Coulees
Outdoors in the Kickapoo Valley
In Wisconsin's coulee country, a green zone is known for morels, apples, wildflowers and a winding river.
In the coulees of southwest Wisconsin, a lush green zone draws anyone who craves a heady dose of nature.
It starts in spring, when trilliums bloom along Rustic Roads, morel mushrooms pop out on hillsides and water rushes down the crooked Kickapoo River.
It's not close to any city, but people find their way. Norwegians were first to be drawn to its deep, narrow valleys, like miniature fjords.
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."
Valleys of Vernon County
In the nooks of Wisconsin's coulee country, people of all kinds found a niche.
In 1862, a poor Norwegian couple and their four small children, including their infant son Thorvald, joined a wave of immigrants to Wisconsin, eventually settling in the coulees of Vernon County.
Vernon County was an interesting place in the 1860s. Only a generation before, Black Hawk and his band had fled through it, hounded by militia. They ran headlong into a slaughter that remains one of the most shameful chapters in U.S. history; today, 11 plaques mark the route, which ended near the town of Victory.
Norwegians poured into the steep, flat-floored valleys that reminded them of home. Italians fished along the Mississippi from
a town they called Genoa.
A jumpin' joint
A Norwegian village in southwest Wisconsin has a longtime love affair with ski jumping.
In Westby, Norwegians take their love of tradition to extreme heights.
The high ridges and deep coulees south of La Crosse drew so many Norwegian immigrants in the 19th century that the area around Westby became known as "America's little Gudbrandsdal,'' after the valley in Norway.
The Norwegians had left their homes, but not their customs. Today, Norwegian flags fly from lampposts, and the visitors
center is a stabbur, a top-heavy wood building used in Norway since the Middle Ages.
Wine walks on the Wisconsin
On a fall girlfriend getaway, we hike, eat and sip our way along the river valley.
For some people, “Wisconsin wine” is a puzzling concept, like “New York nice.’’
But grapes do grow in Wisconsin, primarily on the high ridges of the Wisconsin River, near its confluence with the
Mississippi. There, vines bask in sunlight and frosts sink into valleys.
What vintners can’t grow they truck in from other states, adding a Wisconsin je ne sais quoi to the grapes during blending, fermentation and aging.
Cycling in coulee country
The famous Elroy-Sparta is just one of the trails in a picturesque pocket of Wisconsin.
There's a beautiful pocket of Wisconsin that dairy farmers would have had all to themselves if it hadn't been for a few renegade bicyclists.
In 1967, Wisconsin made a bicycling trail out of an abandoned rail bed that it had devoted to hikers until it saw that most of the users were on bicycles. That trail, the Elroy-Sparta, sparked a national race to convert unused rail beds into trails.
Today, Wisconsin has 1,600 miles of rail trails, still more than any other state, though Michigan and Minnesota keep nipping at its wheels. Of those miles, more than a hundred skirt the edge of coulee country around La Crosse, a dramatic region of high ridges and valleys untouched by glaciers.
Fight club
At a Civil War skirmish in the Wisconsin coulees, history shows up in the flesh and blood.
It was a gorgeous fall day in southwest Wisconsin, and all we could see was heartache and misery.
"Welcome to Virginia 1862," read the sign at the gates of Norskedalen, where pioneer homesteads evoke the Civil War era.
Pushing open the door of a chinked-timber farmhouse, we encountered Nedda Blodgett, who was surprised to find strangers in her parlor but quickly welcomed us in a Southern drawl.
© Beth Gauper, 2007 - 2012 all rights reserved
