I had heard of the Wisconsin Dells but didn’t know really what or where they were. When we knew we were driving by them on our way through southern Wisconsin, we looked up what was available to do there: a boat tour and water parks. Since this is a well-known area, we decided to stop for a couple of days. And we are glad we did! We went on the 2-hour boat tour and learned so much.
The Wisconsin River runs from NE part of the state to the Mississippi River. As the river flows, it narrows and becomes fast moving through sandstone cliffs. This type of sandstone only occurs in 4 places in the world, and central Wisconsin has the largest occurrence. This narrow place is called The Dells.
Early in the 1800s, loggers felled white pines in the north during the winter months. They stored the trees on the frozen river. When it thawed, the logs floated to the lumber mills at the north end of the Dells. After milling, boards were strapped together to float to the Mississippi. These board “boats” were large enough to have a cooking stove and protection from rain on them.
However, there’s a bend in the Dells that’s really dangerous. So loggers made smaller loads out of the big ones to run the rapids and whirlpools; often they crashed and were killed. Those who made it, strapped their boards to other sets of boards that could flow on down to the Mississippi. Those brave men ran the the boards through the dangerous area then hiked back up and took more boards down.
In the 1850s, a dam was built that stopped the lumber trips, but by then, the railroad had started taking over transportation.
Here are some of our views while on the boat.
Our boat captain showed us a couple of interesting stops on the tour. One was the witches gulch, a cutout in the sandstone caused by water rushing down it in only a couple of days. A famous photographer, H.H. Bennett, found this cutout and helped make it accessible in the late 1800s.
He also was the photographer who invented stop-gap photography and captured his teenage son in motion as he leaped from one rock to another. Now the tour has dogs that have been trained to make this leap just to show us what the photographer’s son had done. This was the other interesting stop our boat captain showed us.
I took time to get my nails and toes done before we took off again.
