afternoon i'd like to welcome

you to q public library. we're set up a little differently today and some of you saw that in the email that we sent. but we have someone from c-span, book tv, who is doing this event. so that makes it kind of interesting, a little different for us today. we have scott spoolman us. this is a return visit for him. he's been at our library and talked about wisconsin state parks about four years ago. i think maybe three or four here. and today he's here to talk about the book called wisconsin water, which is about the lakes, the rivers and the waterfalls. wisconsin, he's going to give you a tour of the state, which is great afterwards, we do have

books that you can purchase and have signed and i really don't like to mention it, but christmas is coming. it is something just keeps in the back of your mind to make that easy right? so would you join me and welcome. well, thank you and good afternoon. what a great group of people. nice to see you here today. as julia said, we we came three or four years ago to talk about state parks. back in those days, we like, i think, 30 some libraries around. the state and kiel truly was one of my favorites. so we were looking forward to, to being here again today visiting and so thanks again to julia and the staff here for making this. we're here to talk about my new book wisconsin waters, the ancient history of lakes rivers, waterfalls, published by the wisconsin historical society

press. and this book is in the same vein as that other book that oops, what happened there that julia mentioned the state the state parks, great wisconsin state parks, extraordinary of geology and natural and this book won a gold medal in a national book competition and it was a bestseller for the press. so they kindly were willing to take a chance on wisconsin waters. and this book also explores the geology and natural history of our state with using the state's waterways as entry points. and both of these books cover sites near kiel, as does a third book that i wrote back in 2018 called wisconsin rocks geologic sites guide to geologic sites, the badger state and. so we've spent a lot of time up in this part oth ste researching all three books, actually, and speaking of we.

and before we get started, i want to take minute to thank my wife, gail martinelli, here with us in the center there. she's my partner in this effort. and as in all that we do, and she gives me a great deal, help with ideas and research, photos and coaching and managing and so much more. so thank you, gail. that was nice. so i have fascinat b wisconsin's natural, its forests, fields and waters since i was about five when my older brother john took me on the first of many hikes in the woods and fields, our home town of cumberland, wisconsin, in the northwest corner of the state. and later we moved to hayward. and it wasn't long before john had me out in a canoe on the mekong river. and this this weather was the

first of many trips on the mekong. and that photo dates us, i guess might have been before there was color. i don't know. i quickly fell in love with and i proudly dedicated this book to my brother john. regarding wisconsin's excuse me, i lost my brother. so. but. regarding wisconsin's waterways, there's plenty to talk about water is so to all of us here in wisconsin as i summarized in the following reading from my books preference. tucked into a corner of the upper midwest, formed by two of the great lakes and bordered on the west side by north america's largest river, wisconsin is framed by waterways and rich in water features within its borders like 15,000 lakes, most

of them formed by the glaciers, some 10,000 years ago, the state is laced by more than 12,600 rivers and streams that trickle or surge over dozens of waterfalls that mesmerize us. so many visitors every year, each of wisconsin's waterways has a story to tell. and together these stories create a complex tapestry woven together in time and space by the flow of wisconsin since water's. oh well let's look into the book starting with the first chapter, which is a big picture kind of chapter, addressing questions like how did ocean full of water wind up on planet and how much that water is available to us and that availability question that's a real eye opener in my mind. this this slide help you to visualize the finite of water on

our planet this this largest globe here. oh i'm going to use this pointer here this largest globe in the upper corner represents all the water, the earth, including saltwater, which makes up the lion's share of this slightly smaller globe is all the freshwater, the free flowing freshwater, and then this tiniest little globe down here represents all the freshwater and streams, lakes, rivers in the in the world. so when you take away all salt water in the oceans, all the water frozen in glaciers and the earth's ice caps and all the water that's too deep underground to tap you wind up with one small fraction, 1%, a small fraction, 1% of the water that's available to all the world's plants, animals and 8 billion people. and my hope is that with an

awareness of the finite nature of our water, we'll be motivated to. protect this invaluable resource. another key part and another of the big picture is the immense frame for the geologic and natural history of our region. so this graphic starts way down. whoops, thank you for getting a way down here at the beginning of the earth's history. four and a half billion years ago and it winds way up through the eons to an important, unimportant called the cambrian period. this is life began to evolve diversify rapidly on the planet about 545 millioyears ago. and then it on up this graphic continue oup through the ages millions and millions years of evolution and mass extinctis including the arrival of the dinosaurs and the of the dinosaurs. all of recorded human could fit

