We can’t spend all of our road trip in one corner of southwest Wisconsin! So today, we’re going to wind north to Vernon County, home of a plethora of state and county parks. One of them, Wildcat Mountain (are those some mounds, or what?) also doubles as a ski resort. It’s also home of the 8600 acre Kickapoo River Reserve, a valley along the largest tributary to the Wisconsin River and a truly spectacular wildlife and canoeing spot. As DriftlessWisconsin.com points out, “[b]ecause the glaciers that missed the Driftless Area did not change its natural course, the Kickapoo River Valley is one of the oldest river systems in the world.”
We’ve always liked driving through Vernon County– any part of Vernon County.
The county’s top industry happens to be organic farming. They’re also home of the world’s largest cooperative of family farms, Organic Valley, whose main distribution center is almost totally solar-powered.
The Organic Valley headquarters in LaFarge, Wisconsin.
Signage from the “Uff-Da Shoppe” in Westby
The U.S.A.’s oldest tobacco cooperative isn’t out east, like you might think. It’s in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Photo by “Appraiser.”
Co-ops are a way of life here, as is preserving a sustainable local heritage. Want some cool Scandinavian gifts? Stop into little Westby’s “Uff-Da-Shoppe”! Or drive on to the county seat, Viroqua, whose population doesn’t quite break 5,000. Along with a health-food coops, they also are home to the nation’s oldest tobacco-growing cooperative.
But as we told you on our submissions page, we’re word nerds here. And it just happens that little Viroqua is also home of one of the coolest bookstores we have ever seen! It’s also time to introduce our first guest writer, Rachel Eckmann. Welcome, Rachel!
Last week, we looked at some of the beautiful views and took a walk down the south ridge. But the real fun lies to the north!
Caves, Crevices and Campfires
If you’ve made it to the top of the mound for a hike, the north path is a lot longer and, to me, more fun. If you go, take a compass (or make sure you know how to use the one on your cell phone!) Unlike the easier south path, this trail is one you can get lost on.
You’ll spend the first quarter-mile just walking along the ridge, but the trail is fairly well-marked for this first little bit. Eventually you’ll be under the trees… just stay on the trail!
Even once you get in the woods, the trail is fairly well marked.
“Stay on the trail.” Sounds like an easy concept to follow, right? But if you’re like most of us, pretty soon you’ll notice that more of the coller-looking things — ravines, jutted up rock formations, climbable treefall, views of “the other side of the mound” — all lie off to the right (or east), which is also where its easiest to get lost. But after all, you did bring a compass and cell phone, so…. pretty soon, in spite of yourself, you may find yourself tempted off-trail!
The trail will lead you past lots of fun hide-aways.
… and past lots of “rockfall” …
Sometimes you even find some cave-like hiding places. But that’s only if you’ve given into temptation and left the main trail.
When you get to the far north end of the trail, you’ll see how the Mound ridge has narrowed. Any time except late summer, you’ll have a view off to the north. There’s almost always some sort of campfire pit there. Recently, a local rock artist built this little pyramid!
The north end of the Platte Mound in winter.
One the other side of this particular ridge, you can see nearby Belmont Mound.
Remember how I told you in the last article how you could see Sherrill Mound from the Platte Mound? Well, you can also see the Belmont Mound, if you walk off the trail far enough to the east and find a high ridge. You just can’t get the best picture through the trees. There’s also another little mound (literally called “Little Mound”) that sits half-way between them.
Icicles on the north trail, from early November 2019
If you’re lucky enough to take your hike just after a freeze (but when things have thawed enough on the sunnier side next to the “M” that you can get up the stairs), you’ll find all sorts of cool icicles, dripping out of the limestone. That’s because 1) it stays colder up in the shade, obviously, and 2) Since limestone is very porous, water easily flows out of its crevices and makes icicles. (You’ve probably seen this same phenomenon on highways, where a road has been blasted through limestone. In winter, it seems to spew icicles faster than the surrounding area.) They’re a lot of fun to see!
