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In the May/June 2001 issue of The Iowan

Iowa’s Last Wilderness

Stretched across the western edge of Iowa,
the pristine Loess Hills are poised on the edge of change.

[ Story by Bill Witt | Photography by Ty Smedes ]

A torrent of air funnels through the Dirge Hill road cut: More a stampede than a wind, it rolls small pebbles on the road surface and sends clouds of flour-fine soil dervishing toward the ridge line. It’s an unseasonable wind, too: a hard shoulder of January thrusting into May, and for a moment it becomes the wind of another age. This is how it was when glacial ice rose like a mountain range in the north, and brutal katabatic winds blew for months on end. This is how it was...

Very nearly the same words must have come to Bohumil Shimek, pioneering geologist and natural historian, as one winter morning nearly a century ago he watched the wind roil clouds of mineral powder from the bare dunes and sandbars lining the banks of the undammed, unchanneled Missouri River. The pale ocher clouds swept eastward and rose when they met the steep bluffs that lay a mile or so from the river. Gravity and tall prairie grasses seined the wind, and the river silt lay fresh on the ridge tops. That is how it was, Shimek said, the wind’s demonstration confirming what his painstaking investigation of the hills’ fossils suggested. The hills and bluffs that rise up to 200 feet and run for 200 miles along the Missouri River from Plymouth County, Iowa, to Holt County, Missouri, were laid down by wind: They are hills of loess.

A century before Shimek, one of America’s greatest explorers and natural historians, had also remarked on the effects of wind and sand. “the wind Blustering and hard from the South all day,” wrote Captain William Clark on 26 July 1804, “which blowed the clouds of Sand in Such a manner that I could not complete my map in the tent, the Boat roled is Such a manner that I could do nothing in that, & was Compessed to go to the woods and combat with the Musquetors...”

Clark and his co-captain Meriwether Lewis could not have known that the hills and bluffs that rose to their right each day for a month as they and the Corps of Discovery poled and pulled their keelboat and pirogues up the Missouri were matched by just one similar landform in all the world, in Sichuan, in western China. They did note, however, the region’s richness of plant and animal species, the diversity of its native inhabitants, and its beauty: “the most butifull prospect of the River up & Down and the Countrey prosented it Self which I ever beheld,” Clark wrote on 30 July.

Before the Missouri led them west into South Dakota and beyond the Loess Hills region, Lewis and Clark did two things that connect with us today. On 17 August Clark wrote that, hopeful of their first meeting with the Sioux and Omaha tribal leaders, they “Set the Praries on fire to bring the Mahars and Soues if any were near”—and thus left the first record of European Americans practicing what has become a standard technique of modern prairie management. Three days before, he had noted that the Mahar (Omaha) people “burry their Dead on top of high hills and rais Mounds on the top of them.” On the twentieth the expedition left the most tangible record of its passage, the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, on a bluff top in present-day Sioux City.

Just over two years later, on 4 September 1806, the Corps of Discovery floated past the mouth of the Floyd River and halted to ascend Floyd’s Bluff. After restoring the gravesite, they resumed their journey, “deturmined to continue all night.” They had been gone so long, most of the country had given them up as lost. “Our party appears extreamly anxious to get on, and every day appears to produce new anxieties in them to get to their country and friends,” Clark wrote in one of his journal’s closing entries.

A soldier’s grave, the name of a small river, a handful of entries in America’s most hallowed record of western exploration: For a long time it seemed as though these might remain the high water mark of national interest in Iowa’s Loess Hills. But the past few years have seen unprecedented attention focused on those hills’ features that first crept into the public mind through the words of Lewis and Clark and that grew through the work of researchers like Shimek: The hills possess nearly unique geology, striking topography, biological richness, and a record of diverse human cultures spanning some 600 generations.

