Camping Program Needed for the Ice Age Trail

By Drew Hanson

Use of the Ice Age Trail is increasing. But a significant impediment to more people enjoying the thousand-mile footpath remains: the lack of regularly-spaced camping areas. It’s like a coast-to-coast highway with no place to buy gasoline. Fix this problem and more people will use the Trail. More people using the Trail will bring economic, education, and physical fitness benefits to Wisconsin.

The non-profit Ice Age Trail Alliance recognizes anyone who can verify that they hiked the entire Ice Age Trail as a Thousand-Miler. In the ten years prior to 1990 only four people hiked the entire Ice Age Trail. During the 1990s 13 people completed their hikes of the entire Trail and 39 people completed between 2000-2010. By this meter, Thousand-Miler use of the Ice Age Trail is increasing at a rate of roughly 200% per decade.

Sign directing hikers to one of only two
existing dispersed camping areas along
the Ice Age Trail

The Southern Kettle Moraine State Forest has three backpack shelters spaced along roughly 30 miles of the Ice Age Trail. The shelters require a fee for use and can be reserved in advance. Use data for the three shelters for May – October, 2010 shows 297 user/nights out of a possible 552 available nights for an occupancy rate of 53.8%. For comparison, according to the report The Economic Impact of Expenditures By Travelers On Wisconsin: Calendar Year 2010 prepared for the Wisconsin Department of Tourism (see http://media.travelwisconsin.com/~/media/Files/Research/Economic%20Impact/2010/2010%20Full%20Report.pdf), hotels/motels/resorts/B&Bs had an average occupancy rate of 51% in 2010. Like hotels/motels/resorts/B&Bs, demand for Southern Kettle Moraine shelters is greatest on weekends when the shelters are often reserved months in advance. Comparable occupancy rates between camping shelters and hotels shows that demand for overnight use of the Ice Age Trail is solid where camping accommodations are available, even inconvenient accommodations that require a reservation and fee.

Another example of long-distance hiking use is provided by the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail (AT). Most of the estimated 2-3 million people who use the AT each year hike only a portion of it but an increasing number complete the entire trail. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, approximately 500 - 600 people complete their hike of the entire AT each year (see http://www.appalachiantrail.org/about-the-trail/2000-milers). Given that the Ice Age Trail is roughly half as long as the AT and passes over terrain that is generally easier to hike, if the Ice Age Trail had a camping program, long-distance use numbers on the Ice Age Trail might surpass long-distance use of the Appalachian Trail.

Simple. One of the existing dispersed
camping areas along the Ice Age Trail.
A system of these is needed.

To address the need and realize the tourism potential of the Ice Age Trail, a new program of regularly spaced dispersed camping areas was adopted in 2011. While these camping areas should be free to use, the economic benefits come from the increased fuel purchased to reach trailheads, food and specialized equipment purchased for multi-day hikes, visits to taverns near the Trail and more.

Such a program would be one of the least expensive economic generators that the State of Wisconsin could invest in. It would benefit half of the state’s counties. Partners such as the National Park Service and Ice Age Trail Alliance could assist with set-up. Once in place, the Wisconsin Department of Tourism could promote the program to state residents and the vast Chicago market. Other benefits would include educating residents about the beauty of their state, increasing public use of state-owned land and promoting physical fitness.

Let’s get the program rolling.

North Country Trail office moves from Madison to Lowell

After two decades in Madison, Wisconsin the National Park Service (NPS) recently relocated its North Country National Scenic Trail office to Lowell, Michigan. For years federal staff for the North Country Trail (NCT) shared an office with Ice Age National Scenic Trail staff on Madison's west side. The two trails even shared some staff, which provided some administrative efficiencies. But those efficiencies were wiped out by the travel required anytime North Country Trail staff needed to be on or near any part of the NCT itself. Plus not having a shared federal office will provide an emotional boost to both National Scenic Trails, especially for NCT volunteers who now have their own office and staff located on the NCT.