inside. for the last 4000 years. out of the four and a half billion years of the earth's history, just a sliver on this graphic here. just a sliver. all the earths, all of human recorded history and a really important aspect about this is that for much its ancient history, the region that is now wisconsin was. you know early in the earth's history the crust of the earth was into several large pieces plates and they were jostled and moved around the planet driven by the intense heat, the earth's interior process, plate tectonics and the plate on which wisconsin roll called the north american plate in in precambrian time was south of the equator and it moved in kind of a curlicue fashion around like

that by 350 million years ago it had crossed the and was still moving north and then settled into its current position about 10 million years ago. and we're still moving, shifting roughly very, very slowly slowly. and the fact that wisconsin was tropical for so long explains, why we've discovered lots of evidence. in fact, right here in this part of the state for plants, plant and animal life in our state that was only could come from the tropics, as you'll see. and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a little while here. excuse me. mm hmm. all right. so beyond chapter one, the next four chapters in my book cover the four regions of the state that are sketched out here. and it's designed so that you

can read those four chapters in any in any order want you might want to reach chapter one first to get a review of or an introduction to the geology and natural history of our of our region. that's and then each regional chapter begins with a map like this one showing the sites be visited and an introduction to text in the text, giving a little bit more information about the region and that's followed by 4 to 6 sections per chapter each of which a waterway. so for a total of 19 waterways all across four chapters. so let's do a quick review. this is chapter two covering the northern highlands and it's iconic lakes as well as the the lakes shore and four key rivers, including brule river, shown

here chapter the northeastern ridges and lowlands, which will include the kiel area, certainly explores some enticing waterfall wells like this one on the wolf river over an anomaly county. the lake winnebago. uh, the hurricane marsh and the lakes around west. this is, this is a slide that shows. oops, i forgot. i'm sorry. the upper upper lake michigan shore, including these beautiful on the door county that that are quite famous and and then all right i'm sorry next chapter the southeastern glacial showcase covers lower lake michigan shore with dunes and other beautiful features and lake winnebago the hawken marsh and yarra lakes around madison.

this is a big voice called big springs and the arboretuin madison feeds. the lake winger is the smallest of the five lakes. and finally, chapter five covers the drift. this area, the south corner of the state with, its mysterious ancient rivers like the kickapoo here. can you see the canoeists? that photo there, they stick, paddle into view just as gail snapped that photo from up on the bluff this chapter also covers the lower wisconsin river devils lake and of course the vast valley of the mississippi river shown here and overlook nelson dewey state park park. bottom. let's delve a little deeper into the and go into a couple of these specific sites and we'll

at a destination that's a favorite for many people the shore of lake superior as as with each of my sites i tell the deep of how it was formed following that story with a travel guide that you can use to see evidence of history close up. so the the story of lake superior dates to an event called the mid rift about 1.1 billion years ago in which a great crevice formed a part of the ancient north america america. deep in deep in the mantle, a plume of magma or hot fluid rock had worked its way up to the surface, finding and crevices and prying them over a period of probably 25 million years. now check, this image, some of these the lakes are shown here, great lakes are shown just for reference. weren't here, of course, billion

years ago. but the rift area is shown in this brown tint here started down in kansas. they and worked its way up arcs through what would become the lake superior and then worked its way down into to michigan and possibly. and that rift spewed untold tons lava across this red tinted area here creating layer upon layer of a dense black rock called basalt underlies much of northern northwestern wisconsin and in what would become t lake superior basin. the land slowly subsided or sink due under its own weight into that zone of pliable, softer rock beneath the crust called the mantle. and this created a huge trough shaped trough shaped depression where lake superior is now

located located. the subsidence was due to the steadily increasing mass of basalt and other of rock, including the distinctive of lake superior sandstone shown here at big bay state park on madeleine island. this type of rock famously lines, the bayfield peninsula and the apostle islands, and it's stained reddish brown due to the presence of iron in that rock. oh oh another geologic process affected the northern highlands was the creation of the wisconsin dome represented by this green tinted area here in north central wisconsin. and that whole area was just raised up close to a billion years ago by a geologic forces that were related to the rifting and the subsequent it became that part of the state became elevated just enough to to make