Today a combination of individuals and groups is working to explore and promote a sustainable future for both nature and people in the Loess Hills. Like the original Corps of Discovery, members contribute highly diverse abilities, from artists and storytellers to chambers of commerce and regional development corporations, from farmers and ranchers to not-for-profit conservation groups and state and federal agencies. Their task is likewise sometimes difficult, like poling a keelboat through a riverbend tangle of quicksand and snags, but there is also a sense of mission and accomplishment building as prairies, forests, and farms are preserved, and highways, bikeways, and bed and breakfasts offer new economic opportunities. But their efforts are focusing national interest so much that 2004 may see a Loess Hills unit of the National Park Service established to mark the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Geology and Natural History
The old farmers called it “sugar dirt,” perhaps because its uniformly fine grains of calcite, feldspar, and quartz made it so light and “sweet” to work, but the loess that forms these hills is “flour” to geologists, especially those who study glaciers. Certain mountain rivers still run pale greenish-gray, the color coming from the mass of powdered rock produced by alpine glaciers’ scouring ice and borne away by their melt water. When those fast waters reach flat land and slow down, they leave behind their talcum-fine sediments as deposits of silt, and should the silt then dry and be blown by the wind, geologists call it “loess.” The glaciers—the Illinoisan, Kansan, Wisconsonian—that made the stuff of the Loess Hills were monstrous things: Over tens of thousands of years they routed and planed millions of square miles of North America down to bedrock and then ground the resulting limestone, granite, and quartzite grit into fine powder.

In the intervals when the Earth warmed, the glaciers retreated, and their meltwater ran in vast torrents, carrying trillions of tons of glacial flour. The nascent Missouri River was then a braided stream of many channels, flowing through a broad outwash plain of glacial detritus. A few miles upstream from present-day Sioux City it changed its flow from east to south, piling its sediments in banks and bars that lay at right angles to the prevailing westerly winds. Like so much else in that time (the glaciers that were as high as the Appalachian Mountains, the megafauna that roamed the cold, marshy plains—mastodons and mammoths, half-ton ground sloths, beavers the size of black bears, bison whose calves were as big as today’s Holsteins), the winds could be prodigious, blowing at gale force for days and weeks.

Over some 150,000 years, as North America warmed, and cooled, and warmed again, as tundra went to coniferous forest, then to deciduous forest, and then to grassland, then reverted to forest and back to tundra, the hills of windblown loess rose. About 12,000 years ago the last major Loess Hills building phase ended, as the continental glaciers retreated to Earth’s poles.

Loess is strange hill-building material. Slice it with shovel or bulldozer and it will stand in near-vertical walls almost indefinitely—so long as it stays dry. But saturate it, and its homogenous, cohesive structure can fall apart—suddenly—causing massive volumes of it to slump, slide, or slurry. And if loess is exposed on a bare, dry slope, the wind that brought it can as easily carry it away. Thus it’s hard to estimate how high the Loess Hills might have stood at their highest, because they can erode fairly rapidly, and because they have been mostly subject to erosion over the past 12,000 years.

The southern hills’ shapes are least influenced by their underlying bedrock, and they catch more rain, up to nine inches more per year, than the northern hills. As a result, southern hills topography is more sharply chiseled—narrow, aquiline ridge tops branch in many directions, and the corresponding valleys are small and steep.

In the north, loess lies atop shallow-buried limestone and sandstone bedrock. The bedrock boosts northern loess hills and ridges an extra hundred feet or so higher than their southern counterparts, to heights of 300 to 350 feet above the Missouri River floodplain. It also influences groundwater and surface water flows, which coupled with the greater influence of west and northwest winds, sculpt northern hills terrain into broad valleys and bowls crowned by long, rounded, undulating ridge lines.

The warmer, wetter southern hills support extensive, and expanding, tracts of forest. Although prairies predominated throughout the Loess Hills in pre-settlement times, natural prairie communities hold on in the south and lower-central hills mostly on dry, sun-baked, steep, west- and southwest-facing slopes. By contrast, the hills of Monona, Woodbury, and Plymouth Counties see almost nine inches less annual precipitation and average temperatures about four degrees Fahrenheit cooler than slopes of Fremont County—conditions that tend to favor grasses over trees. The views unrolling from ridge lines in Stone State Park and the Nature Conservancy’s Broken Kettle Grasslands thus reveal the largest continuous, unbroken tracts of native prairie remaining in Iowa today.

