Crossing the Driftless

by Lynne Diebel

  Those fish that anglers shouldn’t and usually don’t go after—the lower layer of the river—are the little known, the endangered, and the threatened. Some live deep and often secret lives. One of these denizens, the paddlefish, is also a long-distance traveler; individuals tagged and tracked by the USGS Paddlefish Study Project have journeyed down the Chippewa River, down the Mississippi, and then up the Lower Wisconsin to the Prairie du Sac dam. The longnose gar, another old fish with a long nose, prowls the Wisconsin as well. Another species with an ancient pedigree is the shovelnose sturgeon, also known as a sand sturgeon or hackleback. A small sturgeon with the same bony plates that give the larger sturgeon its gnarly prehistoric look, it’s a popular sport fish. But fishermen lured by the high price of caviar also go after the eggs, and illegal fishing has endangered this old fish’s future. The little-known blue sucker is a threatened species in Wisconsin. According to Wisconsin DNR ichthyologist John Lyons, the blue sucker prefers cruising the depths of large rivers with strong currents, migrating in the spring to shallow rocky areas to spawn, and thrives only in the least-modified and highest quality waters, like the Lower Wisconsin, where it does particularly well, though it is found in the Upper Mississippi as well.

  The health of any riverine fishery depends not only on clean water but also on free passage for the resident finny inhabitants, many of which need to migrate in order to spawn and thrive. Since its construction in 1915, the Alliant Energy dam at Prairie du Sac has been a barrier to this important seasonal migration of fish such as shovelnose sturgeon and paddlefish and thus has reduced their numbers. According to Wisconsin DNR aquatic ecologist Matt Diebel, fish focus on the turbulence below a dam and congregate there, striving to move further upstream, but in vain. Anglers know this and fish the tailrace. When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates this hydroelectric dam, issued the most recent permit in 2002, they mandated a fish passage.

  Unfortunately, the Lower Wisconsin may also be vulnerable to the notorious species of Asian carp, or jumping carp, aliens that have invaded the Mississippi and Illinois rivers in alarming numbers. An angler caught a grass carp near the Prairie du Sac dam, and the DNA of silver carp has been detected in the river. Thus far, however, no one has found evidence of the jumping carp upstream of the dam and everyone wants to keep it that way; this is one situation where a dam can be of some benefit to a river. Though there is no evidence yet that these carp are actually breeding in the Lower Wisconsin, a conventional fish passage or ladder would allow any fish that can jump to move upstream. Add to this the fact that viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a fatal fish illness, has been afflicting fish in the lower river, and it’s clear why anglers upstream have been anxious about letting those fish move in.

  An unexpected solution has been proposed to resolve this dilemma: a doorman and an elevator. During the spawning season, when the proposed fish elevator would operate, fisheries staff would open a downstream door to let a group of fish enter. But only the desirable fish—like shovelnose and lake sturgeon, paddlefish and blue suckers— would be allowed to ride the elevator. At the top floor, the operator would open the door and release them, free to travel upstream to their preferred spawning grounds. Carp would be detained, no doubt indefinitely.

  A few miles up from Boscobel, we’re making better time against the current, though still working on that Zen thing. It helps when I see a great blue heron in the shallows of a slough, or an eagle soaring overhead. It’s another clear, hot day. When I take off my hat, dip it in the river and don it again— quickly, so as not to break the paddling cadence— the cool river water trickles through my hair and down the back of my neck. It’s a lovely feeling.

  Despite our many trips down the Lower Wisconsin, on this journey we feel the need for a map. It’s something about changing the direction we’re traveling, the way we remember things. Everything looks different. So we photocopied the maps from Svob’s Paddling Southern Wisconsin and packed them in a ziplock bag that rides on the bow. I like tracking the wooded islands and pass the time by reading their names aloud as we pass their tangled shorelines: Feather Island, Patterson Island, Little Island, Big Island.

  Another thing I learned from Mike Svob is that the river valley is wider here, that the bluffs have now retreated from the river on both sides. This is surely an unexpected pattern in a river valley, which usually widens as it nears the confluence. Geologists say that when the torrents of water from the melting Laurentide ice sheet carved the modern Wisconsin valley, the flood cut readily through the soft Cambrian sandstone—the Wonewoc, Tunnel City, and Jordan layers—that underlies the soil at Prairie du Sac and for a number of miles downstream. The harder Prairie du Chien dolomite bedrock that dominates closer to the Mississippi put up more of a fight. Thus the valley tapers from about four miles wide near Prairie du Sac, to two miles wide at Muscoda, and only half a mile wide at Bridgeport.