it sloped gently away from the center in all directions. this is important because it determines the flow of the waters up there they flowed tend tend to flow either from the center either to the east, the south to the west. and yet another geological event that shaped the lake superior shore region ocrred somewhere between hundred million and a billion years ago. and when primitive north american continent collided another continent at its southeastern edge, this collision, the crust and huge blocks of land called fault blocks to be thrust upward and and such a fault block was raised up just just south of and parallel the lake superior shore and is called the douglas fault. and it created cliffs like this

one at patterson state park near superior, the city of superior where the black river plunges over douglas fault. it's the highest waterfall in the state. big manitou falls. and the douglas fault crops up in various places along lake superior shore. several streams flow over it, including the american river here at amna khan falls state park, just east of patterson state park. the chapter goes on to describe how the apostle islands in the swamp bay were formed and explain the islands are here can see off the off the tip of the bayfield here's sharma and bay next to the peninsula and my

chapter explains how plant and animal communities developed in the area after the glacier retreated. i also into early human community is along the shore, such as the archaic people which included the old copper culture. beginning about 6000 years ago, native people learned to extract shlow of copper from lake superior shore as as and in number of other areas around great lakes and it is shown in this depiction that i found in the milwaukee public museum website. and they made all kinds of tools and weapons and eventually any personal, personal ornaments out of copper. they're thought to be the world's first metal smiths. and later came the ojibway woodland and most recently, the

ojibwe, who expanded across much of northern wisconsin when europeans had expanded, when much, when the european explorers first arrived in the 16 and 1700s. by 1854, though, the u.s. government had reduced the ojibwe lands to eight reservoirs. nations in the lake superior outlined in yellow on this map as one. and there's another. and there are three. on the lake superior shore, the red cliff reservation here, the river reservation here, and a section of the bad river reservation up on madeline island, just a small fraction of the shore land that their ancestors had occupied for thousands of years. well, at the end of the lake superior shore section is a travel guide. in this case, they traced the route along the shore on state and county highways. that gives you the best access to those sites that i describe.

in the chapter i'll read a sample of the travel guide just to give you a sense of how you can use it it. and this this section, the travel guide refers to this area right up here on 13. highway 13 descends into the valley of the cisco at river where wisconsin's town cornucopia overlooks cisco at bay just west of, the town is lost creek bog state natural area. where rising lake levels have put the mouths of three creeks under water. these three creeks descend the hills to the south and. one of theforms a gorgeous, secluded waterfall called lost falls. a side trip there involves, a one and a half mile hike, highly

recommended. excuse me. and then and then the travel goes on to explain how to find that trailhead. and it continues. out of cornucopia highway passes the west of the apostle islands national lakeshore, famous for its intricately caves, pillars and arches in colorful lake superior sandstone. some of this stretch displays stunning flows of ice during winter, making the bayfield peninsula ice caves a world renowned destination even for hearty winter hikers and kayakers. and this photo was taken by of those hardy kayakers, crazy crazy friend of mine up the. and there's more to explore in the area along of the area of the lake superior shore as you can learn from my book if you want but now let's leave the lake superior for sure and travel southeast the state to

horwich on marsh, which appears in chapter four of the book this great marsh, one of the one of the largest freshwater catfish marshes in the world, was venerated by none other than the great writer and scientist, although leopold in his classic sand county almanac. in a reading called marshland elegy follows. a dawn wind stirs on the great marsh with. almost imperceptible slowness. it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass, like the white ghost of a glacier mists advance riding over phalanx of tamarack sliding over bog meadows heavy with due a single silence hangs from horizon to horizon. that's good writing my hurricane begins with that quotation followed by the story of marsh

and beginning with how the how the basin for the marsh was scooped out probably by several glaciers over a period of two and a half million years. and most of the carving done by the most recent glacier one named after wisconsin it created this basin that lies mostly in dodge county, 30 miles long and four miles wide, and was filled by water melting off glacier to become what's called a glacial lake. huge, icy pool of meltwater. back then, this area was a tundra and might have resembled this artist'sendition. it would have hosted only the hardiest of groundcover plant, chens, mosses grasses eventually, stunted tree species. the animals in this area included wooly mammoths pictured

