"We skirted the edge of the bluff into the Allison canyons and I noticed a freshly dug den in the hillside. A few yards farther, as I rounded the point of a hogback, a big fiery-red fox darted out of the cover of a fallen limb in the bottom of the draw and started up the opposite side." - Leopold, from Round River, "Red Fox Day"





30 September

Oktoberfest festivities are in the air, along the streets of the city of La Crosse, the traffic thick, as a hundred thousand might descend along the downtown streets for a bounding parade, thick drumbeats, raised glasses of beer, and here and there, pounding in the grounds at the far end of the route, a fine polka under big tents.  All this can mean only one thing for the outdoorsman: head in the opposite direction, light up for the limestone bluff and see what small dances and sweet songs we might flush out there.  La Crosse might be well known for three things: the bluffs, the Mighty Mississippi, and Oktoberfest.  All can be had in a mere one mile drive, if desired, for the eventual platform that you find at the top shelf those bluffs, looks out over the rest of the list, and you can just about make out the meandering parade that runs parallel to the main channel of the river below.  We found a trail head at the far south side of Hixon Forest, and made our way up a steep and recently heavily eroded trail, with divers and channels that run right through the center which one would imagine becomes their own version of river virtually every rain.  The valley that runs here holds some man made works, long flumes of dirt and rock and an occasional square corner of some cement block.  In the old days, when La Crosse had not yet wooded and was called by the Native Americans Prairie La Crosse, the quarry works used to connect top to bottom along some of these routes and you can find remnants here as well as directly below the famous Grandad's portion maybe a quarter a mile south.  Walnuts so abundant they look like a thousand miniature versions of lime green tennis balls.  We stop to examine one, rip off the husk which leaves our fingers yellow and slimy and smelling something like nothing else we have ever encountered.  We set one down on a rock and give it a few solid shots with another rock to reveal the pretty white segments of nut inside and consider that these would have been quite a harvest for subsistence in times past.  We continue up to the flat castles of sheer limestone cliffs at the top and marvel not only their structure, popping up in such random contours, but the unfortunate graffiti lit across each one as if revealing a competition we'd prefer to know less about.  Just below some of the cliffs wild and untended prairies, dry, drifting, and a beautiful snapshot of just what the landscape was a hundred and fifty years ago. Seen in contrast to the scene below, the La Crosse River Marsh, green and alluvial, cross hatched by trails and cattails, we breath in a strong sense of the city as a train makes its way through across its tracks along the edge.  Far off in the distance, a near mirror along the Minnesota side, bluffs the exact shape and height, revealing a similar pattern of emerald green and limestone pewter, and we wonder if there, too, there stands the avid hiker listening for the drums of the parade in the distance, while at their fingertips the soft whish of a September breeze across the field grass.