  Just short of the Blue River landing, Bob announces that we’ve paddled twenty miles today and that’s enough. We stop on the north side of Coumbe Island, a densely wooded island that is two miles long, big enough to be mistaken for the riverbank on the south side of the river. A bit upstream, near the Port Andrew boat landing on the north bank, DNR biologist David Heath says there is a large mussel bed, but we’re too tired tonight to pay a visit to the mollusks. Our chosen camping spot is the downstream end of a long stretch of sandbar, which we share with another couple, one tent at each end. This sandbar is part of a mini-braided channel of water and sand, separated from the island and from smaller sandbars by shallow streams.

  Take a moment to consider the Wisconsin River sandbar, shifty creature that it is, and easily manipulated at the whims of the ever-changing river. We landlubbers generally feel that the ground beneath us, even sandy ground, has some kind of permanence. We don’t expect it to move. And on many sandbars grass, willow thickets, and even small trees are further evidence that the ground will not be departing any time soon. At low water stages, as we are now experiencing, the sandbar flourishes and grows in height, width, and length as the water recedes. But were the river to rise over a foot, a change that can happen during a spring freshet or after only a day or two of heavy rain, in part because of releases from the dam at Prairie du Sac, the sandbar on which we stand could be inundated, its silica granules swept downstream in the flood, randomly scattered to future locations known only to the river, in its secretive ways. It is thus that the sandbar migrates downstream.

  Even without such floods, the sandbar changes daily in small ways, its margin nibbled away by the quiet power of the current as it flows around the tapered shallow upstream head of the bar and along its flanks. At the tail end of the bar, the current deposits the sand it carries into the downstream eddy and often scours a deep hole there swirling with a recirculating current. The sand at this end can be as loose and unstable as quicksand, subject to sudden collapse into the eddy. The tail of the sandbar is a dangerous place.

  Seen from above, the river at low water is a maze of sandbars; at high water, their shadowy shapes are faintly visible under the surface. It is easy to imagine how a sandbar becomes a semi-permanent island over a series of dry years, with swiftly growing networks of roots capturing and holding the shifty sand, keeping it in place until the trees are large enough to call it more than a sandbar and eventually, if luck will have it over the years, one of the islands. And yet a big enough flood can take even an island.

  Despite the impermanence of the sandbar, river travelers love to camp on the invitingly soft open expanse of a large bar, the color of pale ale in the sunshine. Small villages of tents, grills, volleyball nets, and beach umbrellas spring up in the late afternoon.

  Occasionally, a sandbar has been the site of a delightfully improbable event called “Dinner and a Canoe.” Waiting on the sandbar when the lucky paddlers arrived was a circle of tiki torches around a table set with candles. At sunset, the caterers arrived by canoe, lit the torches and candles, served a gourmet dinner�
��all locally raised foods, all home cooked—and then disappeared in their canoes into the night. The very first time the canoe rental company held this sandbar extravaganza it was deemed a success: “The guy proposed to his girlfriend on a sandbar. She accepted, of course,” said Ryan Schmudlach, who invented this wonderful event and with his wife Amy owns the Wisconsin Canoe Company in Spring Green. Unfortunately for romantic canoeists, the logistics proved far too daunting and it lasted only a few seasons.

  There’s a festive air to claiming a sandbar as your own sandy island in the wide Wisconsin. The perfect sandbar is one that is open enough that the breeze blows away the mosquitoes, but with enough thickets at one end to provide shelter for a temporary latrine. The sandbar toilet is just a cat hole, scraped at best only six inches down, deep enough to cover the contents but shallow enough to allow quick decomposition. People who are used to river camping pack out their used toilet paper and often their waste with their garbage. Though this may sound disturbing, it is surprisingly easy to do if one dedicates a large zip lock bag for the purpose. A useful product called Wag Bag includes an odor neutralizing powder and “a decay catalyst that breaks down solid waste.”

  When one considers how many canoeists camp on the river, the problem of untreated human waste on the sandbars becomes formidable. Mark Cupp, director of the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway Board, told me that this is one of the big challenges the river faces. “We have to educate the public to respect this resource,” he said, “and it’s not easy.”

