midwest. The wooded bluffs, long vistas, hundreds of sandbars and islands and thousands of acres of lowland forest and open wetlands still appear largely free of man’s impact.” And the Riverway is about scenic beauty management of all the land, both public and private. In addition, the goal is to manage the natural resources, including endangered species, on state-owned land.

  “It was a confluence of ideas, social changes, things happening on a landscape level,” said Gary Birch, also a Riverw
ay planner. “The baby boomers had grown up and everyone wanted to go back to the land, or in this case, to the river.” The Lower Wisconsin is within convenient traveling distance of urban areas yet it feels like wilderness. The environmental ethic that emerged during the 1960s and ’70s was still strong. It was the right time.

  From beyond the trees, sandhill cranes sound their approval with prehistoric croaks, and I think to myself that this river might actually look much as it did when the first Native Americans lived here, when tribal groups gathered at Prairie du Chien to trade, when Marquette and Joliet arrived that June day in 1673. If it is true that we see essentially what they saw, it is a rare experience in this modern world.

  That could change. The Lower Wisconsin Riverway faces unanticipated challenges as the boom in hydraulic fracturing for shale oil has led to a rapidly increasing demand for huge quantities of the sand that is a necessary part of the mining process. Lured by abundant high-quality sand deposits and willing landowners near Bridgeport, Pattison Sand Company of Clayton, Iowa, purchased sand mining rights on three hundred acres of land between Highway 60 and the Wisconsin River, just upstream of the bridge that carries the Great River Road. Two-thirds of the land in question adjoins the Riverway and one-third is on Riverway land. The company acted on a 1990s change in the Riverway statutes that allows nonmetallic mines to be permitted in the Riverway, “as long as the excavation and stockpiled material are not visible from the river.” Intended to benefit landowners by allowing them to quarry for local road repair materials, the change in statute created a loophole that prevented state authorities from rejecting the sand mine proposal.

  This is not a small issue. The conditional use permit issued by the Bridgeport town board would allow Pattison Sand Company to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for up to sixty years. Which means that, at worst, a truck would enter or leave the site every six minutes. Even parts of the mine that are not on Riverway land would be quite close to the river and noise from mining operations and truck traffic—250 forty-ton trucks a day headed for Iowa on Highway 60— would be clearly audible to those on the river who go there for the solitude it offers. From Point Lookout at Wyalusing State Park we would clearly see this vast sand mine. Not what the Riverway planners had in mind. Residents worry that mining dust would reach the river, that drawing water from the river to reduce the dust would not be regulated, and that their property values would drop. Many observers worry that this operation would be a precedent for eroding protections guaranteed by the Riverway legislation. It’s a messy business.

  The approval process went like this: The Bridgeport town board approved the mining permits. The Wisconsin DNR approved the permits, including those for mining on Riverway land. After the town board approved the mining permits, however, members of the Riverway board learned that some members of the town board owned land on which the permits were being granted. A conflict-of-interest lawsuit ensued. When he learned that the DNR was forced to approve the permit for fifty acres of Riverway land because of the loophole, Mark Cupp, director of the Riverway board, was concerned that if the board refused to give final approval to the permits that affect Riverway lands, as was their right, state government might retaliate by reducing funding to the River-way. The board, however, voted six to two to refuse the Riverway permit. Mining will happen, but not on Riverway land.

  Late in the afternoon of this long hot summer day, we reach the mouth of the Kickapoo River, quietly flowing in close to the head of big Harris Island, and pause, resting in an eddy near the confluence.

  Oh, the beautiful Kickapoo. Upstream of us flows both a lovely paddling river and a river that tells the story of the relationship between people and rivers of the Driftless in vivid terms. Books have been written about the Kickapoo and the people who live along this winding river, including an account of the long and contentious struggle over the dam that was started but never finished, chronicled in the local, personalized voice of Brad Steinmetz in That Dam History. In Lynne Heasley’s fascinating book, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley, she analyzes the epic battle of the La Farge dam in the larger context of the young environmental movement and the accompanying national debate, concluding that the key to its resolution was in acknowledging and respecting the sense of community in the Kickapoo valley, not in actions by the federal government.

  Many stories about the river have to do with its habit of flooding disastrously and washing away houses in the bargain. Say these town names—Gays Mills and Soldiers Grove—and what quickly comes to mind are the news accounts of floods and disaster, stories about the moving of whole towns onto higher ground. The Kickapoo floods because of its nature as a Driftless river with a lot of quick-to-flood tributaries feeding it after heavy rains, and it floods even more because man has separated it from its floodplain sponges and has farmed and otherwise altered the steep valley lands so that they shed water rather than absorbing it. Land uses that most exacerbated the flooding have for the most part ended, but the floods keep coming. People who live in houses built in the flood zone and farmers who till the rich bottomland of the river valley and pasture their livestock there want to try to stop the floods because they don’t want to or can’t afford to move, or both. The river, of course, doesn’t care what people want. It’s an old story.

