ADRIFT in the DRIFTLESS

What if I told you that hidden in the middle of the Upper Midwest is a quiet kingdom where mounds are upside-down and streams disappear underground? Where rattlesnakes sunbathe on hot rock outcrops atop prairies so steep only goats could hoof about, and hills exhale cold air in summer? And what if I said that mountain-tall walls of ice bulldozed, demolished, and then back-flooded the continent with colossal landslides and cataclysmic floods from Canada to Kansas, Seattle to New York City – except for an eyelash of land surrounded by an ocean of ice?

You might tell me I’d had one too many pumpkin spice martinis on Halloween!

But it’s true – and it’s called the Driftless Area, an ancient vestige from before the Ice Age and a refuge from its glaciers during it. It’s a place where rivers have incised cursive signatures into the bedrock for nature lovers to read aloud and heed their credos by boat or boot. And it’s a space today where the past is preserved but infused with the vigor and vitality of the living present.

Improbably, humongous tongues of glacial ice missed a wide swath of southwestern Wisconsin (along with a nib of northwestern Illinois), despite penetrating its surroundings for the last 2.5 million years. “Driftless” denotes the absence of drift, the miscellaneous debris – mostly sand and gravel blanketing the bedrock, but also boulders scoured and shoved from the Canadian Shield – left behind from glaciers some 13,000 years ago.

In other words, the absence of drift indicates that glaciers missed this special place.

How or why the continent-wide mountains of ice missed this sliver of land is not entirely known. It’s tempting to sentimentalize and ascribe accolades, such as it being a bulwark that stood its ground against the glacial goon squad despite the odds. But the reality, of course, is more complex. Ultimately, it’s a fluke – a much earlier “miracle on ice” – that has more to do with the planet warming than any combination of mitigating circumstances.

The result is a masterpiece of unique physiography – a region of undulating bluffs accentuated by limestone, sandstone, and dolomite outcrops; spectacular cave networks and spooky sinkholes; numbingly cold natural springs percolating from porous rocks; and so much more! It is a place of magic and mischief, where hills are called “coulees” (from the French verb couler, to flow), valleys are hollers, and creeks are cricks. Whatever the pronunciation, the uplands here are the results of streams carving away the fractious bedrock from the top down in a process called “inverse topography.”

Long before the glaciers, the Upper Midwest was a tropical paradise steeped in a shallow ocean called the Silurian Sea. For many hundreds of millions of years, the skeletons of corals and other crustaceous critters fell to the bottom and, together with all that sand, eventually became our compacted bedrock. Called the “Paleozoic Plateau” after the newly formed landmass emerged from the ocean, water has since acted like an eraser through erosion, such that today the farms are on top, the forests at the bottom. Abracadabra!

It’s also the only place in the world where select flora and fauna are found, snails especially. What’s the big deal about little snails? They’re ambassadors from a primeval past – a time before civilization, before agriculture or alphabets. These little snails are the direct descendants of the same snails taking their sweet old time while we were naked apes chasing woolly mammoths with flint-tipped spears or running for our lives from saber-toothed tigers. These snails are a living vestige of the Driftless Area itself, and by moving at a glacier’s pace, they embody an ethos of the area found on so many bumper stickers today: “slower is better.”

Or consider the Northern Monkshood, a federally threatened plant that belongs to the Aconitum genus and is typically found at high altitudes or in more northern latitudes. In southwestern Wisconsin, it clings to ledges along north-facing hillsides called “algific talus slopes.” Algific means cold air, and talus is loose rock fragments. Here, warm air seeps into the talus cracks, becomes supercooled by subterranean tunnels and/or natural springs, and then reemerges as air-conditioned air, inducing the tiny purple petals of the flowering monkshood to shimmy as if in a breeze – but really, the hills are breathing!

Although the Driftless Area of Wisconsin accounts for only 20 percent of the Badger State’s land area, it is home to over 30 percent of its state parks. Together with twelve state trails and two state forests, as well as a plethora of county parks, conservation areas, and wildlife areas, the opportunities for immersing oneself in the splendor of the outdoors in a territory larger than Maryland are nearly endless.

From Kinnickinnic to Merrick, Wyalusing to Nelson Dewey, the water-based, westernmost boundary along the Mississippi River offers some of the prettiest camping and hiking spots in the state. Unsurprisingly, these state parks also showcase premier paddling trips, whether that’s the exquisite Kinnickinnic River with its crystal clear water, restless riffles, or stunning canyons, or the mystical confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers seen along the Sentinel Ridge Trail at Wyalusing SP. The most intimate view may well be next to your own tent, and nowhere is this truer than the four walk-in sites at Nelson Dewey SP perched on a high bluff’s brow above the Father of Waters several hundred feet below.