here musk oxen, master dons, caribou, probably large cats. it's possible that horror can even host a giant beavers larger than today's black bears and weighing as much as £350. evidence such animals has been found in this area and other other areas. wisconsin. for, many decades after the glacier had shaped the harold holzer khan basin, it and receded to the north the area remained tundra where mammoths ranged across the plain munching on grasses. here's a picture of gale getting to know the last remaining mammoth stands like a sentinel over sentinel today overlooking that great marsh. this is a full scale replica up, up, up there at yukon marsh. the mammoths were extinct 11,000

years ago, but they may have watched as humans moved into the area around a thousand years before that. nearly major prehistoric native culture known in the upper midwest is thought to have used in the marsh, including the paleo hunters. here they, the mammoths and the other mammals, followed by the archaic cultures and other woodland native community cultures. and the word haakon is derived from an algonquin word, meaning land of clean, pure water. in effigy mound builders had had established or villages and built a lot of mounds all around the hurricane. marsh 712 hundred a.d. , one of the best surviving clusters of mounds in the state can be viewed at ski mounds. county park near south of the southwest corner.

the marsh is shown here. the hurricane marsh story ends well, at least at this point. and this is what it looks like today. but beginning around 1800, it the marsh went through a tortured period. it was first flooded to facilitate logging, followed overhunting to the point where duck and other waterfowl species populations were nearly wiped out. later people drained, it to allow for farming, which did not work out. here's picture of a plowed area where one of those attempts to farm the marsh failed completely in draining and plowing, caused the marsh to dry out, and then the deep peat deposits under the

marsh caught fire and burned for years until most of the peat had turned to muck. so it was it was a mess. but then in 1921, some citizens got together and began the long process of restoration, protection of that marsh. and today it's completely protected, as you can see in this slide, the northern part, a national wildlife refuge, the southern part, a state wildlife area. and the marsh is even recognized, the united nations, as a wetland of international. and you can walk through the marsh on boardwalks and, earthen -- as a margin. many of have in this room. it's not that far away from you can ge close up viewof the various flowering species this the photo that took of a milkweed flower with cattails behind there the marsh hosts

countless of insects including the endangered monarch butterfly. that depends on the milkweed and you'll see amphibians and reptiles and of course birds more 300 species of birds including pelicans egrets herons swans, ibis and many more use the marsh and this photo and the first one you saw of the marsh here at dawn were taken by jack. all of the friends of the hurricane marsh and. we owe those friends groups a lot of gratitude, a debt of gratitude for their ongoing work to restore and protect the marsh. and as with all of my stories, i follow this one with a travel guide, basically a driving route around the marsh on county and state highways.

you can bike it to lots of people. it and you'll want to start your trip with a visit to the hurricane marsh education and visitor center run by the friends of the hurricane marsh. it's an impressive collection of fascinating artifacts and exhibit arts and information. and from from the visitor center you can hike all over that marsh and miles trails to finish hurricane marsh. i'm going to read one more reading from my book that takes us back to aldo leopold. in 1948. leopold some pessimism about the restoration of the hurricane. marsh observing the brutal and widespread disturbance, the disturbances to the marsh he feared that someday quote the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. no doubt, leopold, be pleased to

see that his pessimism was unwarranted in the long run the marsh has survived disturbances to become thriving marshland ecosystem ecosystem. and indeed this is one of the most remarkable that i have ever heard of, of natural restoration that can when people value and then work together to preserve and protect an area that care about. well now wherever i go to present my book i like to do research and talk a little bit about local waterways and. hearing kyle akeel sorry, in kiel i think we might as well talk about that big lake 15 miles to the east of here, lake michigan in the i split the coverage of wisconsin's lake lake michin between two chapters and to adequately cover the whole shore the upper lake

shore from the tip odor count down to manitowoc and the lower lake michigan shore from manitowoc down to the illinois border. and in each case, i tell the deep story of how the shore area was formed and follow that with a travel guide. and the story. lake michigan dates back to the beginning. the cambrian period, 545 million years ago, and for the next 250 million years, a series shallow seas invaded the central part of ancient america. and this diagram shows a very rough outline of such a sea in blue here. it also shows the outlines of today's north american continent. although that ancient continent looked different, it was shaped differently. it's been changing shape ever since. this, interestingly enough, this brown area here is the ancestral appalachian mountain range,

