by Robert Root
“The Kettle Moraine has no borders,” Laurie Allman asserts, in Far from Tame: Reflections from the Heart of a Continent. “There is no precise moment when one can be said to pass into or out of it.” Instead, she says, it “runs in a snaking and discontinuous line.”
When preservation of the Kettle Moraine as a geological feature of the Wisconsin landscape was first proposed, it was envisioned as an unbroken state forest, something that, like the Ice Age Trail, one might walk through from end to end without ever leaving, but the state was unable and often unwilling to push for that vision. The Kettle Moraine State Forest today consists of a large Northern Unit, a large Southern Unit, and three small units in between, Pike Lake, Loew Lake, and Lapham Peak. The separation of the units has been made permanent by the development of communities around and in between them. The Ice Age Trail passes through every unit, and Mickelson and his coauthors divide its path through the Kettle Moraine into northern, middle, and southern sections. In Waukesha County the Monches, Merton, Hartland, and Delafield segments are assigned to the Middle Kettle Moraine, and the Lapham Peak, Waterville, Scuppernong, Eagle, and Stony Ridge segments to the southern Kettle Moraine.
From the southern end of the Delafield segment on, Sue and I will be hiking in terrain somewhat more familiar to us. All the Kettle Moraine State Forest units have other trails in addition to the Ice Age Trail, some for summer hiking and winter skiing, some for mountain biking, some for horseback riding, and we’ve walked such trails in Lapham Peak and the Southern Unit. Often, in our early hikes, the trail we followed would cross the Ice Age Trail and we would wonder what it was and why it was different from any of the color-coded loops we were walking. Now we’ll be crossing those other trails and adding a disoriented feeling of familiarity to the sense of discovery the Ice Age Trail often provides. We’ll also have to broaden our viewpoint. From here on we’ll have to take in not only the Ice Age Trail but the Kettle Moraine as well.
5
On the second weekend in March, on a gorgeous, sunny day with temperatures in the low sixties, we hike the Lapham Peak segment of the Ice Age Trail. Its northern trailhead occupies a corner of a vast, open, grassy area atop a steep rise a hundred feet higher than the surface of a small lake half a mile west. The trail wanders across rolling terrain beneath a uniform field of brown grasses and a pale blue sky, passes an isolated parcel of oak trees, and crosses toward more extensive woods on a slope to the east.
Laurie Allman, who wandered the area in November, observed that “with the leaves mostly down it is easier to see the contours of the land that make the region a showcase for the work of the last ice age.” Until the foliage thickens, we’ll find that statement true.
We wind our way up into a stretch of woods with an under-growth-free floor and a sense of spaciousness. From a ridge we spot an observation tower in the distance, rising above Lapham Peak itself. Back again in the grasses we pass preserved savanna, century-old white oaks, and restored prairie, all of it still winter dormant but full of wildflower promise for the warmer seasons. Our meandering course makes the grassland seem more extensive and broad than it is, almost as if we’re walking across presettlement prairie early settlers would recognize. The trail turns east and eventually dips toward wetlands, the hummocky shallows still ice-coated in places but the ponds open water. On one large pond two geese float serenely. Memories of the landscape surrounding Muir’s Fountain Lake flash across my mind. A long, tilting boardwalk takes us across the wetlands around the pond, and then we enter the forested stretch of the Lapham Peak segment.
The trail is level here, circling a large pond fringed with cattails and marshland and a viewing platform jutting out on one side. We angle back into the trees, the forest floor open and the trees relatively young and widely spaced, and climb the western slope of Lapham Peak. Soon the trees give way and our view of the wooden tower opens up. It’s forty-five feet high, rising above the leafless oaks that surround it. The tower and the trees stand starkly against the empty blue of the sky, above the scruffy brown grasses.
