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By D.R. Martin
Special to the Star Tribune
Among the most invigorating aspects of tagging after a passionate tour guide is that sudden epiphany (for a wink, at least) that "Yes, by golly, this is absolutely one of the neatest things that ever was!"
That reaction came to me recently, high on a rocky trail in Devil's Lake State Park, near Baraboo, Wis. Not only had I just hauled my sorry, winter-flabby legs up 400-odd feet through a vast rock field on a challenging trail, but the sky had darkened, lightning flashed in the distance, and a steady light drizzle began to spatter down on us. The soapy, slippery, angular stone trail we'd trod on the way up was sure to be much more slippery treading back down. To enhance the mood, turkey buzzards wheeled overhead.
I have to confess that on the way up, I had a few of those "What-am-I-doing-here?" moments. At least one other 40-plus person in our group looked to be having similar thoughts. But our guide, Paul Herr, allowed nothing but enthusiasm for this improbable geologic wonderland - set smack-dab in the rolling Wisconsin countryside.
Herr, a professional geologist turned tourism entrepreneur, simply doesn't accept apathy as a valid response to all the questions and facts that he peppers you with. Nor does his well-rehearsed team of geology-student guides.
Doubt is a fine reaction to a Herr factoid. Pugnacity, super. Amazement goes over well. So does the aptly uttered, "Wow, I didn't realize!" There were just five of us with him that rainy spring day on the Balanced Rock Trail. But everyone had to do their bit. Herr cast several of us in the role of his favorite character: the Skeptic.
"D.R.," the geologist said, his eyes glittering behind wire-rimmed specs, "you're standing at the top of a mile-thick layer of quartzite. It looks and feels like pink glass. Rock climbers say that if you can climb the slippery quartzite at Devil's Lake, you can climb anything. Scientists believe that the Baraboo Quartzite was once beach sand when Wisconsin lay on the edge of the continent.
"Now, D.R., do you believe this bit about the quartzite starting out as beach sand?"
Taking my cue, I grinned and got right into the spirit of things: "Well, Paul, it sure doesn't look much like a sandy beach to me. A lot of pinkish rocks and boulders, I'd say. Nope, sounds pretty improbable."
Herr grinned right back "Well, if we broke off a piece of the quartzite and looked at it under a microscope, we'd see beautiful, round quartz grains of sand. So maybe this was a beach that got squeezed and heated until the sand grains stuck together."
"Sorry," I disagreed, "still doesn't look like a beach to me."
"Ever been to a beach, D.R.?"
The others tittered.
"Sure," I said.
Herr looked like a wolf about to descend on a lamb chop. "OK, imagine we're at a beach in Florida and you're knee deep in water. Look down and you'll see a pattern in the sand."
"Ripples."
"Right."
"Now, what if I could show you ripples frozen into this quartzite that's 1.7 billion years old? You see that slab of quartzite over there, covered with perfectly formed ripples? A few miles from here they have a quarry where they've exposed acres of ripple marks in quartzite."
Terrain explained
Then Herr pointed out how perfect the ripples were. Nothing big enough was alive on earth 1.7 billion years ago to wiggle through the sand and leave marks. Just bacteria. If you had been there and opted for a holiday at the beach, you would have needed sunblock with a rating of SPF 1000, at least. No ozone yet. Besides, the atmosphere would have been poisonous.
The quartzite ridge on which we stood is shaped like a 5-by-25-mile canoe, with the town of Baraboo in the middle. The park's a short drive south of Baraboo, on the canoe's south gunnel.
"The quartzite started out as a flat layer about 1 mile thick," Herr said, as we were driving out of the park, time-tripping toward the age of glaciers. "About 1.5 billion years ago, it got crunched up and folded into the shape of an upside-down U with the ends pinched off. And that's what makes the Baraboo Hills one of America's geological wonders."
Geology students and researchers come from all over the Midwest just to have a gander at the Baraboo Hills. It's been the subject of upwards of 200 academic theses. One of Herr's guides used to work the Grand Canyon. He felt that Arizona's national park was more scenic, but Devil's Lake was more interesting geologically.