which was a huge island in that in that sea. and then here's the the the the michigan basin lake michigan is is located this red line running through the image here is the equator. so that means that was a tropical sea and shallow sea life. there was sea life was evolving in that sea. and we're better for sea life to thrive than a coral reef. here's diorama of a slurry in reef on display at the milwaukee public some of the earliest coral reefs on the planet developed along what would become the lake michigan between 420 and 440 million years ago, with an especially rich collection, such reefs centered roughly on the location of milwaukee today. life there included shelled

animals, crawling trail of bites and sorry trilobites. what's the other one going? refreshment and pods. trilobites. these flower like things they look like flowers. their animals called grenades and. the dominant predator in this system, this long octopus type critter called a cephalopod, and the remains of creatures collected on the sea floor. three, 3 million years or so, and entually those remains became limestone, which then was converted by undersea chemical reactions to. dolomite. this hard erosion resistant cousin to limestone makes up the bedrock of most of the lake michigan shore, including the the rock under where we are now. and it it also makes up that

rock that makes the is also the rock that makes up the niagara escarpment that's strip rock that runs the length of door to door peninsula and shows itself off in spectacular cliffs like this one at peninsula state park. okay. and in some places along the shore, you can find great fossil remnants of wisconsin's coral. here's a photo of the gale took of a feather site honeycomb coral near cave point county park on the shore a little a little of here. and after the of the tropical seas had come gone came a period of hundreds of millions of years of erosion by rivers that widened and deepened the future basin of lake michigan, beginning around two and a half

million years ago, several glaciers inched across the land to complete the of the of the basin. here's a diagram of the lobes from the most recent glacier and the great lakes are outlined again here just for reference they weren't here of course the lake michigan law was shaped roughly like lake michigan and flowed down out of the north and scooped up untold tons of sand and gravel and boulders to take the lake's basin depth to hundred feet below sea level level. however, the post glacial period, beginning about 10,000 years ago was also a time of dramatic change, especially in terms of rising and falling levels, as following reading from my book suggests. imagine the clock back to 10,600

years ago and going to the shore of lake michigan, settling into a beach chair and then running the clock forward one century per minute. at first the shore would look much as it does today, but soon waves would stop rolling in and the water, the shore would recede quickly out into the lake bed. it would be out of sight within 11 minutes. and after about minutes you would see the water line slowly returning. within an hour, your chair would be under 20 feet of water and you would be best off swimming toward the new shoreline. this is what happened at a much slower rate of course after the most recent glacier and the level of lake michigan fell and rose several times until it found its present level around 2000 years ago.

and you can evidence of the changing lake levels all up and down the shore of. lake, michigan, as my travel guide, for example, up at the northern end. the northern end of the door peninsula, the northern of the shore, the newport state park, at the tip of the dora peninsula. you can see how the lake are pounding the shore today to create these abandoned to to create these shoreline terraced. there's a shelf type formations here. and then you can travel inland, walk inland less than a mile into woods and find this old abandoned shoreline in the woods created lake that was much higher around 5000 years ago. here's another example of. falling lake levels a little

down the shore, the ridges sanctuary at baileys harbor. here's dropping lake levels shaped a series of ridges and swales, the ridges being old shoreline and sand dunes. the lake would sit at one level for decades or centuries as waves and would shape these shoreline sand dunes and then a lagoon would be forming behind sand dune on the shore. well, today, the swales between, the ridges you see here, these brown areas, some of them with water in them are remnants of those old lagoons. there's this process happened several times the ridges sanctuary. is a beautifully preserved carved ancient shoreline ecosystem hosts rare plant communities, many of which are threatened or endangered.

