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• Dreaming of Ely
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• Adventure on the Gunflint Trail
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• Paddling the Bois Brule
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• 10 great canoeing rivers
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• Hitting the trails in Trempealeau
  There's lots to do in this Mississippi River hamlet.
• Floating Missouri
  Spring-fed streams and springs beg to be explored in the down-home Ozarks.
• Minnesota's Boundary Waters
  For canoeists, vast wilderness is the promised land.

Chasing the Kickapoo

In southwest Wisconsin, a looping river plays peekaboo.

In southwest Wisconsin, following the Kickapoo River is a lot like watching a magic act: No matter how closely you pay attention, eventually what you see is going to disappear into thin air.

When it reappears, it will be in a completely different spot, and you'll have no idea how it got there.

"Look, there it is again," said my husband, as we drove Wisconsin 131 through the Kickapoo Valley. "It's meandering like mad."

The Kickapoo is the most crooked river in North America and one of the best-loved canoeing rivers in the Upper Midwest. Surging out of a vast watershed around Wilton, on the Elroy-Sparta State Trail, it twists for more than 125 miles as it flows toward the Wisconsin River at Wauzeka, 65 highway miles later.

From the highway, motorists catch only glimpses of a placid brown stream, zigzagging for no apparent reason. But down on the river, canoeists see right away why it's so crooked — whenever the water butts into rock, it dodges in a new direction. And there's a lot of rock — old rock, the skeleton of the continent, with all its bones poking through because none of the last glaciers deposited any sediment to pad them.

Each glacier slid right around this corner of Wisconsin, from the Dells to Dubuque, preserving its pointy hilltops and flat valleys and leaving it without the glacial rubble, or drift, that covers the rest of the region.

Now, this part of Wisconsin is known as the driftless area. The Kickapoo Valley lies at its heart, and its unusual topography — prairie savannah and marshes, cool valleys and sun-soaked cliffs — make it hospitable to many rare plants and birds and more giant white pines than can be seen anywhere outside the far north.

"It's such a crazy place," says Jessica Bolwahn, a land restoration specialist for the Mississippi Valley Conservancy in La Crosse. "You've got pockets of northern species and pockets of southern species in a really small place."

Yet this valley nearly became the sludge-covered bottom of a reservoir. It often flooded — partly because rainwater flowed in from 140 tributaries and off its steep sandstone walls, but also because of clear-cutting and poor farming practices — and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to build a dam.

It began buying land in 1969, condemning farms when owners resisted. But in 1970, the Environmental Protection Act established requirements the plan couldn't meet. After $18 million was spent and 140 families forced from their homes, the project ground to a halt.

In 2001, the land between Wildcat Mountain State Park and La Farge became the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, jointly owned by the state and the Ho-Chunk Nation. The Siouan Ho-Chunk, or Winnebago, were the most recent residents, but the river is named for earlier residents, the Kickapoo, an Algonquian nation whose name means "one who moves there, then here."

Now, the 8,569-acre reserve is a green zone for fishing, hiking, canoeing, bicycling and bird watching. Wetlands soak up rainwater and serve as breeding habitat for more than 100 species of birds. There's a new visitor center, with exhibits and a push-button flood table.

In search of birds

One May weekend, Torsten and I went on a bird walk out of the center with the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology's Barb Duerksen, whose finely tuned ear soon was picking out the calls of an Eastern towhee, a warbling vireo and a blue-gray gnatcatcher.

As a sora called in the distance, Duerksen picked up two stones and clicked them together, calling the marsh bird closer. Once she had done the same thing at the same spot, she said, and "it popped up right at my feet."

"It's a really neat bird to see because it's so shy, and you don't usually get a look at them," she said.

Our trail led to a marsh, where we watched swallows, red-winged blackbirds and two shy coots. Old Highway 131 leads over the marsh and heads north through the reserve, now a six-mile wilderness trail for bicyclists and hikers. On the other end of the marsh, a new covered bridge crosses the Kickapoo, one of 12 bridges in the reserve.

After the bird walk, we decided to hike another section of Old Highway 131, where it hugs the river out of Rockton. The forest has engulfed the old guardrail and crept over its edges, but on a drizzly day, the asphalt road made the best possible trail.