Now for the anticlimax…
You can hear all sorts of local stories about different caves up on this trail. Some people swear there really aren’t any. They’re either lying to you or didn’t look very hard. I’ve been in a couple of these caves and listened to stories over beer about lots of others. True, some of the stories were crazy-sounding (like the guy who used to sit at the old Ed’s Cafe and opine that their were Egyptian hieroglyphics inside the mound somewhere). Others, like the story of a child who fell into on of the caves many years ago resulting in that cave being sealed off (either with concrete or by dynamiting it), can’t be easily proven true or false.
But there ARE many places visited not just by me but by seasoned spelunkers with hard-hats, lights and lines. I won’t be the one to tell you how to get to them. Any cave beyond the size of the one shown earlier in this article is a place you shouldn’t go into without someone who knows what she’s doing . . . and that person is not yours truly.
But I can tell you some brief stories about them,
One of the caves, reports long-time resident Garry Prohaska, is more than thirty feet long. Another has multiple rooms. How many caves does the Platte Mound house? Well, retired professor Tracy Roberts has pointed out that the Mound’s limestone ravines, and the way they were formed through stream erosion, suggests that there likely are many unseen sunken caves where water has already created a crevice. That cave-making process takes literally thousands of years: one property of limestone is its ability to maintain its structural integrity for a very long time. There’s no record anyone has made of where the caves are (though you can find Facebook discussions where some locals are telling others to keep quiet about the locations!) But chances are pretty high that, if someone was in a cave 20 years ago, it’s still there, though perhaps covered with surface debris.
Another long-time Platteville resident, now sadly deceased, once described how to get into his favorite cave. Luckily for us, he did it in general enough terms that you can get an idea of the process but not actually locate the cave.
He reported, “if you go into that crawl space [under a particular rock] you’ll get into a small room. [Shine your flashlight] to the left and look for a crack. Crawl on your belly through the tunnel, spiral down to the right, and when you are able to get off your belly, climb down and you’ll have room to stand up. Move slowly to the left, and there’s a second entire room.”
By the way… caves like this pockmark the Driftless Region, especially wherever you find ravines and limestone. But you’ll need to find someone else to show them to you. My time wriggling through rocks belonged to a younger, thinner, and slightly crazier version of myself. My advice is to just enjoy the hiking… that’s beautiful enough!
One last story though… here a (very) old road trip story from a preacher’s journal about one particularly large cave somewhere in the mound (Thanks to my friend Laurie Graney for locating this article. It’s from November 26, 1835, and the various spelling mistakes are from the original.)
A Methodist Circuit Rider’s Tour
West Platt mound. Preached at night. This mound with its mate 3 miles east of it, rises 200 feet above the common levil of the country. They are each about a mile in circumference, & mostly covered with timber. The west one has in it a cave which has been explored 1[oo] or 200 yards [in], & after winter set in a rattlesnake was found crawling about as in summer.
Wisconsin Historical Collections Volume XV. “(1835 ) A Methodist Circuit Rider’s Tour. “
Do any of the caves really go in 100 or 200 yards? I don’t know. It’s fun to think so!
All right, I guess the least we could do is show you an old hideout or two. These places, all off of the east side of the trail (the side towards Belmont Mound), are all safe and easily hiked through. Sometimes you notice that folks have been camping there. The Boy Scouts used to, but now and then older folks do, too.
Walking just below the ridge of the mound in fall, you are bound to find something.
[Editor’s note: since the Platte Mound is so heavily associated with Platteville, the most populous city in Grant County, though it’s actually across the county line in Lafayette County, we’ve tagged it for both places.]
We’ll be back with more on the Platte Mound and its history after winter comes! Now let’s head north to Vernon County, Viroqua, and a great bookstore….
Unless noted, all photos by Terry Burns
Tell us about your favorite place in the Driftless Region!
