Twelve Mile Circle

Why is this man standing here foolishly next to an otherwise nondescript road sign, waist-high in weeds by a railroad track? What is so special about Crawford County, Wisconsin? Nothing much, although I’m sure its residents would tend to disagree. However this was a very special location for me since it represented the 1,000th county in the United States that I’ve visited.

I achieved my 50th and final of the United States a number of years ago. I didn’t want to stop counting and adding to my international tally wasn’t going to happen very quickly with small children in tow. Instead, I turned my attention to the tertiary governing units of the United States, the individual counties and independent cities that collectively cover the geography of each State. This produced a remarkably different perspective. Instead of my map being completely covered with every State visited, it looked like this:

Well that’s hardly any territory at all. I went from smug to humbled in a single stroke. Sure, I’d been to every State but sometimes only to a single county, and I’d missed huge swaths of the American landscape. Thus began a quest to visit every one of those counties no matter how small, isolated or insignificant.

That is no simple task. Currently, as I write this in July 2009, there are 3,141 county-equivalent geographic units in the United States, including formally designated counties, the wacky little independent cities found primarily in Virginia, plus the District of Columbia. There are a number of other complexities including States where the county structure exists mainly as a formality, or where they are called boroughs or parishes, so this count considers the units designated by the U.S. Census Bureau for its decennial survey and for other statistical purposes.

Also, 3,141 is not a static number. New counties are added over time (e.g., Broomfield County, Colorado) and independent cities sometimes meld into their surrounding counties ( e.g., Clifton Forge, Virginia), both occurring within the last few years. Actually I just noticed I need to revisit this number as it appears a couple of changes have taken place in Alaska within the last year. Consider 3,141 approximate for now.

So I found myself in Crawford County, population ~17,000, home of the town of Prairie du Chien along the Great River Road. It was quite a lovely place, actually. I stumble across all sorts of interesting places as I collect new counties like a birdwatcher collects rare sightings. On this particular trip I gathered ten, which now puts me at 1,005 (still, only 32%)

Wisconsin:

1. Buffalo County
2. Crawford County
3. Pepin County
4. Pierce County
5. Richland County
6. Vernon County

Iowa:

1. Allamakee County
2. Clayton County
3. Delaware County
4. Dubuque County

And just to clear up the mystery I posed on Day 2 of my Great River Roadtrip, the reason for the southward jog was indeed to catch a couple of new counties. I figured I wouldn’t be back this way for quite awhile so I better collect them while I could. The family is somewhat understanding as long as it doesn’t take us too far off track.

It’s a bit of a compulsion but certainly no worse than those who collect tripoints, highpoints or various other geographical oddities. I almost feel respectable now that I’ve cracked a thousand.

Day 2 along Wisconsin’s portion of the Great River Road began in La Crosse at the same leisurely pace from the previous day. We would stray from a purely Wisconsin route later in the day, crossing the Mississippi River into Iowa using the Cassville traverse. From there we looped back to the north along the western bank, crossed the river again and completed our trip in Prairie du Chien, WI.

These are the Day 2 waypoints used on our journey. I pre-programmed them into a Nuvi GPS mounted on our windshield to help keep us on track. The Nuvi tends to do best between major locations on large roads. It’s not so great on obscure roads or exact endpoints. Keep that in mind and bring along paper backups. Old fashioned fold-out maps and Internet printouts come in handy when the GPS freaks out, and it will happen so plan accordingly. Perhaps I’m overly cautious or perhaps I simply like maps, but I generally have two or three redundant means to navigate between locations.

I found it infinitely more relaxing to punch in a new waypoint every few miles than tolerate the annoying Nuvi woman’s exasperated recalculating admonishment. Insistent little witch that Nuvi, and more demanding than the kids in the back seat (who were suitably anesthetized by video games and DVD’s). My wife calls Nuvi the "yelling lady" and was ready to throw her out of the window after the second day. Anyone who owns a Nuvi knows exactly what I mean.

We approached Ferryville, Wisconsin south of La Crosse during the morning. A thick cloud cover from the previous day had lifted, blown halfway across the Great Lakes by this time. A sunny day accompanied by a stiff westerly wind greeted us as we cruised along the bluffs. We had the roads practically to ourselves once again.

Regular readers of the Twelve Mile Circle realize that I am an aficionado of ferry travel, and I’ll go out of my way to find one. I’d targeted the Cassville Ferry the previous year but it had been discontinued temporarily due to flooding. I feared I might suffer a similar fate because of the wind, but I checked their website and everything looked fine. Apparently wind isn’t a problem and we crossed without difficulty.