We’ve been up the tower before. On one of our earliest outings in Wisconsin, we wanted to stand on the highest point in Waukesha County and compare its 1,233 feet of elevation with the 14,000-foot elevations of the peaks we’d climbed a few months before in Colorado. The difference in vistas was obvious, of course, and Lapham Peak couldn’t inspire anything like the awe that Longs Peak had. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t have to. Now I have a richer sense of where I am and what I should be looking for; namely, the distinguishing features that identify my home ground—the drumlins formed by the Lake Michigan Lobe visible to the east toward Waukesha, the drumlins formed by the Green Bay Lobe to the west, the flat bed of Glacial Lake Scuppernong to the southwest. The “peak” itself is a glacial hill, and roughly twenty miles off to the north, if the day is particularly clear, it’s possible to see the basilica on the top of Holy Hill, a moulin kame in Washington County a hundred feet higher than Lapham Peak. (A “moulin” is a vertical shaft in a glacier through which debris spills to form a conical hill, or “kame.”) With binoculars I can usually locate the basilica’s towers, even through midafternoon haze, but picking out the drumlins is more challenging now that so much of the terrain is tree-covered—I rely on occasional farmlands to make their shapes more visible. It’s hard to imagine away the visible evidence of the twenty-first century when we stand at the top of the Lapham Peak tower, but if we try we might be able to glean a sense of our glacial origins.
I was drawn to Lapham Peak, even before I knew about the Ice Age Trail, because of Increase Allen Lapham, one of the most fascinating figures in early Wisconsin history. He had a relentless curiosity and a wide-ranging intelligence, and his accomplishments are impressive in their breadth and scope. Considering what he contributed to botany, geology, zoology, history, archaeology, engineering, surveying, education, conservation, and meteorology—I hope I haven’t overlooked any area of his interests—it’s startling to realize that he was essentially self-taught in all those fields.
I also feel a personal connection, though in reality there is none. Lapham was born in Palmyra, New York, in 1811, the son of a canal contractor. At the age of thirteen he was employed cutting stone for the locks of the Erie Barge Canal in Lockport, New York. That’s where my personal connection comes in—and reveals its remoteness: Lockport is the town where my parents met and married and where I was born, none of which would have happened if locks hadn’t been constructed at that section of the canal.
Lapham’s experience with canals brought him to Milwaukee in 1836, just before Wisconsin Territory separated from Michigan. He’d been hired as the chief engineer on the Milwaukee and Rock River Canal, intended to skirt lake traffic around Chicago to the Mississippi. The canal plan fell through but Lapham stayed on, married, and settled in Milwaukee. For nearly forty years he was active in the social and cultural life of Wisconsin: the Milwaukee Female Seminary (which later grew into the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), Carroll College (now University) in Waukesha, the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Young Men’s Society (whose book collection grew into the Milwaukee Public Library), the Milwaukee Public High School, the Natural History Society, and the Milwaukee Public Museum—all these are indebted to his energy and intellect. For a man with no formal schooling—his doctorate from Amherst College in 1860 was honorary—he seems to have had great zeal for learning and for opening doors to knowledge for others.
Lapham’s publications were varied and essential. In 1836, the year he arrived, he published the first scientific pamphlet in Wisconsin, A Catalogue of Plants and Shells Found in the Vicinity of Milwaukee on the West Side of Lake Michigan. In 1844 he published A Geographical and Topographical Description of Wisconsin, the first book about the territory, later titled in the second edition, Wisconsin: Its Geography and Topography, History, Geology, and Mineralogy; Together with Brief Sketches of Its Antiquities, Nat
ural History, Soil, Productions, Population, and Government. It was widely distributed and is credited with spurring emigration to the territory. As early as 1836, as deputy surveyor for the new Wisconsin Territory, he surveyed effigy and burial mounds throughout the region, and in 1855 the Smithsonian Institution published The Antiquities of Wisconsin as Surveyed and Described, Lapham’s thorough review of the existing earthworks he had encountered and recorded. Worried about the potential “loss of those records of an ancient people,” he argued, “Now is the time, when the country is yet new, to take the necessary measures for their preservation.” In the end Lapham’s book served as a catalog of what would be destroyed by cultivation and settlement in the century and a half since the book was published. To me, what Lapham’s Antiquities still records is its author’s powers of rational speculation and, even more strongly, his powers of foresight, both found throughout his writings.