Make no mistake about it: people in tiny Platteville, Wisconsin love this Mound. It is definitely the most famous (though not the highest) of the mounds in group of mound complexes you can find in the southwest part of the Driftless Region, simply because the big “M” makes it hard to miss. In fact, the Platte Mound is featured on Platteville postcards you can buy at the Chamber of Commerce (see below). Kip Schreck took this with his Powered Parachute… now tell me that isn’t cool!
Two hundred and sixty-six of the stairs leading up to the top of the “M” have been sponsored by “M” aficionados.
But you don’t have to parachute in to get to the top of the “Big M.” Just drive to the base and walk up. Actually, it’s a great way to get in shape, and in summer, you may see the more athletic of visitors running up and down the wooden stairs: almost 300 of them, 266 of which bear the names of the sponsors that helped fund its building. From the top, there’s a spectacular view of the surrounding area.
Almost to the top of 266 stairs. (That’s counting the named ones… a few more have been added at the bottom, as some visitors tended to “slide” down the final bit of the hill if the grass was too wet!)View of the M & M farm from the top of the Mound.
So… let’s say you’ve pulled into that parking lot at the base of the “M,” and maybe you wonder why it’s there. Well, yeah, you could read the sign, but it won’t help you much… it says “the World’s Largest M” is the symbol for UW-Platteville’s College of Engineering (which would mean it should be an E, maybe?)
“The World’s Largest M,” sign at the bottom of the Platteville or Platte Mound.
But if you have someone with you who’s from around here, maybe they’ll jump in and tell you that the “M” is for “Mining,” because the part of what’s now the University of Wisconsin-Platteville that was an old mining school got into a battle with the Colorado School of Mines to see who could make the biggest “M”… back in the 1930s. But the mining engineers did build it, and current engineering students keep it whitewashed, just like it’s some alphabetic version of Tom Sawyer’s picket fence. In fact, the “M” was until recently part of UW-Platteville’s logo. But all of that is another story, one that winds back through the mining history of Platteville’s recent past. It’s a good story, though not one we’re going to hear today.
Maybe like me, you also wonder what people thought about the Mound before the miners arrived. Surely it was some sort of sacred sight. Did people live on it it? Or maybe you’ve heard stories of UFOs doing fly-bys on the mound… or maybe you just think all this storytelling is just sort of Mickey Mouse.
Guess what? You’re right (at least about the last thing)! On July 4, 1998, the big “M” lit up with Mickey between its peaks (see below). Maybe your guide was part of the Disney Hometown Parade that came to Platteville that year… or maybe they helped whitewash the Mound (especially if your guide is an engineering graduate of UW-Platteville) or danced or played with the band at the annual Miner’s Ball held at its base. Dancing in the twilight of a torch-lit giant letter may be strange, but its a lot of fun.
The Big “M” with Mickey Mouse ears, on July 4, 1998. (Why? If you’re local, probably you remember the Disney Hometown Parade. If not, come back for another article on the “M”‘s history this winter.)
But for me– not being an engineer, band member, stair runner, or even a good rock whitewasher– the real fun comes from hiking around on top of the Platte Mound and taking pictures. Since every season *but* winter is a good time for hiking, I thought I’d talk about that first, and save the history for another post this winter. So if you want to know more about the Mound’s history… I’ll get to it, but not today.
Seasons on the Mound
If you just want to see the view, summer is definitely the best time. Want to watch a beautiful sunset? The easiest direction to look from the top is west.
Sunset from the top of the M
Also, if you just want to exercise by running up and down the steps, any time where the temperature’s above freezing will do. (Trust me, you don’t want to run up those stairs when there’s any chance of ice.)
Or… if you’ve read our earlier article on the mound complexes and know how the tallest Blue Mound and Platte Mound and Sherrill Mound all line up, then maybe you want to know how to see Sherrill Mound. (After all, it doesn’t have a big letter on it to make identification easy.) Just look for the two irrigation ponds you see in the photo below, then look up to the horizon. There it is!
Here’s another view (with Sherrill Mound in the distance) except its from the base of the Platte Mound rather than the top.
That’s Sherrill Mound in the distance, on the other side of the Mississippi River.
