A vacation in my backyard...
Oct. 29th, 2006 06:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
On the Trail of Wisconsin’s Icy Past
By STEPHEN REGENOLD, The New York Times, October 27, 2006
Great white sheets of glacial ice commandeering land is the perpetual and age-old story of the North. The comings and goings of recent ice ages — the last one retreating from mid-North America 10,000 years ago — were rapid-fire Pleistocene calamities in the creaking eons of geologic time.
Today, the aftereffects of all that drifting ice are revealed in landscapes from Montana to Maine, a ubiquitous mishmash of moraines, tussled stone, talus, deep valleys, lakes, rushing rivers, ridgelines and bedrock scraped bare.
But in few places is the power of global climate change celebrated as it is in Wisconsin, where the Ice Age National Scenic Trail was established by Congress in 1980 to tell the story of the recent icy past via the educational medium of a hiking trail.
When completed, the Ice Age Trail will snake more than 1,000 miles through the state, winding in and out of deep woods, tracking glacial features and connecting hundreds of trailheads from the shores of the Green Bay to the Minnesota border.
“Wisconsin is a microcosm of the effects of recent ice ages,” said Mike Prichard, a retired lawyer from St. Paul who is on the board of the nonprofit Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation.
Jumbled stone, cliffs, conical hills, highlands, potholes, granite erratics and more than 10,000 lakes are all part of the state’s haphazard landscape.
“The trail is recreation for most people,” Mr. Prichard said, “but it can be a geology lesson if you know where to look.”
Six hundred miles of the Ice Age Trail have been built over the last four decades, with intermittent segments found in forests throughout the state. Federal and state financing, private donations and hundreds of trail-building volunteers each year lengthen the path. The goal is to connect all the trail segments to create an uninterrupted route 1,000 to 1,200 miles in length that swings a giant S-shape through the woodsy entirety of Wisconsin.
“The Ice Age Trail will be a high-profile continuous hiking path like the Appalachian Trail,” said Mr. Prichard, who estimates completion is more than 10 years away. The original concept for the trail, popularized by Ray Zillmer, a lawyer and outdoorsman from Milwaukee, has been around since the 1950’s. Today, as one of eight National Scenic Trails, the Ice Age Trail is under the National Park Service. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation share planning, upkeep and administrative responsibilities.
ON an unseasonably warm day in early October, Mr. Prichard met a group at the Ice Age Trail’s western terminus in Interstate State Park on the St. Croix River to lead a day hike. The group of hikers — a botanist, a llama rancher, an architectural sheet-metal worker and two retirees — began the day with a short walk down the Pothole Trail, a loop well-known locally that winds through fractured bedrock slabs and pothole formations drilled smooth and symmetrical into solid basalt stone.
“This is a cataclysmic formation,” said Nancy Frank, a field coordinator with the trail foundation. Ms. Frank, who helped guide the hike, stood on the edge of a 10-foot-deep hole, arms swirling in demonstration above her head. “Potholes are the result of rock-swirling glacial eddies that bored deep holes as ice melted and water flowed downstream.”
Indeed, the power of ice age meltwater, which rushed for millennia from unfathomable fountainheads of continental ice, shaped Interstate Park’s billion-year-old basalt like clay on a spinning wheel. The rock is slippery and flawless to the touch. Sun glints off its glossy face.
Standing on a slab of gray stone, Lindy Lindemann, a 78-year-old retired schoolteacher from Cumberland, Wis., leaned on a bamboo hiking stick to peer into the drilled depths. “I’m looking for the original grinding stone,” he said.
Beyond the potholes, a few feet past the terminus plaque at the end of the Ice Age Trail, a deep gorge of dark stone stood testament to the tenacity of time and fast-flowing water. The St. Croix River, a significant tributary of the Mississippi that drains an immense forested watershed, is but a tannin-tinted trickle down in the depths of the gorge when compared with the crest of the ancient river.
“The river here during the end of the last ice age filled this entire valley,” Ms. Frank said, motioning toward a distant carpet of trees.
Geology lessons aside, hiking is the No. 1 recreational activity on the trail, according to Ms. Frank. Overnight backpacking trips are becoming more popular every year. A handful of long-distance through hikers have walked the whole trail over several weeks, hiking established paths, camping out and linking undeveloped sections of the trail on foot over rural roads.
Land ownership varies on the Ice Age Trail; city, county, state, federal and private interests all claim parts. Recreational provisions vary, too. Mountain biking and horseback riding are allowed on some segments, as well as hunting. (Much of the trail is officially closed during the rifle deer season, which is Nov. 18-26 this year.)
In winter, snowshoeing is popular. Some parts of the trail are groomed for cross-country skiing. Fireplace-equipped shelters provide warmth and refuge from the state’s deep snows.
All over the Ice Age Trail, wood bridges, stair steps, overlooks and boardwalks give access to the region’s abstruse topography. Signboard pictorials provide context on many hikes. Elaborate interpretive center museums along the trail, found at three distant points, introduce hikers to a geologic taxonomy with terms like esker, kettle, moraine, kame, erratic, outwash plain, proglacial lake and drumlin.