In addition to their unusual geology and topography, the Loess Hills lie in what biologists call an ecotone, a zone where major natural communities, or biomes, border or overlap one another. In this case the two great biomes are the midwestern tallgrass and Great Plains mid-grass prairie regions, the wealth of species in each doubling the potential for biodiversity. But the Hills’ irregular terrain and variable weathers make niches for certain plants and animals to live hundreds of miles outside their normal ranges. Among many examples are the pawpaw tree, native of the southeastern states; the yucca, denizen of high plains and deserts, with its voluptuous head of cream-colored flowers guarded by massed, bayonet-like basal leaves; locoweed and skeleton weed, ten-petal blazing star and nine-anther prairie clover, scarlet globemallow, and scarlet gaura.

With rare plants come rare animals and insects. There are butterflies: the zebra swallowtail, which can’t exist without pawpaw trees; the regal fritillary; otoe, pawnee, and dusted skippers. Furred and feathered rarities include the woodland vole, plains pocket mouse, evening bat, chuckwill’s widow, and summer tanager. Remarkable reptiles and amphibians include the ornate box turtle, spadefoot toad, and great plains skink, plus Iowa’s rarest venomous and non-venomous snakes, the prairie rattlesnake and speckled kingsnake, respectively.

In her definitive natural history of the Loess Hills, Fragile Giants, Connie Mutel observes that “Iowa’s [Loess] Hills have been called the state’s most significant region for unusual plants and animals, a retreat for the rarest mammals of the state . . . In spite of dramatic alterations through human use, the hills’ rugged landscape maintains significantly large and intact wild lands to provide refuge for species that have decreased or disappeared elsewhere.”

Noting that healthy natural communities are also dynamic, she continues, “Plant communities and animals will continue their rhythmic and predictable movements up and down the hills day after day, age after age. The hills will never be static . . . In future years, the species may change, but the migrations will continue, as long as the Hills retain their wild and free character.”

Early Human Influences in the Hills
The breeze one May morning in 1998 sounded an especially wild note for Kevin Pape, manager of Stone State Park. Pape was hiking in a remote area of the park when he spotted a small, coffee-colored object, softly gleaming in the dun-hued loess. It was a piece of stone known as Knife River flint, translucent, about two inches long, knapped and polished into a slender, elongated, almost perfectly symmetric lance point. A long, shallow groove, or “flute,” opened at the gently curved base and tapered toward the lance’s tip. The tip and the edges were still deadly sharp. Pape remembered a photograph he’d seen of a similar point; he suspected he’d found something very old. Experts confirmed his hunch: Pape had discovered a Clovis point, a relic of bison hunting nomads who had roamed the Loess Hills 11,000 years before.

A Clovis point in nearly perfect condition is a rare find at any time, truly a lucky chance. But the Loess Hills regularly yield ancient treasure, for scientific archaeology and paleontology have shown that the Hills have offered an environment where people could live secure and prosperous lives through much of the eleven or twelve millennia since those Clovis Culture hunters first came in quest of mastodon and bison. Shimek had hinted at the prospects for study in his 1909 report: “Practically every prominent point along the loess bluffs on the Iowa side of the Missouri valley between Sioux City and Hamburg, shows one or more burial mounds constructed by the aboriginal inhabitants of this region . . . attention should be called to the richness of the field which on the Iowa side has remained almost untouched save for . . . the efforts of local amateurs who have not made systematic studies of the mounds, but have contented themselves with making collections of their contents.”

The mounds were primarily the monuments of the Woodland Indians, cultural allies and trading partners of the Hopewellian peoples of the Mississippi valley, who flourished over some 3,000 years, until about 1000 AD. The clusters of regularly formed depressions on river benches and terraces below the bluff tops proved to be the remains of villages of large, partly earth-sheltered lodges built by the Great Oasis, Mill Creek, and Glenwood Culture farmers who succeeded the Woodland peoples and who appear to have lived orderly, moderately prosperous lives for about 400 years, from c. 900 to 1300 AD.