But if you really want to explore, then take a hike on the top. The best time for that is early fall or late spring, not summer. For one thing, the foliage that grows thick during the summer months includes plenty of stickers and berry bushes–gooseberry and black raspberry, mainly–with thorns. Also, if you like the view, you won’t be able to see much through all the greenery in summer.
Once you climb the stairs to the top, you’ll be facing some ugly cell phone towers (all of the local mounds have cell phone towers on their tops, for obvious reasons–they are the highest spots in the area– though these towers really are eyesores and sometimes give off an annoying hum.)
At the top, you’ll see unlabeled yet pretty obvious paths heading right (south) or left (north). For the shortest and safest hikes, turn right. For more adventure and wilder scenery, turn left.
The Right (South) Path
From the south trail looking … of course … south. That’s West Moundview Road in the distance.
The path that heads south will give you a great view of nearby farm country, including several Amish farms which regularly advertise fresh produce through late summer and fall, and fresh eggs year-round. After you wind along the ridge for a very short while, you’ll run into various forks. Don’t worry… you can’t really get lost on this side. If you decide to go off-trail, all you need to do to find that trail again is uphill. If you stay on the gravelly top, you may actually wind up walking on to the cell phone tower service road (which used to be open, but is now locked to keep non-service-people from driving up.)
View from the south end of the Mound.
If you veer off to the right or south side (that is, if you have turned right then turn right again), and if you’re a lot taller and more athletic than I am, you’ll find several places where you can scramble up rocks that have quite an overlook, like this one to the left.
You can also get an idea of how the mounds were formed. Platteville limestone, formed by crushed invertebrates from some ancient sea, is named for this part of Wisconsin. You’ll see layers of this hard-to-erode stone that have been pushed up by even stronger geologic forces.
Some pushed-up layers of Platteville limestone on the south trail.
This limestone became the canvas for some local graffitist.
The old Nodolf residence is the subject of many excellent stories, but it is also structurally unsound. Do not go inside!
Anyway, the south ridge is the easiest to explore if you don’t have a lot of time. If you wind too far down the slope, you could actually be taking an alternate route to the bottom, but I wouldn’t. Yes, those are private residences at the bottom. But there are reasons beyond general respect for privacy that you might want to head back up rather than down.
Time for a little teaser: there’s one backyard in particular you want to be careful of not because of the owners (who are quite nice) but because the house itself is structurally unsound.
You may have heard of it, sometimes called the Platte Mound’s “Haunted House,” or written up in various accounts as the site of the “Nodolf Incident.” That’s yet another story for a different day. For now, our advice is to just stay away! Do not go inside. It isn’t safe. But it’s a fun story for some later cold, winter day… one where the mound liikes like this:
The Platte Mound in winter
We’ll leave hikers with this thought: what if, at the top of the mound, we went left or to the north instead? That’s another whole story! Be back next week with
[Editor’s note: since the Platte Mound is so heavily associated with Platteville, the most populous city in Grant County, though it’s actually across the county line in Lafayette County, we’ve tagged it for both places.]
When I moved to southwest Wisconsin 25 years ago, what first struck me were the mounds. I don’t mean the smaller conical mounds, linear mounds, or effigy mounds, though we’ll road-trip to some of those soon enough. I mean the huge hills that stand out across the landscape to such a degree that if you’re on any ridge in the Driftless Region, you likely can see one of them.
Platteville’s “M” Mound. Photo by Terry Burns.
Of course, there’s the ubiquitous Platteville Mound, above and bearing what is supposedly the world’s largest “M.” But it is only one of a huge and unexplained complex of mounds in the area. While these giant hillsides are natural formations, the “why” behind that formation– just like the “why” that this is the land the glaciers forgot– remains unknown. Most of these large mounds were sacred sites to indigenous peoples. And most obviously, they are the highest points in the area.
Charles Mound, Illinois: it may be one of the least exciting mounds in the area, but it is also the highest natural point in Illinois. Photo by Terry Burns.