The kind of synergy of having federal and non-profit offices for the Appalachian Trail located in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia can begin to benefit the NCT in Lowell. I applaud the move.

For more on this story, see http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/index.ssf/2011/11/world_traveler_now_in_lowell_t.html

Ancient Trail between the Great River and Great Lakes

By Drew Hanson

Fueled by new modes of transportation and shifting economies, human travel routes change with the passage of time. Most of the changes result in routes being improved. But occasionally an old route is abandoned. This essay is a story about an ancient overland trail across what is now southern Wisconsin and one of its segments that still evokes a sense of what it might have been like thousands of years ago.

The first book ever published by the Smithsonian Institution was Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, by E.G. Squier and E. H. Davis. It appeared in 1847, one year before Wisconsin became a state. Chapter five, Monuments of the Northwest, notes an ancient trail that is the geographic riddle this story strives to unravel:

“The great Indian trail or ‘war path’, from Lake Michigan near Milwaukie [sic] to the Mississippi above Prairie du Chien, which has for the most part [emphasis added] been adopted as the route of the United States military road… [T]his great natural pathway, which has been for ages and must forever remain the route of communication between the Great Lakes and the Great River,” is along “… a high open prairie, on the dividing ridge between the waters of the Rock and Wisconsin rivers.”

Can we find this ancient trail today? The end points are clear: at the mouths of major rivers where the cities of Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien now stand. Various sources show the ancient trail passing through points where other communities grew, including Pewaukee, Lake Mills (Aztalan), Madison and Mt. Horeb. Connecting the dots between Madison and Milwaukee, nearly all of the ancient trail is now either modern highway or developed residential neighborhoods with grid street patterns. The same is true between Mt. Horeb and Prairie du Chien, where we can travel the route today but the tread of the ancient trail was obliterated by the earth moving needed to create highway 18 and the railroad grade that became the Military Ridge bike trail. Between Madison and Mt. Horeb, the location of the ancient trail is less obvious.

Roughly between the Mississippi River and the village of Mt. Horeb, the ridge that divides the waters of the Rock and Wisconsin Rivers is called the Military Ridge. It takes this name from a road that was improved by the U.S. military in the early 1830s. East of Mt. Horeb, the same dividing ridge follows an arcuate course northeastward and then southeastward to the edge of the Driftless Area near a small road named Timber Lane. Since the ridge east and west of Mt. Horeb is the same ridge, I refer to the entire ridge as the Great Dividing Ridge–a name applied to it by Increase A. Lapham in 1861 (Martin, L., The Physical Geography of Wisconsin, 1932).

The eastern edge of the Driftless Area near Timber Lane is marked by a terminal moraine known as the Johnstown Moraine. It was deposited by the Green Bay lobe of the Laurentide ice sheet roughly fifteen thousand years ago. The Ice Age National Scenic Trail and National Park Service Interpretive Site encompass part of this area because of the geologic contrast between glaciated and unglaciated landscapes the place provides. The area holds another distinction as well.

I submit that between Mt. Horeb and the eastern edge of the Driftless Area, the ancient trail continued along the Great Dividing Ridge instead of along the present route of the Military Ridge bike trail, the present route of highway 18-151, or other routes of the Old Military Road through this area. Except perhaps during the driest periods, the modern routes east of Mt. Horeb would have been too wet and included too many topographic changes to provide a good route for pre-eighteenth century foot travelers. The Great Dividing Ridge east of Mt. Horeb would have provided the most reliably high and dry walking route without steep climbs for thousands of years and is the most likely segment to which Squier and Davis were referring when they used the qualifier, “for the most part.”

So why was the part of the ancient trail along the Great Dividing Ridge between Mt. Horeb and the eastern edge of the Driftless Area abandoned as the major travel route through the area? We know that the primary draw for European and American settlers into Wisconsin during the early 1800s was the lead mining of the southern Driftless Area. The principal community of the lead district was Mineral Point. Other important lead mining communities were slightly farther south. The growth of these lead mining towns forced the creation of new transportation routes and altered those previously in existence.