Ironically, of all the prehistoric peoples of the Loess Hills, the least is known about those who lived during five centuries between the decline of the three sedentary cultures and the arrival of Lewis and Clark. No archaelogical sites dating from that time have been found in the Hills, although there is a substantial record from the surrounding area for the Oneota, a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer-farmer people who coexisted for several generations with the sedentary farmer-hunters. The evidence suggests that around 1200 the climate began to grow warmer and drier; more difficult growing conditions, as well as other factors, may have forced out the village dwellers, while the Oneota adapted and turned increasingly to hunting as their main way of life.

The past 40 or 50 years have meanwhile seen remarkable discoveries about the ancient peoples who came before the Woodland mound builders. In 1955 a 4,700-year-old burial site was uncovered at Turin. According to Mutel, the four skeletons found there are the oldest known human remains in Iowa, and artifacts and other evidence uncovered with the bones indicate the burial practices “were similar to European and Near Eastern burials dating from the same period.”

Three discoveries in the 1970s led to Iowa’s becoming a national model for the treatment of prehistoric Native American remains. In 1971, highway construction near Glenwood unearthed an unmarked cemetery that contained 27 skeletons: 26 of European-Americans, and one of a Native American woman. Mutel notes that “although the 26 Euro-Americans were promptly reburied in a local cemetery, the Indian woman’s bones were removed for scientific study.”

Indian leaders, clergy, and others protested, and the woman’s bones were finally reinterred with the others. The following year, violent protests ensued when several sets of prehistoric remains were discovered near Sioux City and archaeologists claimed them for an indefinite period of study.

The 1975 unearthing of an Archaic (before 2500 BCE) burial site during the construction of Lewis Central School in Council Bluffs finally led to resolution of the problems. The Iowa State Archaeologist, State Attorney General, and Native American activists established the principle of granting equal legal protection to prehistoric as well as historic cemeteries. The Indians determined that limited scientific study that could yield more knowledge about their ancient ancestors was preferable to simply reburying the remains. Strict procedures for removal, study, and reburial were worked out by an Indian advisory committee, scientists, and legal experts, and the following year, 1976, the jointly developed policy was made state law.

Since then, numerous prehistoric Indian remains have been discovered, studied, and respectfully reinterred under a process that has become a model for the nation. Iowa established three special state cemeteries for ancient Native American remains. “One cemetery,” Mutel writes, “fittingly covers a massive bluff in Iowa’s Loess Hills, a bluff that prehistoric Indians likely considered sacred.”

A New Cooperative Vision
The cooperative spirit that led to the new law expressed itself again soon after the 1976 Iowa Legislature adjourned for the year. To mark the Bicentennial, Carolyn Benne, a natural history educator for the local area education agency, invited a couple dozen friends on a backpack trip into the hills. The friends’ campfire dreaming led to a more organized approach the next year: 50 people showed up for field walks, lectures, and discussions led by four instructors at the Loess Hills Seminar. But the presentations, though informative, were hardly dry or academic, because Benne structured them so they integrated science, history, religion, art, and ethics, followed in the evening by a hearty meal and hours around the campfire for talk and reflection, songs and storytelling. Benne, recalls Monona County Conservation Director Tom Bruegger, “had a genius for bonding people emotionally and spiritually with each other and with nature.”

Carolyn Benne died in 1981, leaving her friends and husband Larry to carry on the preparation for Loess Hills Seminar VI. They’ve continued the effort, and this Memorial Day Weekend, she will again be lovingly remembered as the Loess Hills Seminar meets for the twenty-fifth time. The event has such staying power because, Larry Benne says, “We believe in the ‘whole village’ approach: everyone, from oldest to youngest, has a story to tell, a song to sing. And if we want our village to go on, we need the community and the land to educate our children, not just ‘nuclear’ families and schools.”

So far, the theory works. “Seminar Kids,” who hiked and sang with their parents 15 or 20 years ago, are now returning to the seminars with their own youngsters. They sniff the yucca flower, wood smoke, and worn buckskin; hear the bluebird by day and the whippoorwill by night; they imagine mound builders and mastodons; they may encounter soap weed—but blissfully little soap.