For instance, Charles Mound, one of the smaller mounds but one lying in the sliver of the Driftless Region in Illinois, is the highest natural point in that state at 1,235 feet. (The highest “non-natural” point in Illinois is Chicago’s Willis Tower, at 1,450 feet.)
From almost any ridge in the Driftless area, you can see one of the larger mounds; from the top of every larger mound, you can see a smaller mound. You can actually use the mounds to navigate around the Driftless Region, if you want to. . . and pre-GPS, many people wanted to.
Belmont Mound, appropriately located in Belmont Wisconsin. Photo by Terry Burns.
Wisconsin’s first state capitol, near the Belmont Mound. Photo by Terry Burns.
For instance, the sight of one of the smaller mounds, the Belmont Mound (left), is what led settlers to create the first Wisconsin state capitol (right) almost in it’s shadow: the mound was an easy natural marker to find. Legislators actually met in one building (the one on the right) and slept in the other after they finished their business. This ended after a couple of years, when the capitol moved to Madison. Maybe legislators don’t make the best bedfellows!
If you spend as much time as we do road-tripping to different mounds, it’s hard not to start seeing connections between them, which is why I’m writing this introductory post about the “mound complex” rather than individual mounds. For instance, suppose you go to the highest spot in the Driftless Region, the top of the west end of one of the Blue Mounds.
The view north from the top of Blue Mound State Park’s west observation tower. Photo by Terry Burns.
Helpful though slightly vandalized signage at the top of Blue Mound’s west observation tower points out some of the mounds visible from this point, the highest in the Driftless Region. Photo by Terry Burns
At 1,716 feet, this gorgeous view is also the highest point in southern Wisconsin and the entire Driftless Region. From the west observation tower of Blue Mound State Park, you get quite a view of some of the other Mounds in the area (as the sign to your left shows.) You can also get an awe-inspiring view of the landscape to the north, or look east and make out the faint outlines of our current state capitol in Madison. (The isthmus upon which our state capitol sits is on yet another sacred site, but that’s a blog post for a different time!)
Some of the mounds on the borders of the Driftless Region, like Elk Mound in northern Wisconsin, actually are made by glacial debris. Many, like the Sherrill Mound over in (surprise) Sherrill, Iowa, aren’t “officially” recognized (whatever that means); others, like the previously mentioned Blue Mound and Belmont Mound (WI) are part of state parks. (Blue Mounds is plural in this sentence but not in the preceding one because only one of the blue mounds is in the state park; there’s a second “Blue Mound,” slightly shorter at 1,490 feet, in a county park nearby.)
Many of the mounds are on private property. Some owners make it clear that you’d better not trespass. Others, like the owners of Charles Mound, let people visit certain times of the year only. In some places, like in Jo Davies county Illinois, home of Horseshoe Mound, a conservation organization has collected money to protect the mound from development.
Helpful signage at Sinsinawa Mound. Photo by Terry Burns.
Sinsinawa Mound viewed from Highway 11. Don’t worry, the dinosaur in the foreground isn’t real. Welding strange monsters is just another Driftless Region hobby. Photo by Terry Burns.
The Dominican sisters at Sinsinawa Mound seem unique among mound property owners in recognizing and celebrating that these mounds likely were — or to Dominicans, are — on sacred ground. Sinsinawa’s signage points out that the native Americans who were their when Europeans arrived called it “Manitoumie,” meaning “land where the Spirit dwells,” probably a version of “Manitou.” As author Sister Mary Paynter, OP, pointed out, “It seems that manitou (or a variation) is fairly standard in the languages of native peoples who would have been in this southwest part of Wisconsin at various times– and the meaning is ‘Great Spirit’ or ‘God’ [in our Western Christian vocabulary].” Incidentally, Mary Paynter has done extensive research on the native history of the name “Sinsinawa;” we’ll look at her work more when we road-trip to the Sinsinawa Mound.
