– John O’Donohue
The slopes of the lightly frosted path dropped steeply away into a stark winter woods. The narrow, curving trail was an esker in the Kettle Moraine State Forest South Unit in southeast Wisconsin. An esker, formed courtesy of our most recent glaciers ten thousand years ago, is a natural elevated path created by sediment dropped at the base of a melt-stream at the bottom of the ice. I remember its name by means of a visual alphabet: its twists and turns remind me of an “S-Curve.”
Landscape is a text we can read. Stories accumulate here. I tick off glacial formations like squares on a bingo card as we hike through Kettle Moraine. A kame, shaped like the bottom half of an hour glass sand pile and formed much the same way from sediment dropped when meltwater plummeted down a vertical chute in the ice. A tear-drop shaped drumlin, fashioned from rubble dragged and scraped across the bedrock and whose arrowed edge points in the direction of the glacial crawl.
Plus the two features for which the state forest is named: a moraine, the steep line of rubble pushed along at the front or side of an advancing glacier; and a kettle, a pot-shaped indentation in the forest floor formed by a huge chunk of calved-off melting ice. When the last of the ice chunk melted away, its indentation in the outwash floor became a kettle pond.
Such is a reading of Kettle Moraine South Unit, a 22,000 acre state forest that stretches in a northeastly band for 30 miles beyond Whitewater, Wisconsin.
My wife Dianne and I recently hiked on the Ice Age Trail in Kettle Moraine on a sunny but chilly winter day. More than thirty miles of Wisconsin’s 1,100-mile long Ice Age Trail wind through the state forest, roughly following the furthest advance of the last great glaciers.
The winter thus far had been mild, but a stinging wind swiping down from the north offered the imagination a hint of a glacial chill. But only a hint. In truth, the slight dusting of snow served mostly to offer some color contrast to the browned-out woods and brought the sometimes hidden glacial features into relief.
In addition to glacial features, the forest chapters of oak, pine, and aspen punctuated with prairies, springs, and marshes offer habitat to coyotes, foxes, Cooper’s hawks, and sandhill cranes. Kettle Moraine is an Audubon Society Important Bird Area (IBA), home or breeding ground to 137 woodland, grassland, and marshland species.
More of the Ice Age Trail climbs through the Lapham Peak Unit of the state forest, rising from a lowland boardwalk crossing over the marsh and scaling up through the woods to the peak. The trail passes alongside the 45-foot wooden watch tower capping the highest point in Waukesha County.
But the land holds in its pages human stories as well and reminds us that our every footprint is inscribed in the landscape and is eventually swallowed by it.
A hike through the Scuppernong Springs Trail near the north of the forest’s scattered holdings tells how humans have lived both with and against the landscape over time. Archaeological findings of arrowheads and flint flakes point to Native American encampments on high ground overlooking the marsh, the choice of location based on access to plentiful game and fresh water.
White settlement altered the landscape. The 1½-mile trail brushes past the fading traces of an 1846 sawmill and the still-standing walls of a 1909 marl plant. Marl is a lime-based, grayish white soil formed at the bottom of glacial lakes and used as fertilizer and as building mortar. For six years up to 60 employees dug the clay out of the marsh, processed it, and put it on train cars on rail run specifically to the plant. By 1915 the plant was closed, the railroad abandoned, and the entirety left for the woods and marsh to reclaim.
A 19th century cranberry bog and a trout hatchery flourished behind man-made dikes. These were removed in the 1990s to restore natural habitat along the Scuppernong River for native wild brook trout, beaver, otter, muskrat, and mink. The springs themselves can still be seen bubbling up from the marly clay bottom.
At nearby Paradise Springs additional natural springs erupt where the water table is sliced diagonally by the rocky slopes. Thirty thousand gallons of fresh water per hour pour from the rocks at a constant 47 degrees, year round, into a scenic valley. The resources and scenery attracted both entrepreneurs and those seeking an idyllic escape from Milwaukee, about 40 miles away. A ½-mile leisurely trail—much of it handicap-accessible, winds past the remains of a 1920s horse track and a water bottling plant that once produced the label “Lullaby Baby Drinking Water.” The plant’s foundations and cement stairway are all that remain.
Beyond these lies the Fieldstone Spring House built in the 1930s to protect the spring waters. The Spring House originally sported a copper-domed roof. Roofless today, all that remains are the fieldstone walls and the spring as it emerges from the rocky hillside. The dammed-up pond still harbors trout. The grounds around the Paradise Springs Hotel, a popular honeymoon resort whose foundation ruins are located near the pond, once boasted a menagerie of peacocks, monkeys, and pheasants. All are gone now, except for the spring, the pond, and assortment of ruins and foundations.
Historians speak of palimpsests, ancient and medieval texts whose base—whether parchment or animal hide—was so valuable that it was oft-reused. Old lettering was scraped from the pages to make way for new text, but the old still showed through faintly.
Landscape is a palimpsest. Stories as ancient as the glaciers and first-peoples, as comparatively modern as abandoned factories and fisheries, and even as recent as today’s worn footpath sink back into—but still faintly grace—the land.
-- January 2019