As a work-in-progress, the trail is continually being carved from wilderness by crews of volunteers. Existing hiking paths have been upgraded and rerouted throughout Wisconsin to connect disparate segments of the trail. The Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation — which has about 3,500 members and seven full-time staff members — works with municipalities and local landowners to procure easements.
“It’s a lifetime project for many people,” Mr. Prichard said.
At Interstate, after leaving the Pothole Trail, Mr. Prichard’s group hiked into the woods on a spur called Horizon Rock Trail. Yellow birch and maple shaded the forest floor. The forest was cool and moist, with spring water trickling over mossy stone.
“Look at these trees!” said Barb Delaney, a botanist from Dresser, Wis. Deciduous reds and golds hung in a dense mural, blue sky seeping through cracks in the encompassing curtain.
The group was still for a moment. Ms. Delaney snapped a photograph before starting off again.
Silence took back the forest after the people walked on. Mud brewed in a streak of sunlight. Leaves rotted on the ground. Water dripped, and stone eroded, atom by atom. Infinitesimal blips on the dial of deep time.
Glossary of Terms
HIKE a few steps in any direction on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail and you run into land shaped spectacularly by glaciers of the recent past. Indeed, the succession of ice ages over the last few million years has created a landscape so abrupt and strange as to inspire a vocabulary all its own. Here’s a quick primer on some common terms:
KAME A steep-sided or conical hill formed from sediments that flowed down through crevasses in glacial ice.
MORAINE Accumulated piles of rock debris transported by glaciers. Moraines form in great mounds as ice melts and glaciers recede, resulting in hills that can be sweeping and wall-like on the land.
POTHOLE A smooth cylindrical bowl carved into bedrock. The grinding action of swirling stones in massive ice-age river eddies created these symmetrical formations.
ESKER Stout winding ridgelines, some miles in length, created by deposits of rock, sand and gravel from ancient interglacial streams. Some eskers resemble railroad embankments.
KETTLE An earthen depression or basin formed from a large block of ice that was buried as a glacier receded.
DRUMLIN An elongated teardrop-shaped hill formed by drifting glacial ice. The long axis of a drumlin forms parallel with the movement of the ice. Drumlins often occur in groups of a dozen or more.
GLACIAL ERRATICS Large boulders — some the size of a house — that are carried in drifting continental ice sheets and deposited in distant locations. Erratics are often starkly out of place, resting in swamps, marshes or flat forested land.
By STEPHEN REGENOLD, The New York Times, October 27, 2006
Great white sheets of glacial ice commandeering land is the perpetual and age-old story of the North. The comings and goings of recent ice ages — the last one retreating from mid-North America 10,000 years ago — were rapid-fire Pleistocene calamities in the creaking eons of geologic time.
Today, the aftereffects of all that drifting ice are revealed in landscapes from Montana to Maine, a ubiquitous mishmash of moraines, tussled stone, talus, deep valleys, lakes, rushing rivers, ridgelines and bedrock scraped bare.
But in few places is the power of global climate change celebrated as it is in Wisconsin, where the Ice Age National Scenic Trail was established by Congress in 1980 to tell the story of the recent icy past via the educational medium of a hiking trail.
When completed, the Ice Age Trail will snake more than 1,000 miles through the state, winding in and out of deep woods, tracking glacial features and connecting hundreds of trailheads from the shores of the Green Bay to the Minnesota border.
“Wisconsin is a microcosm of the effects of recent ice ages,” said Mike Prichard, a retired lawyer from St. Paul who is on the board of the nonprofit Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation.
Jumbled stone, cliffs, conical hills, highlands, potholes, granite erratics and more than 10,000 lakes are all part of the state’s haphazard landscape.
“The trail is recreation for most people,” Mr. Prichard said, “but it can be a geology lesson if you know where to look.”
Six hundred miles of the Ice Age Trail have been built over the last four decades, with intermittent segments found in forests throughout the state. Federal and state financing, private donations and hundreds of trail-building volunteers each year lengthen the path. The goal is to connect all the trail segments to create an uninterrupted route 1,000 to 1,200 miles in length that swings a giant S-shape through the woodsy entirety of Wisconsin.
“The Ice Age Trail will be a high-profile continuous hiking path like the Appalachian Trail,” said Mr. Prichard, who estimates completion is more than 10 years away. The original concept for the trail, popularized by Ray Zillmer, a lawyer and outdoorsman from Milwaukee, has been around since the 1950’s. Today, as one of eight National Scenic Trails, the Ice Age Trail is under the National Park Service. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation share planning, upkeep and administrative responsibilities.
ON an unseasonably warm day in early October, Mr. Prichard met a group at the Ice Age Trail’s western terminus in Interstate State Park on the St. Croix River to lead a day hike. The group of hikers — a botanist, a llama rancher, an architectural sheet-metal worker and two retirees — began the day with a short walk down the Pothole Trail, a loop well-known locally that winds through fractured bedrock slabs and pothole formations drilled smooth and symmetrical into solid basalt stone.
