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See the FUDGE sign in blinking white lights. See the plane tail protruding from the faux-ruin façade of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. See the Wax World of the Stars, the Dungeon of Horrors, the Trojan Horse . . .
Yes, it’s Wisconsin Dells. But it’s not the only Wisconsin Dells.
Tourists always have been part of the scenery in this picturesque part of Wisconsin. The first settler was a printer and
publisher, and one of the first residents was a young carpenter who crippled his right hand in the Civil War and became a
photographer.
In winter, only the most dedicated pilgrims make the trip to Itasca, Minnesota's most revered state park.
Yet the park is beautiful without its forest canopy. It's easy to see its bones, the lumpy quilt of knobs and kettles laid down by retreating glaciers. It's easy to see the 300-year-old pines that escaped loggers. And it's easier to listen — to the sassy chatter of a squirrel, the prehistoric croak of a crow, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.
In winter, the park grooms 32 kilometers of trails for classic and skate skiing. On the trails, skiers see the legacy of Jacob Brower, the far-sighted surveyor who, in 1891, used his own salary to start piecing together the state's first state park.
As Will Rogers famously said, the trouble with land is they're not making any more of it.
In the north woods, land prices are rising as the population swells and people look for places to build vacation and retirement homes. Wall Street investment bankers are demanding timber companies convert their vast land holdings into profit. And as cheap wood pulp from abroad depresses their revenues, it's hard for the companies to say no.
"It's the perfect storm," says Ron Nargang, director of the Nature Conservancy's Minnesota chapter.
In its marshes and woods, John Muir first discovered the joys of wilderness. On its sandy plains, Aldo Leopold became a pioneer of land stewardship. On its meadows, two young ornithologists created a haven for cranes.
The natural world found some of its greatest allies on a swath of rolling, glaciated land in south-central Wisconsin. Muir went on to found the Sierra Club and is known as a father of America’s national parks. Leopold inspired legions with such books as “A Sand County Almanac.’’ George Archibald and Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation.
Wisconsin often is called the cradle of conservation. It was the first state to ban the use of DDT, before it was banned nationally in 1972, largely thanks to Lorrie Otto of suburban Milwaukee, who put native plants in her front yard in the 1950s and became known as the godmother of natural landscaping. Earth Day was founded in 1970 by yet another Wisconsinite, former Sen. Gaylord Nelson.
In Wisconsin, a bunch of rocks sets hearts aflutter.
They enchant geologists, of course, but also scuba divers, rock climbers and botanists. The rest of us, too — hikers, birders, campers, Boy Scouts.
We all go to give Devil's Lake its due.
Just up north, there’s a vast wilderness of lakes, virgin forest and wild rivers lined by waterfalls and rapids.
It isn’t like other north-woods forests — not as they are in this century, anyway. It’s a wilderness unto itself, and though it’s no farther than the state parks farther up Minnesota’s North Shore, it seems a world away.
It feels a world away, too.
Deep down, every morel hunter believes in divine providence.
There's nothing so providential as baskets overflowing with morels, and the taste is so divine hunters dream about it all winter. In spring, they offer a fervent prayer to the mushroom gods: May the fungus be among us.
Morels do taste heavenly. But it's the hunt that's so addictive, not the mushroom itself. For one thing, it's fun to find something for free that's so expensive in stores and restaurants, and it's fun to beat the odds by finding something so notoriously elusive.
In Minnesota's early days, creating a park was no picnic.
As the public admired the towering pines around Lake Itasca, loggers dreamed of the miles of board feet they could produce.
"No measure was ever more unreasonably harassed and opposed," wrote park founder Jacob Brower. But in 1891, the Legislature gave the people their first state park by one vote.
Only a day’s drive to the south lies a world as old as the glacier-cut north woods are new.
Here, in the foothills of a worn-down mountain range, elephantine boulders stand in herds. In riverbeds, billion-year-old slabs are as slippery smooth as clay just pressed by a toddler’s thumb. Springs pop out of the Earth’s depths, shimmering as blue-green as the Caribbean.
This is what a volcanic landscape looks like after 1.5 billion years of continual erosion: very rocky and very rolling. There’s rarely enough topsoil to till, and locals eke out a simple living. The world of strip malls seems far away — in days of visiting state parks and historic sites, you may never see a single national franchise, just the mom-and-pop cafes and motels of yesteryear.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.
In Wisconsin, the American dream came true for a penniless boy from Iceland — and the rest of us made out pretty well, too.
In 1873, 5-year-old Hjörtur Thordarson traveled with his family from Iceland to Milwaukee, where his father soon died of typhoid fever. The youngster's schooling stopped in second grade as the family moved to farms in Wisconsin and North Dakota, then resumed when the boy — called Chester — joined his married sister in Chicago and, at age 18, entered the fourth grade.
"All I wanted was a chance to learn," he said later.
In the land of 10,000 lakes, prairie often is dismissed as, well, dull.
But in the farthest corner of Minnesota, a dramatic patch of terrain offers more spectacle than an Imax show.
I stood atop Blue Mounds one afternoon in June, watching as bolts of lightening rocketed earthward from a leaden, wraparound sky. At my feet, domes of blood-red rock erupted out of pale grass; nearby, piles of boulders squatted at the edge of a 90-foot cliff, but there was no shelter for anything bigger than a squirrel.
Under the cornstalks of Fillmore County, an unusual sculpture garden sits in shadow.
Stalagmite topiaries line walkways, alongside pale-green flowstone as translucent as Chinese jade. Stalactite statuettes dangle in artistic arrays.
They’re obviously created by a Pollock of rock, a Van Gogh of stone. Yet their genius relies not on the medium — water, applied one drop at a time — but on eons worth of time.