Mineral Point is situated approximately eight miles south of the Great Dividing Ridge. One of the effects of its growing economy was to attract commerce and its requisite transportation routes into the community. At least some of the traffic through the region was thus redirected across the lower lands south of the Great Dividing Ridge. After the territorial and state capital became fixed at Madison, the shortest distance between the main communities reinforced the route shift generally south of the Great Dividing Ridge and with a far smaller percentage of transportation being done on foot, the water crossings of the upper Sugar River basin (part of the Rock River system) were rendered insignificant.

During the 1830s, U.S. government surveyors were delineating the grid of the Public Land Survey System in western Dane County. In addition to marking township and section corners, the original surveyors took copious notes on the distance from each corner to the nearest tree. More important to this story, they sometimes drew trails and roads on their maps and noted distances in their notes. The maps and notes of the original surveyors show that by the 1835, the primary travel route between Mt. Horeb and Middleton (just west of Madison) was located on the military road south of the Great Dividing Ridge.

In the decades following the work of the original government surveyors, lands were sold in rectangular 40-acre units. The lands were eventually settled by farming families. With evolving transportation technologies and as a matter of convenience to landowners, most travel routes were gradually straightened along survey lines wherever practicable.

During Wisconsin’s first half-century, important roads were often named for the community at the other end, such as, Green Bay Road in Milwaukee, Madison Street in Beaver Dam, Milwaukee Drive in New Holstein, and many others. As transportation routes change, sometimes road names become applied to only vestiges of different earlier travel routes. In other cases, newer straighter roads are assigned names of earlier nearby roads, even if the straightened road no longer reaches its namesake, such as Mineral Point Road on the west side of Madison that no longer leads to the city of Mineral Point.

Does anyone today drive Blue Mound Road or Capitol Drive in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties to reach Blue Mounds near Mt. Horeb or the Wisconsin Capitol? Could either Capitol Drive or Blue Mound Road be part of the ancient trail between the mouth of the Milwaukee River and mouth of the Wisconsin River?

The road name “Stagecoach Road”, just south of the village of Cross Plains, presumably refers to its early history as a stagecoach route. The nearby road named “Old Military Road” appears to not follow the route of the earliest military road through the area, but perhaps it marks some vestige of a partially straightened military road of an intermediate era?

During all the years since the lead mining days, the Great Dividing Ridge east of Mt. Horeb had no road of importance along its crest. New modes of transportation and shifting economies redirected traffic away from this part of the ancient trail. It fell from dominance as “the route of communication between the Great Lakes and the Great River.” The “high open prairie” became a high, mostly open agricultural field.

Extending east from the Great Dividing Ridge, where the Johnstown Moraine defines the edge of the Driftless Area, one of Middleton and west Madison’s main roads begins. Just as the modern names Mineral Point Road, Capitol Drive and Blue Mound Road hint at their origins, the ancient trail provided Dane County with the name for one of its modern roads. Honoring a Native American Nation that lived in this region and had its primary village at present day Sauk City, the road is named Old Sauk Road.

The march of civilization has left the Mt. Horeb to Johnstown Moraine segment of the Great Dividing Ridge and ancient trail largely without improvements. For the moment at least, one can still grasp the scene that has remained for ages. But it may not last for long. Residential development and quarrying threaten this link to our past. How long before new homes, quarrying and paved roads obliterate this last vestige of the ancient trail? How long will these vistas last?

Cut the Deficit without Betraying our Founding Fathers

By Drew Hanson

There’s a lot of discussion these days about the deficit. Rightfully so. The United States is in debt to the tune of something over $12,000,000,000,000. That’s twelve trillion dollars. And because our economy is still emerging from the worst economic disaster of the past 80 years, that number is going to get bigger before it gets smaller. It is a problem we need to address.

Unfortunately, too much emphasis is being placed on cuts to what some call “domestic discretionary spending”, that is for things like public education, public radio and television, and public health. These are programs that contribute to the quality of life for nearly all Americans. These are programs that distinguish rich countries from poor countries. These are programs worth fighting for.