Birds chattered nonstop in the trees, and at the foot of a sandstone cliff, a frog plopped into a puddle and sat there, staring at us. As we walked to the next bridge, we thought how much fun it would be to ride the whole route on a bike.

"It's great, especially for families with younger kids," says Jonel Kiesau, the reserve's education coordinator. "It goes through so many habitats."

Ecotourism now is a source of income for people in the valley. So is organic farming, and its hub is just down the road from the visitor center. On a hillside above La Farge, the $6 million headquarters of the Organic Valley cooperative, started in 1988 by seven Kickapoo Valley farmers, now coordinates the output of 775 organic farmers in 23 states but still can't convert farms fast enough to meet demand. At the end of July, the cooperative puts on the Kickapoo Country Fair, which draws more people every year.

Since the rain didn't let up, we drove 30 miles farther down the valley, admiring the roadside scenery. North of Viola, one green little valley was particularly scenic.

"In Nebraska, that would be a state park," Torsten noted.

Our destination was Gays Mills, famous for its apple orchards, which are covered with blossoms in May. It has an inviting main street, too, and at the Village Greenhouse we stopped to buy perennials from pony-tailed proprietor Joe Brandt.

"Organic farming is taking off, which ties in to the hippies," he said. "We've got a lot of 'em here; we have a lot of earthy people."

At the Village Food Cooperative next door, we bought maple syrup from Laura Negronida, a Chicagoan who came to Gays Mills after trying the back-to-the-land lifestyle in California. The Kickapoo Valley, she said, is blessed by its location, away from highways and big cities.

"It's remote, which most people think of as the edge of somewhere," Negronida said. "This is remote by being in the middle of somewhere; people just kind of go around it."

'Hugged and cozy'

It was still raining the next day, so we drove the valley's two Rustic Roads. The trilliums had just started to come out on the steep sides of Tunnelville Road, a three-mile channel of vegetation that descends alongside a narrow valley that, through the trees, looked like a river of grass.

"It's amazing how green it is," Torsten said. "Look at that, it's just one green wall."

At places like these, visitors may feel far from home.

"People who are from the flatlands sometimes feel claustrophobic here," says the reserve's Kiesau, who grew up near La Farge. "There are tight valleys, it's hard to see through the clouds, and the trees are dense. But if you're from this area, you feel hugged and cozy."

Near the road's junction with Wisconsin 131, just south of La Farge, a herd of Texas-style longhorn cattle grazed. We followed the highway north to Rustic Road 56, which climbs a high ridge lined with Amish farms; one was serving as church that Sunday, and there were dozens of buggies parked outside.

Time to paddle

In Ontario, we stopped at one of the three canoe liveries along the Kickapoo, and were surprised to find Titanic Canoe Rental would be happy to give us a shuttle in the rain, since they already were expecting 75 girls from Lubavitch Girls High School in Chicago.

Titanic is the newest of three canoe rentals in town; they have 500 canoes among them, said owner Bill Teynor, and on Saturdays every canoe is out on the river. As he drove us back from the landing at Wildcat Mountain State Park, where we had left our car, Teynor told us his son Jason had started the livery nine years ago to help pay for college, then sold it to his parents.

"The kid retires and Mom and Dad take over," Teynor joked. "There's something backward about that."

Even in the drizzle, the river was gorgeous. Virginia bluebells lined the banks, and hemlock and cedar clung to the tops of yellow sandstone cliffs, jutting out over the water like the prow of an ocean liner.

The silence allowed us to see more than our share of wildlife. As we rounded a bend, we startled a family of geese, and as the mother herded her goslings up a sandy bank, the father led us down the river, honking and slapping his wings against the water until he decided we were a safe distance from his family.

"He's going to have a heart attack when those 75 girls show up," Torsten said.

On a log, we saw a plump, long-legged brown bird that was either the sora or its cousin, the Virginia rail. We got an escort from a belted kingfisher, which seemed to wait for us to catch up as we followed its hollow rat-a-tat-tat down the river. Swallows made bombing runs over the water, eating, drinking and hunting in full flight.

The sharp loops also hid us from a deer herd that was crossing the river. Helplessly, we watched as the deer panicked, one crashing its head into a tangle of branches as it tried to bolt up a nearly vertical bank. We had separated a fawn from its mother, who anxiously followed her baby until it finally rushed through the water, bobbing as if it had springs on its feet.

