Glacial Ridge Adventure

The idea was to get out of town for a few days and explore some of the most beautiful landscapes Minnesota has to offer—the ones in Pope, Swift, and Kandiyohi Counties.

What? Come again?

Clearly, I'm not talking about the Boundary Waters or the North Woods here. I'm talking about the Glacial Ridge Trail Scenic Byway, which zigs and zags down gravel roads through grassy hills that don't support marketable crops and have been put into environmental set-aside programs or purchased by the Nature Conservancy. 

The byway passes lakes and sloughs not attractive enough to have been invaded by cottages and second homes but appealing to waterfowl and to the passing connoisseur of landscapes. We saw sheep and cows and horses occasionally, but very little corn.

To get a general idea of the region I'm referring to, just draw a straight line from Sibley State Park (north of Willmar) to Glacial Lakes State Park (south of Starbuck). We reserved a campsite at Sibley for one night and a second one at Glacial Lakes for the following night. According to Google maps, you can get from one park to the other in half an hour. But we followed the "Scenic Byway" signs down a labyrinth of gravel roads, stopping often to admire the scenery, and it took us all morning.

If you're planning to make the trip, I would recommend downloading the Glacial Ridge Scenic Byway brochure. It identifies the various natural and historic sites you'll be passing by and helps to alleviate such anxious existential questions as "What am I doing surrounded by swamps in the middle of nowhere?"

I think we ought to commend whoever published that brochure, which we referred to time and again during the two days we were wandering the prairie countryside. The motive for producing such publications is usually commercial; the ads pay for the printing. But during our tour of the countryside we didn't pass a single car. So perhaps it wasn't money well spent.

Or maybe the weather was keeping tourists away. Winds were gusting to 35 mph, and temperatures crept up into the low nineties.

Little-known fact: high winds make a landscape more attractive, because they create a sense of whirring animation and they also rustle the leaves, which then bulk out, shimmer, and expose their light and sometimes silvery undersides.

A few swans

Another little-known fact: any driving tour becomes more interesting if you're looking for birds. When you come upon a God-forsaken slough thick with mud, you comb the opposite shore with your binoculars—there might be a bittern lurking in the reeds!  You endure a mile of shadowy oak forest by stopping from time to time to listen for the ethereal song of a thrush. And who knows? There might be a scarlet tanager lolling on a branch nearby.

The woods and fields were full of chattering house wrens, redstarts, and yellow warblers. Flocks of soaring pelicans were a common (and majestic) sight, and we saw plenty of trumpeter swans and egrets, too. I had three species on my "hope to see today" list, but only saw one of them: a dicksissel.

Our lone dicksissel

But the chief glory of the glacial ridge country is the landscape itself, shrouded in early-summer green: bare hills covered in a carpet of grasses, ridges thick with oaks, small kettle lakes that look like they were poured into the hollows of the countryside yesterday.

The only person we spoke with during our morning ramble was a young woman just getting into her truck in a parking lot near the side of the road. I pulled in to say "hi" and noticed the lettering on the door of the truck: Nature Conservancy— Arlington VA, Cushing MN.

I mentioned how much we were enjoying the countryside and she agreed wholeheartedly.

"But there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get into these marvelous tracts of land," I said.

"Have you been to the Ordway Prairie Overlook?" she asked.

Ordway Prairie

"We've been there on other occasions," I said. "But I never saw a trail down into it."

"There isn't a formal trail, but you're free to hike anywhere. There are lots of deer trails."

Prairie Woods ELC

Two of the best places to get out into the countryside on foot lie at either end of the route I'm describing. The Prairie Woods Environmental Learning Center, just south of Sibley State Park, offers several miles of trails, and the Kensington Runestone Museum,  a few miles northeast of the town of Kensington itself, has twelve miles of trails through a variety of habitats and also has a small but attractive (and air-conditioned) museum that looks like it was completed only a few weeks ago.

Campsite 30

But the bests trails we took out through the woods and onto the ridges were at the state parks. I had reserved a campsite at Glacial Lakes State Park facing directly out into the fields from alongside the trailhead, and we took a cool morning hike across the countryside. But not before partaking of our early morning coffee, and also chatting with a woman from the DNR who arrived in a silver pick-up truck and stopped by to chat before starting her day. In one hand she held a long tube with a nozzle connected to a plastic tank of herbicides that was hanging off her back.

"What are you two doing up so early?" she said as she approached, addressing us as if we were old friends.

"Best part of the day," I said.

She told us she'd driven down from Brainerd to eradicate some burdock and thistles out on in the fields.

"We've cut down a lot of trees around here," she told us. "Last year, you couldn't even see that slough over there. The ash trees are really on the way out. We're just removing them early."

"Do you use fire?" I asked.

"Oh, we're burning all the time," she said. "But not today, with winds up to 40 mph, and a high in the mid-nineties. It's going to get nasty."

"I hope you've got your tick protection on," I said.

"I have clothes for ticks, but these aren't them," she said. "I've gotten every tick disease there is, up in Brainerd. But there aren't any deer ticks around here."

Park maintenance woman driving through the field

Our hike was one of the highlights of the trip. Winds were already building, the views were fantastic, we could easily have been in Iceland or Wales, but with silos in the distance rather than village church steeples. And the trailside plants looked unusually lush amid the morning shadows.

A clay-colored sparrow

It had been too hot to make a fire the previous evening, but we enjoyed a brief but vigorous chorus from a nearby pack of coyotes as the sun went down and a midnight display of twenty or thirty fireflies scattered around the woods and slough down the hill from our site. The stars were also grand.