We just returned from more than a week on the road visiting friends and family in the upper Midwest – Minnesota and Wisconsin, specifically.
I made a bunch of photos at every stop along the way and it will probably take me weeks to get them all posted with appropriate context.
I’ll get started with some images from Alma, Wisconsin, where we spent a few hours exploring on a gray, November day.
Alma is a charming little town of about 800 residents alongside the Mississippi River in Wisconsin’s lightly populated Buffalo County.
It’s within an area of Wisconsin referred to as the Driftless Area because it wasn’t covered by glaciers during the last ice age. As a result there were no deposits of drift, which is the soil receding glaciers leave behind which tends to fill in the topography. With no drift fill, the areas striking bluffs and coulees are on the surface, giving the region more visible hills, cliffs and rock formations than most areas of the upper midwest enjoy.
The most striking modern feature of Alma today is Lock and Dam #4, one of 10 such structures the Army Corps of Engineers built and maintains on the Mississippi River to carry barge traffic.
The town itself is wedged between the bluffs to the east and the river to the west, along with the aforementioned Lock and Dam, a busy BNSF rail line, and two baseload coal generating stations, capable of producing a combined 583 megawatts of power.
In addition to some great photography opportunities, we enjoyed exploring the amazing Buena Vista Park, pondering the abundant hiking and tourism opportunities and the passing trains and barges.
You can learn more about Alma and it’s history and people of the region here, here and here.
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