It was easy canoeing, made even easier because high water covered the sandbars. We paddled the six river miles to Wildcat Mountain in an hour and 40 minutes, then doubled back to Bridge 4 to watch the schoolgirls arrive. Many of them had tipped, soaking their long black skirts, but that just seemed to enhance their high spirits, and they thanked Teynor for the awesome trip.

"Titanic lived up to its name, didn't it?" he said.

The Kickapoo is only knee-high, so tipping is no big deal. In July and August, says Ann Teynor, "everybody tips."

Next time, we'll paddle all the way to La Farge. With all that spectacular scenery just sitting there, it seems a shame not to see it all.

Trip Tips: Kickapoo River Valley

Getting there: It's about 3½ hours from the Twin Cities. The Upper Kickapoo Valley is 25 miles south of the junction of interstates 90 and 94.

Events: Late July, Kickapoo Country Fair in La Farge, with music, food, artisans and workshops. Mid-August, LarryFest outdoor bluegrass festival near La Farge.
Late September, Gays Mills Apple Festival. Early October, Kickapoo Valley Reserve Dam Challenge Triathlon, with three miles of trail running, seven miles of canoeing and 14 miles of bicycling. There's a citizen class for people who just want to enjoy the trails and scenery.

Canoeing: Three liveries in Ontario offer day trips on the northern part of the Kickapoo River for $25-$30 per canoe with shuttle: Titanic, 1-877-438-7865, www.titaniccanoerental.com; Mr. Duck's, 1-608-337-4711, www.mrduckscanoerental.com; and Drifty's, 1-608-337-4288. Call in advance to reserve, especially for weekends.

Saturday can be very congested; if you must canoe on a Saturday, try to arrive first thing in the morning. Skilled canoeists can shave up to a third off the times the liveries say it will take to reach a landing. Highway distances between landings are short, making bicycle self-shuttles easy for people who own canoes.

Bicycling: The six relatively flat miles on Old Highway 131 through the Kickapoo Valley Reserve can be ridden on all but the thinnest tires. The reserve also has miles of mountain biking, and fit bicyclists can ride on Wisconsin 131, which has a bike lane, and other highways.

The 32-mile Elroy-Sparta State Trail, famous for its three tunnels, goes through Wilton, 1-608-463-7109, www.elroy-sparta-trail.com.

Hiking: There are many miles of trails in the reserve and in the state park.

Rustic Roads: For a copy of Wisconsin's free Rustic Roads guide, call 1-800-432-8747 or look at www.dot.wisconsin.gov/travel/scenic/rusticroads.htm. To find the routes — and your way home — you'll also want a Wisconsin DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer, available from bookstores, sporting goods stores and Target stores.

Camping: There are 21 primitive campsites in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, $10 for up to 10 people. They're first come, first served. Campsites are also available at Wildcat Mountain State Park, 1-608-337-4775, www.wiparks.net.

Kickapoo Valley Reserve: Day-use permits are $4. 1-608-625-2960, kvr.state.wi.us.

Accommodations: There are many cottages for rent, and it's handy to have a kitchen since restaurants are limited. We stayed at the comfortable two-bedroom Historic Ottervale School, three miles west of La Farge. It's $95 for two, $20 for each additional person, 1-608-625-6000.

Twelve years ago, I stayed at Trillium B&B on a ridge outside La Farge, where two cottages go for $65-$105, 1-608-625-4492. Other B&Bs include the Inn at Elk Run in Viola, $45-$95, 1-608-625-2066, www.elkrun.net, and the Inn at Lonesome Hollow in Soldiers Grove, $99-$249, 1-608-624-3429, www.lonesomehollow.com.

Adjoining the reserve in La Farge, the three-bedroom Seeleyburg Guest House rents for $60-$125, 1-608-625-4346. West of La Farge, the Kickapoo Valley Ranch has cabins, $119-$249 for two, 1-608-625-6222, www.kvranch.com.

Information: Kickapoo Valley Association, www.kickapoovalley.org.
For a copy of the Hidden Valleys guide to southwest Wisconsin, call 1-800-592-6968, www.hiddenvalleys.com.

Last updated on June 25, 2008