  This fascinating river, the Lower Wisconsin’s biggest tributary, begins in Monroe County and flows south to the Wisconsin through a winding valley that cuts deep into the rugged land that is the ancient remnant of the Paleozoic Plateau. Tall sandstone bluffs, with overhanging trees that cling to the bluffs and shade the river, line the river’s middle reaches. These rocky outcrops are undercut, so as you paddle underneath them you can look up at the underside of the overhangs, where lichens, liverworts, and mosses grow, minerals paint the sandstone, and groundwater seeps from the crevices. Laminar flow lines tracing the direction of the water’s erosive action over the millennia add sculptural beauty. On a summer weekend, the stretch between the towns of Ontario and La Farge is a busy place, with a steady stream of canoes and kayaks, many of them rentals, floating downstream through seemingly endless meanders, river bends that after a time become predictable, like the curves of a snake. And bridges, numbered not named. Bridges and bluffs, bridges and bluffs. What are not predictable are all the deadfalls, rocks, and overhanging branches the paddler encounters and dodges. Young agile paddlers have been known to grab one of these branches and hang from it as their paddling partner continues downstream, until another companion’s canoe floats underneath, then dropping in.

  The river runs through the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, 8,569 acres of state land between Wildcat Mountain State Park and the town of La Farge. Of this, 1,780 acres would have been flooded had the dam that was to be upstream of La Farge been completed. First proposed as a flood control measure in the wake of the Flood Control Act of 1936, construction of the dam was repeatedly delayed. When a more extensive project was conceived in the 1960s, a plan that would have yielded a much larger impoundment, the federal government forcibly purchased 149 valley farms, many from unwilling sellers, and the Corps began construction. But in 1975, Congress decided the project was costing too much, and research by the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison made clear that the dam had the potential to do serious damage to the region’s ecosystem. Though the partially built dam was never finished, the dam intake tower still stands on the site, in the words of Lynne Heasley, “a monument to an environmental nightmare averted.”

  In 2000, the federal government turned over control of 1,200 acres of the land to the Ho-Chunk Nation, the previous inhabitants of the valley, and control of the balance of the state-owned land to a citizens’ group, the Kickapoo Valley Reserve Board; these two groups manage the land together as an area for public recreation and environmental education. The once-wild land is wild once more. And the river still floods.

  Along the Kickapoo, the forested valley slo
pes and sandstone river bluffs shelter relict plant communities, leftovers from glacial times that are still alive in the Driftless because of the region’s unique cool moist microclimate pockets, species that scientists believe repopulated the barren world left behind when the glaciers retreated. Some of these species live only in the Driftless, not anywhere else in the world, on moist sandstone cliffs and algific talus slopes. Which is to say that their homes are cool, damp, and rocky. Steep wooded north-facing slopes are kept even cooler by the fascinating air-conditioning properties of karst topography. In winter, subzero air pours into the fractures, fissures, and sinkholes, supercooling the bedrock as deep as forty feet. Spring rains seep into these icy rock cavities and freeze solid. When summer’s heat finally thaws the bedrock, the ice becomes frigid water vapor and ice-cold water, both of which flow from openings in the bedrock. In the heat of midsummer, a blast of icy air may pour from these vents, startling a hiker. Ancient species of plants that had adapted to live in the periglacial climate still find the cool habitat they need to survive.

  Riverway planner Gary Birch, a botanist by training, said he loves exploring the river valley to look for these botanical treasures. Here he finds rare birdseye primrose, northern monkshood, and Lapland azalea, the only rhododendron native to Wisconsin. “These ancient species still grow in the Kickapoo valley. Remnants and scraps of the rich, rich forests of the Kickapoo valley were preserved because the slopes are so steep and are a good indication of the rich biological diversity that was once here,” said Birch.

  Ancient varieties of land snails live on as well. Who would have guessed that creatures this small could persist through a glacial age? Graced by us humans with fanciful names like obese thorn, toothless column, carved glyph, bristled slitmouth, white-lip dagger, winged snaggletooth, and cherrystone drop, these oft-forgotten and sometimes maligned macroinvertebrates live their quiet lives throughout the cool moist forests of the Driftless. Their lowly task is to glide over the forest floor, clearing it of rotting debris. Tiny barometers of the health of the land, they begin to die out when the habitat that is their home is under siege.