The seminar has also been a nucleus for remarkable growth of the larger Loess Hills community. Sharing shady picnic tables at the Saturday lunch may be local, state, and federal officials, regional economic developers, college professors and kindergarten teachers, tourism consultants, prairie managers, farmers, and “just folks.” David Zahrt of Turin personifies the kind of networking that goes on: Zahrt and his wife Lin, a public health nurse, live on the “west slope” farm that his great-grandfather homesteaded in 1856. They returned there after 20 years of public health and community development work that took them to inner-city Chicago, the Mississippi Delta, Australian Outback, and Kenya.

Zahrt is deeply concerned that “the trend in agriculture is to undermine rural community and sociability and turn the landscape into just another assembly line. Farmers are fewer and fewer, living farther and farther apart, physically and emotionally. We live with a lot of unease and guilt about this, but it’s hard to say anything.”

His response is manifold: he and Lin organize weekends and special events at their Country Homestead bed and breakfast that mirror the communality and “touch the land” spirit of the Loess Hills Seminars. He works to restore his upland prairies and find new, more diversified crops for his plow ground. And he serves as the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation’s (INHF) land stewardship consultant, advising fellow farmers and landowners on ways they can enhance the quality of their farmed and natural lands and permanently protect them through conservation easements and other private and public-private partnering options. A key initiative involves working with landowners to prevent unsightly, uncontrolled development along the region’s recreational trails and scenicbyways.

The Iowa Nature Conservancy has taken a more direct approach, combining land purchases and donations, easements, and other private arrangements to assemble at Broken Kettle Grasslands north of Sioux City an unbroken tract of native prairie and savanna totaling almost 5,000 acres—Iowa’s largest. But the Conservancy (like the Natural Heritage Foundation, a private, not-for-profit organization) is also developing new private ventures, coordinating, for example, a cost-share Grassland Restoration Program with local ranchers, and a small business pilot project to produce “prairie-friendly mulch” from cedar trees invading prairies.

In 1999 the Iowa Legislature created a remarkable precedent, organizing, chartering, and funding the Loess Hills Alliance, a council of public officials and private citizens that is drawing national attention for its pioneering efforts in coordinating and promoting land conservation and sustainable economic development. “The Alliance,” says Shirley Frederiksen, coordinator of the eight-county Golden Hills Resource Conservation & Development Corporation, “is pulling together interagency coordination between the state and federal governments and the seven Loess Hills counties, public education, property tax policy, landowner protection, city development planning, county zoning, regional tourism . . . it’s a huge task, huge.”

And not always a pleasant one, says Mauri Welte, a Woodbury County supervisor and past chair of the Alliance. “Some days it’s like paddling a canoe upstream, into a head wind,” particularly in the areas of potential costs to local governments and landowner fears of public takeover of their property. “It’s all about building trust,” Welte continues, “and it will take time, but I can see many ways that we’re already succeeding. Our momentum is growing faster than we can organize.”

What fuels the accelerating engine, Welte says, are the neighborly traditions of Loess Hills people and their love for the land. “Our people are going to discover new options that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. Good things are going to come out of this.”

One of the most noteworthy so far is a keenly anticipated Special Resource Study of the Hills from the National Park Service. Spearheaded by Iowa Senators Harkin and Grassley and initiated by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 1999, the process has moved with unusual speed and thoroughness, according to Sändra Washington, the Park Service’s Omaha-based representative. A series of public meetings generated “page after page of detailed, thoughtful comments, plus we received over 900 letters,” Washington says. “It was an unusually complete response, more than we get from most studies of this scope, and in a lot less time. I think that clearly reflects the great number of people who care deeply about the Loess Hills.”

As The Iowan goes to press, a draft of the study, including five possible options for Park Service participation, is undergoing internal review. Washington could not discuss the five options, but she did seek to allay some local fears by noting that none of them called for federal land acquisition. “These people love the hills; they want to protect the high quality of life they have there. They want to work out the Loess Hills’ destiny for themselves, and we are ready to help, however they choose to accomplish that.”

A draft may be ready for public comment before the Silver Anniversary Loess Hills Seminar convenes, but in either case, the more than 300 participants are sure to sense a more joyous spirit in the wind and a brighter glow in their great, communal campfire.

Loess Hills Scenic Byway Map

To download a PDF of the map, CLICK HERE