Let’s not forget that the United States remains a wealthy nation, perhaps still the most wealthy nation on the planet. Our deficit is a big number but there is great wealth here and we have the exceptional ingenuity to fix the budget issues. So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

A sensible approach to cutting the deficit would look at three things: our country’s mission, where the wealth of our nation resides and where we might make government programs more efficient. In this short essay I’ll explore the first: our mission.

The government of these United States has a wonderful mission statement, contained in the preamble of our constitution and written by our founding fathers. It reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Given our large deficit, if a federal government program does not directly help to satisfy this mission, we must look at cutting the program.

Two parts of the federal budget that do not directly serve our mission are, first, having far too many American military service personnel stationed overseas and, second, the continued development of many military weapon systems. Military service personnel should be paid fairly and on time, protected with the best safety equipment, given excellent health care and if they are injured in the line of duty provided with health care coverage for life. But stationing them in far off lands, sometimes for decades, does not satisfy the mission of our government as delineated by our founding fathers and is an unnecessary expense we can no longer afford.

America needs to be exceptional for its own citizens again before we can afford the job of global police. It is time other nations police the world and, if necessary, topple brutal dictators.

The trillion dollars we have spent on Iraq was…, well, how do you think it squares with our nation’s mission statement when our own citizens have basic health and education needs? The same holds for recent military operations in Libya. The more than 160 tomahawk cruise missiles we shot at Libya during one week last month cost about $1 million each. Without factoring the other associated costs, that operation dinged US taxpayers over $160,000,000.

The next time you hear someone complain about a million dollars for the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, for instance, or other beneficial education or public health project for our own people, point out that our government spent that much on just one bomb in Libya. What’s more in keeping with our government’s mission, securing “the blessings of liberty” for our own people with a public health resource like the Ice Age Trail or attacking a sovereign nation that posed no threat to the citizens of the United States? Especially when we are over twelve trillion dollars in debt, our military should “provide for the common defense” of the citizens of the United States only.

Make no mistake about it, there is plenty of waste in the military weapon systems our government is building. More than a trillion dollars in boondoggles were recently described in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/13/opinion/13opchartimg.html?ref=opinion

Part of insuring “domestic tranquility”, promoting “the general welfare” and securing “the blessings of liberty” is embodied in our public education system, public radio, public television, public health programs and in relatively small programs like our National Park System (including the Ice Age National Scenic Trail), transportation enhancements and the Smithsonian Institution. These are things that give our civilization value and meaning.

It is time for a peace dividend to help pay down the deficit. By bringing home most overseas American military service personnel and by cutting certain military weapon systems we could save trillions of dollars without trashing our constitution and betraying our founding fathers.

Mountain Majesty Bias

By Drew Hanson

Preface

author atop Matterhorn, Oregon, 1992

I need to be clear about something from the start: I love mountains. I've spent months backpacking in them. I did three weeks of mountaineering in the John Muir Wilderness through one of my favorite mountain ranges--the Sierras. I've backpacked three times in Glacier National Park, two times at Mt. Rainier, summited two of the Three Sisters in Oregon and without boring you further suffice it to say many others. I disclose this at the beginning not to proudly pound on my chest but to make it clear that I am not against mountains nor am I naively unfamiliar with them.

On the other hand, many people think mountainous areas are "wastelands." My grandfather can't understand why I "waste" my time visiting mountains to hike. Like many Americans, he has never hiked on one. But I suspect he and others living in "flatter" landscapes have a deeper understanding of scenery. Out of this I discovered that scenery should not be measured by elevation alone.

The Bias

The Conservation Movement, like the Labor Movement, Civil Rights Movement or Suffrage Movement, has a rich history that includes certain tendencies and biases. These biases are most on display at the large national conservation groups like Audubon, Sierra Club and National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) or what is sometimes collectively called, Big Green. One of the currents running through the history of the Conservation Movement and Big Green is a bias I call mountain majesty bias.