In 1867 Lapham, J. G. Knapp, and H. Crocker published their Report on the Disastrous Effect of the Destruction of Forest Trees, Now Going On So Rapidly in the State of Wisconsin. The epigraph for the report comes from Man and Nature by George Perkins Marsh: “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.” Lapham and his coauthors warned that removing the forests would have a detrimental impact on the environment, making summers hotter, winters colder, winds stronger, ground dryer, springs and rivers more likely to dry up, floods more extensive, “the soil on sloping hills washed away; loose sands blown over the country preventing cultivation; . . . the productiveness of the soil diminished”; and thunderstorms, hail, and rains more frequent and more intense. I don’t know to what extent the ecological history of Wisconsin since their report confirms the accuracy of these predictions, but certainly Aldo Leopold’s account of the sand county farm he first occupied bears witness to some of the effects they forecast. The report also foreshadows the Dust Bowl and perhaps our own era of climate change and harks back to the history of the Muirs’ Fountain Lake Farm. It perhaps confirms a tendency in people to concentrate on the promise of immediate rewards rather than on the potential for eventual catastrophe.
Lapham was a thorough record keeper. This thoroughness extended to his observations about the weather. According to Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes, in Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham, soon after Lapham’s arrival in Milwaukee he began “calculating the length and severity of Wisconsin winters by recording the dates each year when the Milwaukee River froze over and thawed.” He installed his instruments on the west shore of the river, “little more than a block east of the Lapham home,” and recorded temperatures, barometric pressures, snow and rain fall totals, and high and low water levels of both Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River. When Lapham was away from home, his wife and sons continued to add to his records.
The results of this methodical recordkeeping, like Aldo Leopold’s phenological records on his sand county surroundings, led Lapham to speculate on the practical possibilities of weather observation. In 1850 he unsuccessfully urged the Wisconsin legislature to establish a state weather bureau. But twenty years later, in 1870, Congress approved Lapham’s proposal, thereby establishing the National Weather Bureau. The United States Army Signal Corps created a system of twenty-four observer network stations. Signals sent from Pikes Peak in Colorado were received by telegraph at the station on Government Hill in Wisconsin and relayed to headquarters in Chicago. Lapham wired the first published national weather forecast on November 8, 1870, reporting high winds in Cheyenne and Omaha and predicting, “Barometer falling and thermometer rising at Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Rochester. High winds probable along the lakes.” A marker commemorating this first national weather forecast was erected at Lapham Peak in 1955, and I stop to read it every time I visit the tower. And each time I hear the radio telling me the National Weather Service station in Sullivan has issued some warning or other—Sullivan is a little farther west of Lapham Peak—I think of Increase Lapham and what he accomplished.
In 1875 Lapham died of a heart attack in a rowboat on Oconomowoc Lake, in northwest Waukesha County, shortly after he’d completed writing his final scientific paper, “Oconomowoc and Other Small Lakes of Wisconsin Considered in Reference to Their Capacity for Fish Production.” After nearly four decades in Wisconsin, he apparently never tired of learning about the state and passing on what he learned. I admire that about Increase Lapham. He certainly merits being commemorated as a conservationist along with Muir, Leopold, Schurz, and Powell, not simply with a sign but with a state park. Like Muir, Leopold, and Derleth, he reminds me that, wherever we are, there is always something more to learn about what we make our home ground.
And so I try to pay attention as the Ice Age Trail descends a long, steep set of stairs on the east side of the tower hill. The woods close in around us, thicker and denser than on the western slope. We trudge a long way through deep woods, the path often narrow, continually rising and falling, bending and turning; we can seldom see far ahead or far behind or very deep into the trees and shrubbery on either side. Occasionally we cross a few of the other, wider park trails used for winter snowshoeing and skiing and I strain to recognize them as ones we’ve been on before. At times we notice kettles below us off the trail, a few of them dry, many of them still ice covered, a blur of white at the bottom of brown, leaf-coated slopes. Near the eastern boundary of the park we begin to meander south, reaching ever-lower elevations until we move out of the close packed trees and onto a terrace above a flat floodplain, with good views of wetlands further east. We pass through an open meadow, with an occasional sprawling bur oak that stops me in my tracks from admiration. I wonder from their size if any are older than Leopold’s Good Oak.
