Day 2 along Wisconsin’s portion of the Great River Road began in La Crosse. We kept the same leisurely pace as the previous day. Later in the day we strayed from a purely Wisconsin route just to liven things up a bit. We crossed the Mississippi River into Iowa using the Cassville Ferry traverse. From there we looped back to the north for awhile along the western bank to Effigy Mounds. Then we crossed the river again and finished our day in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
Navigating
This is the approximate path of Day 2 of our journey. I pre-programmed waypoints into a Garmin Nuvi GPS mounted on our windshield to help keep us on track. The Nuvi tends to do best between major locations on large roads. It’s not so great on obscure roads or exact endpoints. Keep that in mind and bring along paper backups. Old fashioned fold-out maps and Internet printouts come in handy when the GPS freaks out. Unfortunately that happens all too often so plan accordingly. Perhaps I’m overly cautious or perhaps I simply like maps. Either way I generally bring two or three redundant tools to navigate between locations.
I found it infinitely more relaxing to punch in a new waypoint every few miles than tolerate the annoying Nuvi woman’s exasperated recalculating admonishment. Insistent little witch that Nuvi. She’s more demanding than the kids in the back seat (suitably anesthetized by video games and DVD’s). My wife calls Nuvi the “Yelling Lady”. By the end of the second day I was ready to throw Yelling Lady out the window. Anyone who owns a Nuvi knows exactly what I mean.
Taking the Longcut
We approached Ferryville, Wisconsin south of La Crosse during the morning. A thick cloud cover from the previous day had lifted, blown halfway across the Great Lakes by this time. A sunny day accompanied by a stiff westerly wind greeted us as we cruised along the bluffs. We had the roads practically to ourselves once again.
Regular readers of Twelve Mile Circle realize that I am an aficionado of ferry travel. I’ll go far out of my way to find one. Actually I’d targeted the Cassville Ferry the previous year but it suspended operations due to flooding. I feared I might suffer a similar fate once again because of the wind. However, I checked their website and everything looked fine so I decided to give it a go. Apparently wind isn’t a problem and we crossed without issues.
I took some great video and many more photographs, and you can check that out on my permanent site.
Most people taking a similar route — crossing here at Cassville — would probably head straight up to Guttenberg, Iowa at this point. However I took a southern detour for reasons that will be explained in a future article. Anyone wishing to replicate this journey can safely ignore the southernmost jaunt on my path. That will save about twenty miles of extremely rural driving. I will say that it is some of the most beautiful farmland I’ve ever observed and it might be worth a detour simply from an aesthetic perspective.
On to Effigy Mounds
My Iowa target was the Effigy Mounds National Monument, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service. It’s located just north of the binary towns of McGregor and Marquette with their tourism focus and a tacky casino with a fiberglass pink elephant in a top hat out front. That contrasted sharply with the purpose of the nearby Effigy Mounds. Native Americans placed hundreds of sacred ceremonial and funereal mounds along the Mississippi River bluffs a thousands and more years ago. Little is known of these nomadic people besides the enigmatic mounds they left behind.
Mounds take various shapes such as effigies of birds or bears. They can also form more plain shapes such as the conical structures pictured above. Well-groomed hiking trails wind among the mound groups and along the bluff.
We hiked one of the shorter trails, leading from the Visitor Center past the Little Bear Group and up to Fire Point. That took about a mile. A park ranger there explained local history as well as pointed out some of the landmarks to be seen from this elevated perch. This particular view looks downriver towards the south. Prairie du Chien, our final stop, appeared in the distance on the opposite bank.
Leave a Reply