The Driftless and Its Rivers: A Reckoning

The Driftless Area was spared by the glaciers. While the ice sheets that shaped most of the upper Midwest ground everything flat, this corner of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois was left untouched — its ancient valleys intact, its bedrock exposed, its springs still running cold and clear from aquifers that have been filtering water through limestone for thousands of years.

The result is a landscape unlike anything else in the region. Deep coulees and ridge-top prairies. Trout streams that run cold even in August. Caves and sinkholes and disappearing creeks that reappear miles away as springs. A biological diversity that reflects the region's role as a refugium — a place where species survived the ice ages and have persisted ever since.

It is also a landscape under pressure.

Agricultural runoff — nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment — enters the karst system through sinkholes and fractured bedrock, bypassing the natural filtration that would occur in other geologies. What goes into the ground here can emerge in a spring or a well within hours. The cold-water streams that support native brook trout and rare aquatic invertebrates are warming as land cover changes and groundwater is drawn down.

And yet the Driftless is also a place of extraordinary conservation energy. Landowners who have farmed these valleys for generations and understand, viscerally, what is at stake. Organizations like the Driftless Area Land Conservancy and Trout Unlimited working reach by reach to restore stream banks and reduce runoff. A regional identity rooted in the particularity of this place — its light, its topography, its seasons.

The reckoning the title refers to is not a verdict. It is an accounting — an honest look at what we have, what we are losing, and what it would take to keep it. The Driftless does not need to be saved from the outside. It needs the people who love it to act like it.