“This is a cataclysmic formation,” said Nancy Frank, a field coordinator with the trail foundation. Ms. Frank, who helped guide the hike, stood on the edge of a 10-foot-deep hole, arms swirling in demonstration above her head. “Potholes are the result of rock-swirling glacial eddies that bored deep holes as ice melted and water flowed downstream.”
Indeed, the power of ice age meltwater, which rushed for millennia from unfathomable fountainheads of continental ice, shaped Interstate Park’s billion-year-old basalt like clay on a spinning wheel. The rock is slippery and flawless to the touch. Sun glints off its glossy face.
Standing on a slab of gray stone, Lindy Lindemann, a 78-year-old retired schoolteacher from Cumberland, Wis., leaned on a bamboo hiking stick to peer into the drilled depths. “I’m looking for the original grinding stone,” he said.
Beyond the potholes, a few feet past the terminus plaque at the end of the Ice Age Trail, a deep gorge of dark stone stood testament to the tenacity of time and fast-flowing water. The St. Croix River, a significant tributary of the Mississippi that drains an immense forested watershed, is but a tannin-tinted trickle down in the depths of the gorge when compared with the crest of the ancient river.
“The river here during the end of the last ice age filled this entire valley,” Ms. Frank said, motioning toward a distant carpet of trees.
Geology lessons aside, hiking is the No. 1 recreational activity on the trail, according to Ms. Frank. Overnight backpacking trips are becoming more popular every year. A handful of long-distance through hikers have walked the whole trail over several weeks, hiking established paths, camping out and linking undeveloped sections of the trail on foot over rural roads.
Land ownership varies on the Ice Age Trail; city, county, state, federal and private interests all claim parts. Recreational provisions vary, too. Mountain biking and horseback riding are allowed on some segments, as well as hunting. (Much of the trail is officially closed during the rifle deer season, which is Nov. 18-26 this year.)
In winter, snowshoeing is popular. Some parts of the trail are groomed for cross-country skiing. Fireplace-equipped shelters provide warmth and refuge from the state’s deep snows.
All over the Ice Age Trail, wood bridges, stair steps, overlooks and boardwalks give access to the region’s abstruse topography. Signboard pictorials provide context on many hikes. Elaborate interpretive center museums along the trail, found at three distant points, introduce hikers to a geologic taxonomy with terms like esker, kettle, moraine, kame, erratic, outwash plain, proglacial lake and drumlin.
As a work-in-progress, the trail is continually being carved from wilderness by crews of volunteers. Existing hiking paths have been upgraded and rerouted throughout Wisconsin to connect disparate segments of the trail. The Ice Age Park & Trail Foundation — which has about 3,500 members and seven full-time staff members — works with municipalities and local landowners to procure easements.
“It’s a lifetime project for many people,” Mr. Prichard said.
At Interstate, after leaving the Pothole Trail, Mr. Prichard’s group hiked into the woods on a spur called Horizon Rock Trail. Yellow birch and maple shaded the forest floor. The forest was cool and moist, with spring water trickling over mossy stone.
“Look at these trees!” said Barb Delaney, a botanist from Dresser, Wis. Deciduous reds and golds hung in a dense mural, blue sky seeping through cracks in the encompassing curtain.
The group was still for a moment. Ms. Delaney snapped a photograph before starting off again.
Silence took back the forest after the people walked on. Mud brewed in a streak of sunlight. Leaves rotted on the ground. Water dripped, and stone eroded, atom by atom. Infinitesimal blips on the dial of deep time.
Glossary of Terms
HIKE a few steps in any direction on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail and you run into land shaped spectacularly by glaciers of the recent past. Indeed, the succession of ice ages over the last few million years has created a landscape so abrupt and strange as to inspire a vocabulary all its own. Here’s a quick primer on some common terms:
KAME A steep-sided or conical hill formed from sediments that flowed down through crevasses in glacial ice.
MORAINE Accumulated piles of rock debris transported by glaciers. Moraines form in great mounds as ice melts and glaciers recede, resulting in hills that can be sweeping and wall-like on the land.
POTHOLE A smooth cylindrical bowl carved into bedrock. The grinding action of swirling stones in massive ice-age river eddies created these symmetrical formations.
ESKER Stout winding ridgelines, some miles in length, created by deposits of rock, sand and gravel from ancient interglacial streams. Some eskers resemble railroad embankments.
KETTLE An earthen depression or basin formed from a large block of ice that was buried as a glacier receded.
DRUMLIN An elongated teardrop-shaped hill formed by drifting glacial ice. The long axis of a drumlin forms parallel with the movement of the ice. Drumlins often occur in groups of a dozen or more.
GLACIAL ERRATICS Large boulders — some the size of a house — that are carried in drifting continental ice sheets and deposited in distant locations. Erratics are often starkly out of place, resting in swamps, marshes or flat forested land.