and you can hike the old ridges on trails designated to make our impact there as light as possible. and it's just a real treasure. on the lake michigan shore, the ridges sanctuary. well, i've given a small sample of the sites available on the lake michigan shore and. i one, i think the wonder of the lake shore is great variety of experiences that you can have up and down the shore from pristine environments like preserved areas like the ridges here to roy or the lakes or waves or steadily sculpting cliffs and and cave like. this one at cave point county park to intriguing old lake shore towns and cities. algoma manitou, sheboygan, milwaukee just to name a few. this is a this is a photo lake shore state park, right in

milwaukee. it's taken by our sun. and it appears in the travel guide of my lower lake michigan shore section of the book. well i hope that my book, with its travel guides, will help you to fully enjoy exploring the lake michigan shore as well as 18 other waterways covered in the book and i want thank you it's been a it's been a pleasure being here today i can sign a copy of the book if you wish and right now i'd welcome any any questions that you might have. thanks again. yes. along did you worked on your book? this one took about well took to two seas two years fall and spring seasons. i primarily work the fall and the spring. when i do the field research.

and then i also do library research in between and then i took about a year to do the compile everything and write it and then the press takes about a year to produce the book. so four years total from beginning to end kind of similar. my state parks book, it just worked out same. have you ever been of the sheboygan marche? oh yeah, yes. there's a lot of history there, too. yes, indeed. yeah. so we're a stream was blocked, right and backed up by blocked by dunes i think went through the same thing with what foreign talk first and yeah we're going to plan in there and all the sort of glue set pretty good that's why all the channels are in there one time it was called lake sheboygan when my native were there. oh well, i'll have to look into that more. thank you. there's a lot of indian mountains. yeah, we're just finding new ones all the time.

good to know. as gary and jill. know, just. i absolutely love your state park. okay. thank you. awesome thanks. and i always take take that one camping so that if we're going to a particular area in the state, then we'll read about it before we do our hikes and things like that. we have a really background in biology geology. i was just wondering, what's your background. yes, because it is absolutely very scientifically done. but really for the average person, it's a wonderful guy. well, thank you so thank you. appreciate it. to your stance on the lottery. yeah. thanks i'm trained as a science writer, actually i went to school in journalism focused on science reporting and that's just all about taking raw science or raw, but science and and bringing it to the level where i can understand it. and then pass it on to other people and your books do that

really well. and i really to the fact of the history of the land back when the native american culture so you and everything after you leaving it beautifully give us thank you so much that's not. just yeah unbelievable to bring the passenger pigeon one particular of the sandhill cranes go the same way. thankfully was wrong about that. yeah yeah you predicted the passenger the passing of the passenger pigeon. yeah. and i've forgotten what. but what year that was that. the last one was killed. you remember. don't remember over the way. that was just. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. a great monument to the passenger pigeon while losing state park, which is on another one of the waterways. talk about what while losing on the wisconsin river in

mississippi. so everybody else question yes, i have a question about the niagara. yes, you said it was like the outline of an agency and the equator was right there, which was really surprising to me. so how do you go from really hot tropical to i know how many centuries later to the you know, the the glacier how does that happen. well we you know the plate tectonics you remember that slide i had of showing how the these plates just kind of are just being bumped and moved around like bumper cars in an amusement park over time and that american plate was down there in this round the equator. yeah. and it got bumped and moved around, landed where it is now, about 10 million years ago. and that was way the glaciers came. so then it was far enough into northern hemisphere so that when the glaciers came, know, they covered they covered that.

so that was pretty fun. oh, yeah, yeah. moved from the from of the equator all the way up to the 45 where we had the 40,. 45 degree latitude. i think you. yeah. huge took. 600 million years. yeah. it took while and now it's kind of an interesting thing that i used to insert is that we're moving now. we're still moving southwest, but we're moving about as fast as your fingernails are growing. so not very fast. i sure i heard that the best fishing is the kickapoo trout. why is it that from superior? because of that grit? no, no. if comes out of the the sandstone, it's old plot. it's an old plateau. the drift.

missouri is an old plateau that's deeply eroded. so it was covered with with a hard rock called dolomite. and then the stream is gradually carved. this network of streams down into the old sandstone. so it's like coming out of a sandstone or an aquifer. it's pretty pure water coming out, feeding that river and, all the other streams. there's several really good droughts. james down there, i'm not a child fisherman. so i don't know, but i've got a nephew who has told me that. so that water comes from somewhere. i guess what i write, it comes from somewhere that, that makes it such good water. well, it's groundwater. groundwater, you know, comes, it comes the part of the water cycle precipitates down snow seeps down into those those aquifers. the sandstone, and then feeds into streams and lakes. yeah. anybody else. wow. thank you for your attention and

great. thank you so much.