  Scott Teuber, owner of a canoe rental company based in Boscobel, lamented that often after a weekend, shrubs are festooned with toilet paper on one sandbar after another. Though toilet paper degrades fairly quickly, and he said tests show that the water quality is fine, he longs for the DNR to establish firm, enforceable policy about the issue. Many campers already understand. Ryan Schmudlach said, “We try to get people to take care of the river. A lot of groups come out with more garbage than they brought in.”

  On the topic of the dark side of the sandbar, there’s a bit more to tell. In The Wisconsin, River of a Thousand Isles, August Derleth writes that the “Wisconsin’s sand has for decades been a bogey for the boys who haunt the old swimming holes along the river.” He recalls that “the excitables” told of a girl being swallowed up by a Wisconsin River sandbar, slipping into the sand and drowning, dragged down by what people said was quicksand. Though he dismissed the tale, knowing that the truth was that she drowned because her chosen sandbar had become unstable and she slipped into the current, not because she was swallowed up, Derleth did capture the sentiments of those who lived along the river in the early twentieth century and were leery of its impermanent shifting sands. Derleth himself paid no attention to the warnings and wrote that he often swam with his friends in the river, continuing this habit for decades.

  Wisconsin River sand bar

  On summer weekends like this, even when the weather is cool, this river playground is the place to be. With this summer’s low water, the inevitable consequence of extended drought, campers find that sandbars big enough for camping are plentiful and spacious. At high water the sandbar count drops precipitously and competition for the good camping spots can be fierce.

  During the Riverway planning process in the 1980s, Gary Birch and others conducting the study counted canoes from a small plane that flew low over the river the length of the Lower Wisconsin and divided the Lower Wisconsin into three segments, according to the amount of recreational use. About 68 percent of canoeists used the stretch of the river from Prairie du Sac to Spring Green; 20 percent used the Spring Green to Boscobel reach, and only 12 percent canoed from Boscobel to the Mississippi.

  Today’s paddlers, at least those who rent their craft, seem to follow the same pattern. Ryan Schmudlach said that more and more renters choose to canoe the Prairie du Sac to Spring Green run, including those who come back year after year. He rents to one group of six guys in their late seventies and early eighties who do an annual trip. “They tell me they still feel awe and wonder on the river,” said Schmudlach. Another group rents eight canoes for ten people, fills the extras with firewood and coolers full of beer, and tows them. Although almost 40 percent of his renters are from the Chicago area, he said that he sees a number of visitors from European countries. During a single week in the summer of 2013, he rented canoes to a group from Germany, a family from the Netherlands, a group of young men from the United Kingdom who were holding a bachelor party on the river, and a French family that brings their grandmother to canoe the Lower Wisconsin every year.

  Tomorrow morning, the first confluence we will pass is with the Blue River, just upstream of the bridge, though technically this juncture is the opening to Cross Slough, into which the Blue flows. In late August of 1835, on his way downstream to the Mississippi, adventurer George William Featherstonehaugh stopped right about where we are now, though perhaps on the riverbank at that confluence rather than on a sandbar. In his account in A Canoe Voyage Up the Minnay Sotor, he wrote, “About half-past nine we stopped at the Rivière Bleu to breakfast.” A connection in place seems to bridge the passage of time, at least in the imagination.

  I have never explored the Blue, but a young conservationist named Abbie Church told me that about eighteen miles upstream from the confluence, the Mississippi Valley Conservancy (MVC) has over one hundred acres of land in conservation easement. Working with Trout Unlimited, the landowners stabilized about a mile of stream banks, on a reach that is known as good trout water. Their restoration work proved its worth during subsequent floods—the banks survived high water that tore up nearby unrestored stream banks. The uplands are thriving as well. Church said that during a casual survey they found amazing diversity—271 species, including relict species like naturally occurring white pines, descendants of ice age populations. “All you do is walk to the north-facing slopes on this property and you’re in a whole different world of species,” said Church.

  Back here on the Wisconsin, as we set up our little sandbar camp, the river rocks with noise, both manmade and natural. Traffic hums on Highway 60 to the north, on Highway 133 to the south, and on the county bridge that crosses the river. Fishermen in motorboats buzz past. A large flock of sandhill cranes flies purposefully overhead, headed to farm fields to browse for their evening meal, telling the world of their hunger with warbling croaks. Cows bellow to be milked. Dogs bark. The cacophony reaches a crescendo with the rat-a-tat-tat of a distant round of firecrackers.