The flesh-ripping index
Devil's Lake State Park is the most popular State Park in Wisconsin, attracting 1.5 million visitors each year. The lake itself is picture-postcard pretty, set under richly forested 500-foot cliffs - quartzite cliffs. Its name comes from the Ho Chunk Indians, whose Thunderbird gods killed all but one of the evil Mantou spirits. That surviving Mantou, Ho Chunk legend says, lives in the lake. Thus, whites called it "Devil's Lake." Some Ho Chunks, Herr told us, still refuse to visit.
Herr had been leading geology tours around the Baraboo Hills for a number of years, for the fun of it. A couple of years ago, he realized that no one - let alone a professional geologist - offered regular natural-history tours of the area.
"This," he stated in a press release, "was like having the pyramids in your back yard and not showing them to people."
Whether the Baraboo Hills are on a par with the Pyramids as a tourist attraction is debatable. But it's a fact that Herr and his gregarious, sharp-witted guides tell compelling and entertaining tales of Wisconsin's ancient history.
The tour we took with Herr that rainy afternoon wasn't entirely characteristic. Usually Herr and his guides start their Time Travel Tours in the geological "yesterday," at the end of the last Ice Age, an eye blink of about 13,000 years ago. That's where we headed after picking our way gingerly down the slippery Balanced Rock Trail.
Herr drove us down out of the Baraboo Hills, off a main road, and into a fenced field occupied by a few soggy horses. We darted through pouring rain and into an open horse barn.
Why take us to a horse barn next to an ordinary pasture? Because right behind the barn is a terminal moraine, a little hill that signified the end of the last glacier's southward march.
If it had been a nice summer day at the end of the last ice age, Herr told us, painting a vivid image, meltwater would be roaring off the glacier into Glacial lake Wisconsin, which stretched off into the distance. The lake would have been milky white, because it contained so much finely ground rock.
Humans were living around here, too, hunting mammoths and giant beavers.
"OK, mammoth hunter," Herr said, fixing a stare on a college-aged woman. "Would you have stayed here by the glacier in the winter?"
She shrugged. "I don't know."
"I need you to he macho," Herr said encouragingly. "Say 'Yes.'"
"Yeah, then, OK, I'd stick around for the winter."
Herr shook his head regretfully, as if to say: Ah, the foolishness of youth.
"I'm afraid that wasn't a wise choice," he said. "It wasn't just cold by the glacier, it was very windy. You see, the ice surface becomes super cold, and the air directly on top of the ice becomes cold, too. And cold air is heavy, like the air spilling out of your freezer on a humid summer day, like a waterfall.
"The cold air on the glacier wants to roll downhill, too. Only it has 1,000 miles to pick up speed. You didn't have a windchill index, you had a flesh-ripping index. Where we're standing right now, the winds might have reached 200 miles per hour. Like a sandblaster. If you were a mammoth hunter standing here, the wind would have stripped the flesh off your bones in 30 seconds."
Parfrey's Glen
The next morning, on my own, I drove a few miles east of Devil's Lake to check out another very special corner of the state park - Parfrey's Glen. Herr had encouraged me to go. "You won't believe it," he told me.
I didn't have the benefit of Herr's running commentary, but the beauty of the place floored me. I hiked up through the woods, close by a burbling brook. Then the formations of quartzite began springing up around the path, gnarly and characterful, with trees and shrubs clinging to them.
Before I knew it, I was at the bottom of a shadowy gorge straight from a 19th-century German Romantic's fevered imagination. This was a rugged, craggy glade in which Rhinemaidens and wagnerian gods might have cavorted. Carl Maria von Weber - the great proto-Romantic composer - could have set an opera here with brave hunters, golden-locked maidens and noble stags.
My reverie didn't last long. I could hear a burble of a different sort approaching from downstream - a large gaggle of high school kids chattering loudly. And who should be at the head of the column, elucidating passionately, but Baraboo's resident "evangeologist?"
"Our tours are tours with an attitude," Herr had told me when we said goodbye the day before. "We want to shake people up a little. I wouldn't do this if we couldn't stretch people's brains."
D.R. Martin is a freelance writer and photographer in Minneapolis.
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