Photographs by David Bowman
The view from a lookout at Wildcat Mountain State Park in southwest Wisconsin. Glaciers missed the area during the last ice age, which explains the rugged, rolling landscape.
The view from a lookout at Wildcat Mountain State Park in southwest Wisconsin. Glaciers missed the area during the last ice age, which explains the rugged, rolling landscape.
At the Viking Inn Supper Club, cocktail napkins are topped with salt to prevent them from sticking to your crème de menthe on the rocks. Like the Viking itself, the napkin trick conjures the Euro-American enclaves of the old Midwest—insular little towns that rallied around God, work, and the occasional ham steak dinner. In Viroqua, Wisconsin, population 4,500, this bygone era extends well beyond the wallpapered confines of the local supper club. It’s in the bricks of the 1922 Roman revival theater down the block from the Viking. And in the pages of the Vernon County Broadcaster, now in its 161st year of covering prep sports and farm sales.
Map of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa's Driftless Area
But despite its folksy charm, Viroqua is no Wobegon. A progressive current pervades the area, marked by ethical farming practices and the fetishization thereof. Just off Main Street is a farm-to-table café. A nearby coffee house pours organic fair trade coffee. And don’t forget the co-op selling craft beer and $14 tubes of artisanal sausage. Though before you peg Viroqua as the Seward of southwest Wisconsin, please note the Amish horse and buggy parked outside the farm store on Center Avenue—a stark contrast to the pickups and hatchbacks in the lot.
So, then, what is this place? The answer becomes even more elusive as you head east out of town. At first, the backdrop is as pretty and soft as a Bob Ross painting, all happy trees and gentle knolls. But before long it hardens into a sweeping green valley topped by a broad ridge and carved by the Kickapoo River, named for the native people who once inhabited the area. At the town of La Farge, turn north up Highway 131 and into the 8,500-acre Kickapoo Valley Reserve. When you reach the horse trail off Rogers Road, hike up the wooded path to a vast, elevated prairie where bumblebees hover among the wildflowers like miniature blimps.
From this perch, gaze out at the towering hills that stretch to the horizon in great irregular sine waves. The visual drama recalls many places—the rolling peaks of Vermont; the Great Smoky Mountains of the south—but not Wisconsin. Or at least not the Wisconsin of popular imagination. And yet here you are, an hour east of La Crosse, standing on a baby mountain range. The cognitive dissonance brings to mind that old Talking Heads song: And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Walking back to your car, embrace the notion that this land of sculptural limestone towers and cold, clean trout streams is actually some sort of annexed shadow territory hidden in plain view of a flatter, more familiar Midwest.
And you may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
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An overlook at Wildcat Mountain State Park.
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An Amish buggy outside of Viroqua, Wisconsin.
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Hikers at Trempealeau Mountain State Natural Area north of La Crosse.
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Red Clover Ranch B&B in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin.
In 1823, geologist William H. Keating ventured to what is now southwest Wisconsin, marveling at its topographical diversity. From his account of the expedition:
To this region the name of the Wisconsin Hills has been given, which are terminated on the south by the Ocooch and Smoky Mountains, whose altitude is about twelve hundred feet above the common level, or two thousand feet above tide water. Its aspect is exceedingly diversified by hills and vallies, the former of which are high and rugged, supporting a heavy growth of pine . . . while the latter often present extensive flats, abounding in lakes, swamps, and ponds, yielding wild rice in great abundance and perfection.
Keating visited at the dawn of glaciology, and could only guess at the origins of this strange, craggy terrain. Today’s geologists know that during the last ice age, glaciers leveled what is now the Midwest, but spared 24,000 square miles contained mostly in southwest Wisconsin (but also slivers of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa). The expanse is known as the Driftless Area, so named for its lack of sediment, boulders, and other glacial calling cards known as “drift.” As Keating implied, a visit here dizzies the mind, akin to wandering into a natural history museum where the exhibits are outdoors, the flora and fauna still very much alive.
Unless you plan vacations around obscure geologic zones, you’ve probably been to the Driftless (as locals abbreviate it) and not even known it. The Minnesota stretch of Highway 61 bisects the region to the north, where massive bluffs line the Mississippi. Farther east is Wisconsin Dells—the self-proclaimed waterpark capital of the world and home to the narrow river canyons from which the tourist area takes its name.
But deep in the Driftless, the environment is less familiar, and a little weird. Hidden in its many microclimates are ecological Easter eggs like the prickly pear cactus, which grows on terraced grasslands near the Wisconsin River. Even more unusual is the algific slope, a rare ecosystem that is cooler than the surrounding climate thanks to a subterranean ice cave that keeps things at around 50 degrees in the summer. Found on north-facing bluffs in southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa, the habitat hosts “relict” plants and animals not found elsewhere in the region—the northern monkshood flower, for one, and the tiny Pleistocene snail, once thought to be extinct. Somehow, these ice-age holdouts live on, delicate keepsakes from a time long passed.
And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
Trail riding in Wisconsin’s Kickapoo Valley.
Trail riding in Wisconsin’s Kickapoo Valley.
The Driftless Area seduces with its natural beauty, but also its name. It sounds mysterious. Poetic. Removed of scientific context, it implies inertia, but that’s not accurate. After all, its terrain constantly shape-shifts. You could drive in and out of valleys for 20 miles, then come to a plateau as flat as Kansas. The water here tends to move as well, in countless rivers, cricks, and falls.
The citizens of the Driftless mirror its vitality. You’d have to in order to survive in this rugged place, whether a sculptor in one of those artsy little towns on Highway 35 or a farmer who partners with the billion-dollar Organic Valley cooperative based in La Farge. The area’s hard-working streak goes back a ways. Frank Lloyd Wright, that avatar of American ambition, was born in the Driftless hamlet of Richland Center, and later returned to nearby Spring Green to build his famed Taliesin studio. The Ho-Chunk people were forcibly removed from their native Wisconsin in the 1800s, but they came home, too. Today, the tribe manages a casino in the Dells and parts of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve.
Raw landscapes. Exotic ecosystems. Artists, slow-food acolytes, and Christian conservatives living in relative harmony. The Driftless challenges every stereotype you might have of rural Wisconsin. And isn’t that why we travel in the first place? As a humbling reminder that we know nothing at all?
And you may ask yourself, where does that highway go?