  But by the time our supper is ready, the sun is going down and with it the noise. Our neighbors, who have pitched their dome tent and flipped over their canoe—a maroon Spirit II, just like the one we left at home—pick up folding sand chairs and wade to another little sandbar for a better view of the sun setting behind the bluffs. We eat standing up, devouring two bowls each—tortellini mixed with canned chicken, onions, and rehydrated peas and carrots—then quickly fall asleep, long before the sky is dark.

  Fourth of July

  On the morning of our nation’s birthday, the rattling voices of sandhill cranes sound again, echoing mysteriously in the pale light of early dawn. The door of our tent fly is open and through the screen I once again see nothing but cool white fog, as though the world outside the walls of our little green tent disappeared during the night. More croaking fills the air. The sandhills are heading off to work, I think sleepily. We should probably get up too. But it’s cool outside and Bob is still asleep. Burrowing deeper into my sleeping bag, I doze instead.

  When we finally crawl out of the tent, only a light misty veil remains and that quickly dissipates as we get ready to go. We’re on the river again, warming up our tired muscles with slow, steady paddle strokes. As we pass the tail end of Steamboat Island, behind which hides the mouth of the trout stream Byrds Creek, I can’t help but think about those steamboats that once plied the Lower Wisconsin. They carried passengers, including those on the Fashionable Tour, and they carried mail, grain, and lumbermen’s supplies—a
nything that needed transport and that they could load. The twin-stack steamer Ellen Hardy drew only sixteen inches, according to historian Richard D. Durbin, which explains how this 132-ton boat navigated the frequent and shifting shallows. This morning, working hard in my still sleepy state to read the river, I’m grateful that I’m not a steamboat captain. Our little canoe is enough.

  And then, at the head of Steamboat Island, a strange apparition appears upstream. Three young men are standing on a raft in the middle of the river, gracefully casting their fishing rods. As we call a greeting, they grin and one announces proudly that they built the raft just this morning. It’s a platform of discarded plywood, resting precariously on six steel barrels that are strapped together. In addition, perched atop this small rickety vessel, are a large, filthy plaid sofa—on which one of the intrepid shipwrights now reclines—two coolers, and a big spray-painted sign that reads “Gilligan’s Island.” These fellows built their ship before dawn, launched it at Muscoda, and are headed for Boscobel, eleven miles downstream from where we meet them.

  “Are you catching anything?”

  “Not yet, but we will. The fishing’s great along here.”

  “What’ll you do with the raft when you get to Boscobel?”

  “Just leave it at the landing. Let someone else use it.”

  Other Huck Finns will no doubt be delighted to abscond with this raft, though that’s not always the case with stuff left along the river. Under the leadership of Tim Zumm, the Friends of the Lower Wisconsin (FLOW) spend time every year cleaning up after people who dump stuff in the river and on the shoreline. At a program about the Lower Wisconsin at Canoecopia, the annual celebration of all things paddling held in Madison each March, I listened to Zumm tell about a group of volunteers and DNR staffers who hauled more than five tons of steel post, copper wire and cable from the river bed near the beach at Mazomanie, where it had lain since the 1930s, slowly sinking into the sand. This particular project started in 2003, when they dragged out a lot of the mess. But there was more. By waiting until the low water of a drought exposed the tips of this hazardous manmade debris, and by using the power of a fisheries backhoe, provided by conservation warden David Youngquist, they dragged the last of the junk, the final remains of what was probably once a power line or telegraph line, from the river’s sandy bottom. Bill Gauger of Gauger Salvage in Arena donated dumpsters to collect the scrap, and sold the steel for almost five hundred dollars, covering his expenses. Another time, members of FLOW pulled tangles of steel from the river near Ferry Bluff. Zumm told the audience that there is far less large trash in the river now, thanks to the volunteers. A tireless advocate for the Lower Wisconsin, Zumm followed his trash-picking story with a brief pitch for Rhythm of the River Festival, an annual environmental fundraiser held in Spring Green, and finished his talk with instructions on How to Clean Up a River: 1. You go into the river. 2. You pick up a piece of junk and put it in the truck. 3. You go back again.