by Shane Behler
My only taste of Wisconsin had been a seventy-mile-an-hour view from I-90. The state streaked across my windshield on blitzkrieg drives between the East Coast and Montana back when summer breaks spent chasing trout out West were reality, not Monday-mornings-at-the-office pipe dreams. My tunnel-vision remembrance of the state was that it was pretty. Maybe not as pretty as Minnesota, but prettier than North Dakota and Illinois.
While I had thought about detouring on those drives to spend a day or two fishing Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, I never did. Mountains and cutthroats were calling from across the plains, and you don’t stop in Wisconsin when Ennis is just another sunrise ahead. However, with a name as sublime as Driftless, I knew I’d get back to Wisconsin someday.
Which brings me to the present. Even if Rocky Mountain summers are now relegated to memory, I’m still plenty game for a few days on the road in pursuit of trout when the opportunity presents itself. So, when a conference brought me to Madison, Wisconsin, in late September, I picked up a rental car at the end of the week, pointed it westward, and this time stopped before hitting the Minnesota border.
The Driftless Region encompasses parts of Southeast Minnesota, Northeast Iowa, and Northwest Illinois, but its heart lies in Southwest Wisconsin. Glaciers never plowed over this pocket of the world during the last ice age, sparing it from deposits of glacial drift (hence the name). Most of the streams out here are called coulees (more wonderful nomenclature), and they bubble cold and clear out of porous limestone bedrock.
I had three days to explore as many coulees as I could. This was scarcely enough time to even begin to scratch the surface—there are thirteen thousand miles of trout-inhabited water in Wisconsin’s portion of the Driftless alone. I started with a bite-sized chunk: One tributary stream in one small watershed that splayed into many more tributaries further up the valley.
From this starting point, I could probably cover about twenty of those thirteen thousand miles within a twenty-minute drive. Quite the bite for three days of fishing.
I parked at the first access point I found along on my chosen coulee and caught three wild browns under a high noon sun, all within sight of the rental car. The blind squirrel can in fact find quite a few nuts when they’re littered everywhere. In true spring creek fashion, the coulees are ridiculously fertile. Their abundance of subaquatic vegetation produces a riot of trout food, which in turn produces plenty of trout, and, as I quickly discovered, some damned good fishing.
My fortune persisted over the few coulee miles I managed to cover through those three days. Browns and brookies were tricked steadily enough to keep a smile plastered to my face. The trout were strong and athletic, painted with the acrylic of stream-bred purity, and despite the smorgasbord of nymphs and cress bugs available to them, entwined with the world beyond the surface like few I’d ever encountered. They clung to the muddy cutbanks, noses upturned, waiting on the unfortunate terrestrial insect that had lost its grip on the earthbound. I kept a hopper or foam beetle on my line nearly my entire stay and often did not need to bother with a dropper. There’s nothing quite like those splashy terrestrial rises.
And the landscape: The view from I-90 in those past summers was like a too-fast glance at a woman who might have been beautiful. Standing beneath her cerulean sky as she slipped into her fall dress, I fell hard for the Driftless’s pastoral charm.
Yet maybe the best part about the Driftless is the accessibility of its coulees. Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources has purchased public access easements along thousands of their miles. If a car was parked at a pull-off where I wanted to fish, I’d drive down the road to another access sign and an empty gravel shoulder. I never had to go far.
That’s not something you can find in many places, even in Montana. I’ll be back, Driftless.
nice story. makes me want to go
Good story…I made that trip between Montana and the East too many times to count and was fortunate enough to stop a couple times in the Driftless. I’d love to fish there again.