Perrot SP not only features several bluffs over 500’ tall, but also neighbors so-called Trempealeau Mountain – the biggest island-mound anywhere on the Mississippi River itself. The hiking trails at Perrot are rich in history, from Indigenous burial effigy mounds to the pioneering voyageurs. Come winter, some of these will challenge champion cross-country skiers – to wit, Tow Rope Hill and Broken Ski Run. In summer, Perrot promotes a canoe trail that allows paddlers an easy loop along languorous backwaters with breathtaking views of the bluffs. The park also provides seamless access to the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge, where birders’ hearts will flutter in fall and spring, especially at the panoply of feathery migration that is the Mississippi Flyway, best perceived from various viewing platforms. Parents of young children should be advised about the use of fowl language…

One of my all-time favorite bike rides, the Great River State Trail, laces through the refuge’s rolling 6,800 acres of prairie and wetlands. Fantastic in its own right, it is one of four contiguous state trails comprising over 100 miles connecting communities through the heart of the Driftless Area. The most famous of these is the Elroy-Sparta State Trail, the first converted rail-to-trail conversion in the country, where bicyclists will plunge into the chilly, pitch-black darkness enveloping three interspersed tunnels. Bring a bright light!

Just don’t forget to stop off at the Trempealeau Hotel! This 19th-century gem is famous for its fabulous walnut burgers and quaint, antiquated rooms upstairs to rest a spell and listen to the trains, geese, and swans going up and down the Mississippi.

The list is long and luxurious. For instance, the Red Cedar and Chippewa state trails intersect in Menomonie and Eau Claire, providing opportunities for paddle-and-pedal trips on the eponymous rivers. Mirror Lake SP just outside of the Dells offers serene paddling, hiking, and a skate-skier’s paradise. Traditional Nordic skiers will rejoice in nearby Blue Mound SP due west of Madison. Here, one can be at the highest elevation in the Driftless Area (1719’), while only two miles away is one of its lowest, at Cave of the Mounds, whose stalactites and stalagmites are positively extraordinary and will drop your jaw.

Or just hedge all your bets on the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, where the Driftless Area’s quintessential river, the Kickapoo, runs through an uncompromised tapestry of billowy hills, steep ridges, and deep ravines, together with a matrix of extensive trails for hiking, biking, skiing, horseback riding, camping, and of course, paddling. For those whose druthers are darting trout, the Kickapoo River’s West Branch is Class I. Western Wisconsin’s ecology is renowned and revered for fly-fishing. In keeping with the time-honored reticence of anglers coveting their beloved streams, I’ll say that you may want to rush out to Pierce County – if you catch my drift.

What you won’t find, however, are natural lakes in the Driftless Area. No glaciers meant no giant ice cubes that broke off and melted into big puddles. That also means no jet skis or wake boats.

The Driftless Area is so much more than a unique oasis for recreation, thrilling and enthralling as its many escapes are. “Going Driftless,” as the Greg Brown song goes, is a state of mind, a way of being and doing. There’s no one script for this, nothing orthodox or monolithic. The vibe in Viroqua is more like Vermont, whereas the spirit in Mineral Point is trending towards the chic (which is a historical detour, as it’s the oldest settlement in Wisconsin). Nonetheless, there is a throughline between Driftless Books & Music and Storybook Hill, the former a tobacco barn transformed into a bibliophile’s dream come true, and the latter the atelier of the famed illustrator, Renée Graef. And there is a relation between Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright, from Pepin to Spring Green, “Little House” to Taliesin, not of blood or love per se, but both were native s and bold visionaries.

More finale than “finally” – for there is no end; one tributary feeds another – the arterial network in natural names from Black Earth to New Diggings, Diamond Bluff to Fountain City, Bear Valley to Snake Hollow, invokes a kind of acoustic terroir that is suggestively scintillating if you linger to listen.

While rooted to an achingly ancient past, the Driftless Area is a place defined by beautiful ruin, renewal, and ingenuity. A folk music school might be next to a boutique and distillery; a folklore village might be down the road from a film festival. You’ll happen upon no shopping malls, but you’ll hear about a small shop’s mercantile with local wool textiles on the community radio station. A former soybean field is now an array of solar panels. An Amish horse-and-buggy clip-clops to a stop at the county’s only traffic light, opposite a gravel bike rider stepping out of her cleats.

To be sure, it has its share of problems – floods of increasingly Biblical proportions; fragmentation of wildlife areas; highly sensitive ecosystems that have been unscathed for eons undone in a day. But anything that can withstand a glacier is dang resilient. Still, the most dangerous thing any of us can do is take something for granted, and the best antidote to complacency is embracing the Driftless Area fully. So visit and be vigilant. Buy local. Be local. Go slowly. Let yourself get lost; you’ll find yourself wanting to drift more.