For example, a few years ago, there was a large property in New Mexico that was offered for sale to the federal government to add to Bandelier National Monument. The Big Green groups and National Park Service all got behind it, pushing Congress with all the rhetoric they could muster to allocate the $101 million needed to buy it. Big Green quoted John Muir and other conservation greats and found a couple rare species on the property to justify why this property was so critical to America. After a couple years of public relations blitz in which the mainstream press eventually jumped on board, they got the needed votes in Congress, the money was allocated and now the Baca Ranch is owned by the federal government as conservation and recreation land for all of us. It sounds like a beautiful place and I plan to hike there one day.

It’s a tried and true recipe used by Big Green countless times and loaded with mountain majesty bias. If you interview conservationists, especially those who support Big Green, I suspect you will discover that quite a few unconsciously subscribe to the following logic: lots of elevation (i.e. mountains and canyons) equals scenery that should be protected. The converse to this line of logic is: flatter landscapes are not scenic and hence receive less conservation attention.

Look at a map of federal lands in America. Where are nearly all of them? Most are in the west. And where do the loudest calls of “sell federal land” and “we don’t need to be spending any more tax dollars buying land” come from? Local people living in the west. Ever heard of the Sagebrush Rebellion?

So it’s hard for me to sympathize with Big Green when they make noise to have this mountain or that canyon in the west purchased by the federal government. If the Conservation Movement were concerned about filling gaps in America's existing conservation lands and serving a host of other societal benefits, such as undoing some of the damage done to imperiled ecosystems (i.e. savannas, prairies, barrens, wetlands) and economies of the Mississippi River basin, we need to look outside of mountainous areas for places to focus our conservation attention. It is long overdue for the Conservation Movement to turn its focus to America's mid-section to make it our nation’s highest conservation priority to protect farmland, great river systems, wetlands, prairies and a system of protected corridors with footpaths through them that includes the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.

$101 million to purchase land for the Ice Age Trail is unheard of. But for those of us who know the Trail, we know that $101 million would forever protect a couple hundred miles of it. Imagine an additional couple hundred miles of Ice Age Trail for the 18 million Americans who live within a two hour drive to enjoy! But the forces of Big Green and the mainstream press are not ready to help. To Big Green the Ice Age Trail has no mountains, so what’s the point?

Mountains add to the great diversity of landscapes in America. But the absence of mountains does not mean that a landscape is uninteresting or inferior or unworthy of a (thousand mile!) hike or other conservation attention. The mid-section of the United States is home to some magnificent scenery!  Think about it the next time Big Green asks you to urge your member of Congress to support protection of xyz mountain or abc canyon. Then think about how long it has been since Big Green did as much to help the Ice Age Trail or just about any place in the Midwest.

Postscript



As an aside, at one point or another I was a member of all the Big Green groups including sixteen years as a paid member of NPCA. I read virtually every page of every magazine they sent me and sometimes responded to their “calls to action”. I wrote to NPCA at least a dozen times during those sixteen years asking that they please give even the slightest bit of attention, either in their magazine or in the halls of Congress, to my neighborhood National Park area–the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. But it was not to be. My membership in NPCA came to an end after they published an article about all the great National Park areas along the Great Lakes but failed to make any mention of the Ice Age Trail. I sent NPCA a farewell letter but NPCA’s misunderstanding of the Ice Age Trail stems from more than just mountain majesty bias. I described it in detail at http://pedestrianview.blogspot.com/2013/10/farewell-prejudiced-npca.html

An Unwitting Ice Age Trail Pioneer

by Drew Hanson

[A version of this essay appeared in the Winter 2001 edition of Mammoth Tales.]

Have you ever been asked, “Since Ice Age glaciers were in many states why is the Ice Age National Scenic Trail only in Wisconsin?” I have.

Tongue in check, I sometimes answer, “Have you ever wondered why Rocky Mountain National Park is only in Colorado? Don’t the Rocky Mountains span thousands of miles and several states from Alaska to Mexico?”

I’m generally a little less sassy.