I took some great video and many more photographs, and I’ll post something to my permanent site at a later time.

Most people taking a similar route, crossing here at Cassville would probably head straight up to Guttenberg, IA at this point. However I took a southern detour for reasons that will be explained in a future article. Anyone wishing to replicate this journey can safely ignore the southernmost jaunt on my path and save about twenty miles of extremely rural driving. I will say that it is some of the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever observed and it might be worth a detour simply from an aesthetic perspective.

My Iowa target was the Effigy Mounds National Monument, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service. It’s located just north the binary towns of McGregor and Marquette with their tourism foucs and a tacky casino with a fiberglass pink elephant in a top hat out front. That contrasted sharply with the purpose of the nearby Effigy Mounds. Native Americans placed hundreds of sacred ceremonial and funereal mounds along the Mississippi River bluffs a thousands and more years ago. Little is known of these nomadic people besides the enigmatic mounds they left behind.

Mounds take various shapes such as effigies of birds or bears, or more plain forms such as the conical structures pictured above. Well-groomed hiking trails wind among the mound groups and along the bluff.

We hiked one of the shorter trails, leading from the Visitor Center past the Little Bear Group and up to Fire Point, a distance of about a mile. A park ranger explained local history as well as pointed out some of the landmarks that could be seen from this elevated perch. This particular view looks downriver towards the south. Prairie du Chien, our final stop, could be seen in the distance on the opposite bank.

My recent discussion of the Great River Road was a bit of a setup. We took a short journey along Wisconsin’s portion of the road, and into Iowa over the weekend. The scenery along the bluffs of the Mississippi River could only be described as spectacular; soaring cliffs towering over the ever-changing nature of the river itself.

We encountered remarkably little traffic. There were a number of motorcycle convoys as apparently this is a well-known touring road, but few automobiles and no trucks. I would have thought differently on a summer weekend and I’d prepared myself mentally. That was surprisingly unnecessary. That happens so rarely and I made sure to savor our good fortune. I don’t know if that was due to the economy or to the timing of a big 3-day holiday next weekend, but either way we cruised along roads practically by ourselves.

Day 1, Saturday, involved a leisurely amble from Prescott to La Crosse, a distance of about 200 kilometres (125 miles) along winding country roads. This provided plenty of opportunities to stop anywhere we liked at the many overlooks, historical sites and quaint riverside towns. We spied a bald eagle soaring above. The previous day we’d spotted a black bear sitting right by the side of the road not paying us any attention as we drove right past him. He didn’t mind us and we didn’t mind him.

The Bow and Arrow

We arrived at the "Bow and Arrow" outside of Hager City. An archeologist in the early 20th Century observed this rock formation and remarked upon its unusual shape, as if it were a bow and arrow pointing towards Lake Pepin. Later archeologists speculated that perhaps it might be a bird effigy.

It is definitely not a natural formation. Humans places these stones here in a particular pattern, but nobody knows who did it, or why they did it, or what it’s supposed to represent. Native Americans do not remark upon it in their folklore and this is the only boulder formation of its type in Wisconsin. The manifestation of an ancient sacred site? The handiwork of bored early explorers of European descent? The mystery remains unresolved.

Lake Pepin

We followed the mountainside arrow, continuing downstream until we arrived at Lake Pepin itself. One often thinks of this river as being universally monolithic, the fabled "Mighty Mississippi." It’s a powerful force even way up here at its northernmost extremes but with lots of variation thrown in. It breaks into numerous paths as it diverts around networks of channel islands, it devolves into marshland as it courses though sloughs, it takes the appearance of an unobstructed pathway in places, and it creates lakes at others.

A dam forms where the Chippewa River dumps sediment from a sizable section of Northwestern Wisconsin into the Mississippi. The resulting backup creates Lake Pepin, the widest natural spot anywhere along the Mississippi River.

Lock and Dam Number 4

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keeps the river navigable commercially. This involves a series of locks and dams on the upper Mississippi, many of which can be visited along the roadway. We stopped at Lock and Dam Number 4 in Alma, Wisconsin and arrived just in time to watch a lock in operation. Water filled a large rectangular basin in a matter of minutes. The lock door swung open and workers guided a tug and its barges slowly into the slot. The process repeated at a second step and soon the tugboat and its cargo passed the dam successfully. Another tug sat just downstream ready to repeat the process in reverse.

We continued onward to La Crosse.