We soon reach the trailhead on US 18, where Marlin Johnson took his glacial geology class to view the south end of that glacial meltwater channel. Scuppernong Creek flows through the channel now, a spring-fed “underfit stream” too small to have originally cut it. I think about the Scuppernong Creek floodplain on one side of Lapham Peak, the restored prairie, oak opening, and savanna on the other side, the tower on the hilltop, and the flourishing forest we’ve wound our way through, and I realize that being able to hold it all in my mind means I’m getting closer to being at home in it.
6
One thing I don’t keep in mind often enough is the difference between the Kettle Moraine as a geological feature and the Kettle Moraine State Forest as an official natural resource. Established in 1937, the state forest, in all its units, has distinct borders, but the geological entity, as Laurie Allman observed, hasn’t. When I leave the Kettle Moraine State Forest I’m still in the Kettle Moraine itself. In the same way, though it’s handy to break the Ice Age Trail into identifiable sections with distinct trailheads to mark beginnings and endings—handy, that is, for those who prefer to hike the forty-five miles in Waukesha County or the thousand-plus miles in Wisconsin in short spurts rather than in one continuous march—the Ice Age terrain the trail traces is vaster than its outline in our hiking atlas. When someone writing about New Jersey or New England mentions the extent of the Wisconsin Glaciation there, I’m grateful for the reminder: the Wisconsin Glaciation wasn’t just for Wisconsin. If I grant myself a moon’s-eye view of the northern hemisphere more than a hundred centuries ago, I gain a richer perspective on what the trail we walk is connected to.
Here and now, of course, my perspective is most often narrowly focused on the ground where I place my hiking shoes, and my peripheral vision extends no farther than the edges of the trail. Even so, as I follow the Ice Age Trail through both the geological and the governmental Kettle Moraines, I continually encounter cues that send me across time, in connections both tenuous and temporal.
The temporal comes in flashes of memory from places we’ve hiked before. In our first year in Wisconsin, looking for nearby hiking trails, we were drawn first to Lapham Peak and then to trails in the Southern Unit of the Kett
le Moraine State Forest. The John Muir Trail in northern Walworth County, popular with mountain bikers in dry, warm weather, introduced us to the forests, ridges, and kettles of the Kettle Moraine. We took it in March, when the leaves were down, the contours exposed, and the trail too muddy or intermittently snowy and icy for bikers. Other than the trickiness of the footing, I remember most vividly the view from high on a narrow ridge into a leatherleaf bog at the bottom of a large kettle and reveled in the seclusion along the trail.
The trail had originally been intended by the Sierra Club to be mostly undeveloped. The former Kettle Moraine trails coordinator Ray Hajewski explains, in Candice Gaukel Andrews’s Beyond the Trees, that it was meant to be “a walk through the wild woods. If a tree fell down across the trail, so be it. You’d walk over it or around it.” At first, it could be imagined as a trail someone like John Muir would want to walk; but over time, to accommodate cross-country skiers and mountain bikers, all the trails in the southern Kettle Moraine State Forest were widened and rerouted, and their crowded use sorely altered the terrain. Some careful redesigning has since ameliorated some of the damage, but as any hiker who has walked a trail shared with bikers knows, the pleasure of a walk in the woods is ferociously detonated by the headlong rush of a mountain biker hurtling a rise or exploding out of a curve—bikers usually ride the woods for speed and challenge, not for solitude and serenity. Once the ground dried out and the snow evaporated, we avoided most loops on the John Muir Trail.
A year later we hiked the Emma Carlin Trail in southeastern Jefferson County, again too early for bikers, and we were entirely alone on the trail. We started out from a glacial sand plain and walked through hardwood forests to a vista over Lower Spring Lake and a potential sighting of distant Holy Hill, but I didn’t appreciate sufficiently what we were seeing or realize that, because the Ice Age Trail skirts both the John Muir Trail and the Emma Carlin Trail, I had learned where the trail and the Kettle Moraine both go when they leave Waukesha County.
