The Ice Age National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin is now a NPS unit, so I will create a new entry for it. The trail will link most Ice Age National Scientific Reserves in the area, which are NPS affiliates. The Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail runs from Montana to the Pacific Ocean. I’m keeping this post about all three together here.

Wisconsin’s scenic trail curves around the edge of the last ice age glacier 26,000-10,000 years ago, which covered the north near Lake Superior and east near Lake Michigan with a massive ice sheet. The trail extends from near the confluence of the Mississippi and St Croix Rivers east towards Michigan’s upper peninsula, south to Madison and back up the Door Peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan. South and west of the trail contains both an area that had glaciers before that and a ‘driftless’ area without signs of glaciation. The glaciers stripped the earth of many layers of soil, leaving a flat land of lakes with short forests. The Wisconsin Dells, with its horizontally carved lines in the rock, is at the edge of the last glacier and the driftless area, where the ice sheets pressed and cut into landscapes that had not been glaciated before. From there the Wisconsin River flows down through the gentle driftless area to meet the Mississippi near Effigy Mounds. Frank Lloyd Wright build Taliesin in the driftless area, which reminded him of the verdant rolling hills of Wales, which were similarly carved by glaciers.

The massive glaciers ran west along the Canadian border all the way to the Pacific, past Glacier and Lakes Roosevelt (see photo) and Chelan. The ice covered what is now Seattle and down between Olympic and Mt Rainier. The floods geologic trail refers to the stretch from Grant-Kohr’s Ranch and Big Hole Battlefield in western Montana, through Idaho’s panhandle, across the giant flood plains between the Grand Coulee Dam and the Nez Perce park, down past the Whitman Mission, down the Columbia River Gorge to Fort Vancouver, up the Willamette Valley and finally down past Lewis & Clark’s fort through the wide mouth of the Columbia.

The simple geologic explanation for the vast floodplains and dramatic gorges, is that the ice melted, repeatedly collapsing ice dams between mountains, releasing huge waves of water and reforming the landscape. Much of the rich farming soil we depend on was placed there in a natural climate change event. Washington state produces billions of dollars worth of produce annually on those floodplains, including apples, milk, potatoes, wheat, beef, hops, hay, cherries, grapes and onions.

What some folks don’t seem to understand is that while the end of the last ice age was ‘sudden’ in geologic terms, man-made climate change is exponentially more abrupt. Imagine a deer seeing a hiker slowly approaching on foot and choosing to flee by jumping into the woods. Now imagine a deer seeing a truck approaching at 75 miles an hour and not having time to respond. That’s the difference between natural and man-made climate change. We don’t have time to stare into the headlights.