It rained all last night, and the rain changed to snow about an hour ago; a perfect time to sit by the bay window and remember the stretch of unusually warm weather a few days ago …
Monday started off kind of cold but the overcast quickly burned off and the temperature kept rising; by lunchtime I was thinking about a hike.
The Kickapoo Valley Reserve follows the river from the southern edge of Wildcat Mountain State Park to just north of LaFarge, and encompasses a variety of areas under different jurisdictions; federal, state, and Ho-Chunk Nation, under a KVR Management Board. There is a lot of history in this area, stretching back to prehistoric times, way too much to cover in a blog post, but the salient item for my purpose is the Corps of Engineers’ beginning a project in the 60s to dam the Kickapoo and create a lake. There remains one vestige of that project, and I have always wanted to see it: a concrete pylon that was the beginning of the dam. I found the site by a combination of on-the-ground reconnaissance and map study and Monday seemed like a great opportunity to visit it.
And there it is, right by the end of the Dam Tower trail loop.
A pleasant hike on a really nice day! The maps are interesting, filled with a lot of trails (including another Ice Cave!), I am looking forward to spending a lot of time exploring them this year.
Alas, because of the interlocking and overlapping jurisdictions I am pretty sure the KVR will never be a POTA site.
Thank you for visiting driftlessqrp! (it’s still snowing out there today)
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