Native history in this area goes back nearly 2,000 years and involves multiple tribes, including the Fox, Sauk, Anishinaabe (Ojibwa), Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Potowatomi, Dakota, and Mesquawki. This writer is not surprised that the lone native reference I can find to what native people called one of the mounds confirms that they saw at least one of them– and my guess would be all of them– as a sacred place.
One might easily guess that the abundance of smaller and definitely human-made mounds (the conical, linear, and effigy mounds which occur throughout Wisconsin but especially in the Wisconsin River valley in greater density than anywhere else in North America, and which make up Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa) might be also indirectly related to the lack of glaciers… yet almost all of those were made AFTER the surrounding ice melted. The larger mounds that are the subject of this article are much older: 10,000 years old as a minimum. Some of them, like the smaller mounds, look terraformed. Could they also have been made by native peoples? I’m no geologist, but my friend Dr. Rich Waugh is, so I decided to get the scoop from him. Did humans make these mounds?
The large mounds in southwest Wisconsin, Waugh says, were “most definitely made by natural forces, primarily erosion related to streams and slope processes.”
“None of this precludes human use of the Mound,” Waugh added. ” I would be amazed if Native Americans didn’t impart some meaning to the Mound.”
These huge hills are often pocked with caves and natural springs. They make for great hideaways, too! In my next post, I’ll show you one of my favorites, on the Platte “M” Mound.
Before I end this installment, though, I do want to suggest that these large mounds are more than haphazard markers on the landscape. They’re upwellings of geological energy and follow patterns. As my husband Alan and I road-tripped to more and more of the large mounds, we’ve noticed relations between them not often taught in local schools.
For instance, Alan noticed that the Blue Mound, Platteville Mound, and Sherrill Mound all line up exactly.
Sherrill Mound (IA), Platteville’s “M” Mound (WI) and the first Blue Mound (WI) all lie on the same ley line. Thanks to J. Alan Moore for pointing this out.
From the top of one, one a clear day, you can see the next one. That is, from the top of the Blue Mound’s west observatory tour (as noted in a graphic earlier), you can see the Platte or Platteville Mound (and know that, lined up behind it on the other side of the Mississippi River is the Sherill Mound. From the Platte Mound, you can see the Sherrill Mound. And from the Sherrill Mound (see below) you can see the Platteville Mound (and know that, lined up behind it, is the tallest of the Blue Mounds.
Platteville Wisconsin “M” Mound as seen from Sherrill Mound, Iowa (with the help of telephoto 10x!). Photo by Terry Burns.
Summer solstice marker at the top of Horseshoe Mound. The zoomed-in photo below, showing Sherrill Mound and Balltown Iowa in the distance, was taken from this location. Photo by Terry Burns.
The Blue Mound-Platte Mound-Sherrill Mound line isn’t the only one. Several years ago, conservationists in Jo Davies county Illinois opened up the Horseshoe Mound for viewing. Clearly the people who designed the new park knew the mound well, and had watched natural phenomena on it for years, because on the top they’ve created a round circle showing where on the horizon the sun rises and sets on the winter and summer solstices. Turns out, the sun sets right between Iowa’s Sherrill and Balltown mounds. To the right, you can see the view with the naked eye, but below is what it looks if you zoom in. We thought it was pretty cool how the conservationists in Jo Davies county set things up so that you have a variety of views labeled, in a sundial-like pavillion.
View from Horseshoe Mound, with Galena, Illinois in the foreground. In the distance, you can see across the Mississippi river to both Sherrill Mound (right) and Balltown, Iowa (which also sits upon a mound.) On the summer solstice, the sun sets right between those two points on the horizon. If the view extended further to the right, you’d also see Sinsinawa Mound, Wisconsin. Photo by Terry Burns.
Signage on Horseshoe Mound pointing out what you can see in the distance
You can draw similar geographic connections between some of the smaller mounds. And yes, right now I’m mainly writing about the mounds nearest to me… I haven’t moved very far north at all. For instance, so far, I’ve totally ignored the Minnesota Driftless Region, though I will get to that eventually.
But for now, let’s start day-tripping! First stop: the Platte “M” Mound.
