The Driftless, on foot

Begin with the Driftless. Twenty-four thousand square miles of unglaciated upper Midwest, the only patch of the continental interior the Pleistocene ice sheets missed. The land kept a topography over 500,000 years old: deep coulee valleys, sandstone-and-dolomite bluffs rising 500 feet from cold-water creeks, oak savanna and goat prairie remnants, the soil profile distinct from the loess plain of the surrounding corn belt. Today the region holds the highest density of certified-organic farms in the United States. The trail walks from Organic Valley's cooperative HQ to the Mississippi bluffs, naming the substrate the country's regenerative-ag movement has been quietly rooted in for fifty years.

↓ begins at

Start at Organic Valley's headquarters in La Farge, Wisconsin — population under 800, the operational center of the largest farmer-owned organic dairy cooperative in the United States. Founded 1988 by seven farmers in this coulee. Today: 1,800+ member farms, $1.2B+ in revenue, all member-owned, one farmer one vote. This is the proof-of-concept American regenerative agriculture has been waiting for: cooperative organic ag, at national scale, owned by the producers, governed democratically. Stand outside the HQ — a deliberately unflashy office building in a coulee village — and recognize what the building represents. Most American food companies of comparable scale are owned by private equity or public shareholders; this one is owned by the farmers.

↓ is part of

Drive the few miles south to the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. Eight thousand five hundred sixty-nine acres along the Kickapoo River, restored from the failed 1962 La Farge Dam project — which the Army Corps of Engineers spent two decades acquiring by eminent domain (displacing 149 families) before federal funding collapsed. The land sat unused for twenty-five years. In 2000 Congress transferred it: 1,200 acres to the Ho-Chunk Nation as recovered ancestral territory, the rest to Wisconsin under co-management. Today: restored prairies, oak savannas, hemlock-birch ravines, 60+ miles of trails. A reserve created by undoing a federal project is unusual; one held jointly by a state and a tribal nation is rarer still. Walk the trails. Notice how recently restored everything is, and how wholly it has returned.

↓ is co-stewarded with

Drive west to the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum and Cultural Center. The Ho-Chunk are the original people of this bioregion — *Hoocąk*, 'people of the big voice.' The 19th-century U.S. government removed the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk from this land five separate times, to Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska. Each time substantial portions of the nation walked back. By the 1880s the federal government acknowledged the failure of removal as applied to the Ho-Chunk. Federal re-recognition came in 1963; the nation has rebuilt its institutional and cultural substrate continuously since. The Center is the public-facing knowledge-care anchor: history, language, sovereignty. Visiting is the simplest direct way to begin understanding the Driftless as a continuously-Indigenous place — not historically Indigenous, but currently and continuously.

↓ shares the bioregion with

Drive south through the Wisconsin coulees to Spring Green, and to Taliesin. Frank Lloyd Wright's home, studio, and architectural school, built into a Driftless hillside above the Wisconsin River. Wright began the building in 1911 on land his maternal family had homesteaded since the 1860s; he expanded and rebuilt it across decades, including after two devastating fires; he lived and worked here until his death in 1959. UNESCO World Heritage Site (2019). Walk the grounds. The horizontal lines of the house continue the lines of the surrounding ridgelines. The local limestone in the walls comes from a quarry visible from the kitchen. The whole place is unintelligible apart from its landscape. Prairie-style architecture is a Driftless-shaped response to Driftless terrain.

↓ is contemporaneous with

Drive northwest to Coon Valley and Norskedalen Nature & Heritage Center. The Driftless coulees were settled in the mid-19th century by Norwegian immigrants; Coon Valley remains among the most identifiably Norwegian-American communities in the United States. Norskedalen's Skumsrud Heritage Farm reconstructs an 1850s immigrant homestead — log cabin, stabbur, granary, sauna — translocated from coulee-country original sites. The same valley is also the location of the 1933 Coon Valley Project: the first large-scale watershed restoration in the United States, run by the Soil Conservation Service and Aldo Leopold, where contour strip-cropping and integrated farm-watershed planning were pioneered. Two layers of Driftless cultural inheritance, in one place: Norwegian immigrant family-farm tradition, and the federal-academic-farmer partnership that built the modern American soil-conservation toolkit.

↓ informs

Pause and acknowledge Aldo Leopold. Forester, ecologist, conservationist; the country's first professor of game management (University of Wisconsin, 1933); author of *A Sand County Almanac*, posthumously published 1949. The 1933 Coon Valley Project at the previous step was Leopold's most consequential field-applied work. The land ethic he later articulated — 'a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise' — was a Driftless-shaped intellectual response to a Driftless-shaped landscape. Modern Driftless agriculture, modern American conservation ethics, and the regenerative agriculture movement that Organic Valley represents at scale all stand on this man's land ethic.

↓ is read in

Drive east to Ridgeway, Wisconsin, to the Ridgeway Pine Relict State Natural Area. Ninety-seven acres protecting one of the southernmost surviving stands of native eastern white pine in the upper Midwest. These pines have been here continuously since the post-glacial cool period 10,000+ years ago — survivors of a climate the surrounding upper Midwest no longer supports, persisting in the cool sandstone-walled gorges of the Driftless while the broader regional climate warmed beyond their tolerance. The forest below the canopy is correspondingly cool-relict: Canada yew, mountain maple, hemlock-affinity ferns. Stand in the gorge. The temperature drops perceptibly. This is not a representative Driftless forest — it is the precise place a Driftless visitor can stand in 10,000 years of continuous post-glacial ecology.

↓ drains into

End at the Mississippi River. Drive to Wyalusing State Park or, on the Iowa side, to Pikes Peak State Park — both sit on bluffs above the confluence with the Wisconsin River. Below: 240,000+ acres of Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge stretching 261 miles down the river corridor. Forty percent of all North American migratory waterfowl move through this corridor each year. The Driftless ends here, at the river that has been cutting the western edge of this bioregion for hundreds of thousands of years. Stand on the bluff at sunset. The river below is the same river the Ho-Chunk fished, the same river Wright watched from Taliesin, the same river Leopold's contour-cropped fields drain into. The trail's whole logic is in motion: the cooperative agriculture, the restored reserve, the Indigenous continuity, the architectural lineage, the immigrant heritage, the survivor forest — all of it draining, in the end, to this river. The Driftless is the goldmine American regenerative agriculture has been quietly built on for a century. The directory's job is to make it findable.