My typical response describes the world-class landscapes created by continental glaciation in Wisconsin and how the Ice Age Trail Alliance was founded here by the late Raymond Zillmer.  Another reason for the Wisconsin focus is the work of the late Wisconsin Congressman Henry Reuss who championed conservation legislation for Wisconsin between 1960 and 1980. The tens of thousands of people who have volunteered their time since 1958 to make the Ice Age Trail a reality also deserve a share of the credit.

Surprisingly, however, the Trail’s roots go back much farther. It was actually during the late 1800s that the seeds for a national park and trail to commemorate the Ice Age were sown: and they were sown in Wisconsin!

The life and extraordinary career of Thomas Chamberlin far exceeds the realm of the Ice Age Trail. He published more than 250 scholarly articles and books and received a multitude of awards for his work. One of his several biographers placed him alongside the world’s greatest thinkers, including Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Darwin. His most-significant work was in the field of geology, which provides another basis for making Wisconsin the home of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.

Thomas Chamberlin was born in 1843 on a farm at the crest of a glacial end moraine near Mattoon, Illinois. He attended Beloit College in southern Wisconsin and the University of Michigan. He served for two years as principal of Delavan High School, in southeast Wisconsin, and taught at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater for three. In 1870, he co-founded the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

Returning to Beloit College in 1873, he began a nine-year term as professor of natural history. His primary focus became a thorough study of glaciated southeastern Wisconsin. This work resulted in the first scientific publication in the world on interlobate glaciation and the naming of the Kettle Moraine.

For most of his tenure at Beloit College, Chamberlin wore the second hat of Chief State Geologist. From this statewide position, he began to illustrate the anomalies of the unglaciated Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin. More importantly, he published the four large books titled Geology of Wisconsin. It surpassed in excellence and scope similar efforts of any other state geological survey.

His stock increased, Chamberlin became head of the Glacial Division of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). It was, likewise, a hat he would wear in addition to others. Seventeen years as Division head brought him recognition as the foremost authority on glacial geology in the United States.

In 1892, Chamberlin became the first chairperson of the Geology Department at the University of Chicago. Two years later, he completed the first-ever map of North America showing the extent of glaciation.

At the beginning of Chamberlin’s career, geologists believed there to have been one continental glaciation during the Ice Age. By the late 1870s, Chamberlin was the first to understand that there had been multiple glaciations–initially arguing that there had been two. Years later, using the best tools of his day, he determined there to have been at least four glaciations and named them for the states where their deposits were most easily recognized. Wisconsin was chosen as the namesake of the most recent continental glaciation.

(Since the 1960s, studies of deep ocean cores demonstrate that there have been perhaps 12 to 15 continental glaciations during the past 2 million years. The last period of the Ice Age, between 10,000 and 75,000 years ago, continues to be known as the Wisconsin Glaciation.)

Shortly before his death in 1928, the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW), which he once served as President, honored Thomas Chamberlin with a bronze plaque attached to a large erratic boulder. It was placed at the top of Observatory Hill–a drumlin on the UW campus– where it stands to this day. The plaque describes his service to the University and monumental accomplishments in the field of geology.

Thomas Chamberlin was the greatest American geologist of his generation. His brilliance lit so many paths of knowledge that he made an unwitting contribution to the Ice Age Trail. His recognition of the unique geology of Wisconsin and naming of a period of history for this place provides one of the compelling foundations of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.

Thousands of years ago, colossal glaciers had profound impacts on the planet. The landscapes of Wisconsin provided the ideal Ice Age canvas for continental glaciation to paint its most beautiful landscapes and intriguing sites for scientific research. The Ice Age National Scenic Trail is today a place to preserve, commemorate and enjoy this masterpiece.

Sources:

The History of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, S.W. Bailey, R.A. Paull, and L.H. Burckle, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin Systems, 1981.

“Chamberlin, Salisbury, and Collie”, Allan F. Schneider, in Geoscience Wisconsin, volume 18, “History of Wisconsin Geologists”, Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, 2001.

“Wisconsin’s Glacial Landscapes”, David M. Mickelson, in Wisconsin Land and Life, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, Harvard University Press, 1979.