Trail of Columbines

"The point has changed little since those early days, and the silhouettes of the islands and the vistas across the water are much the same as they have always been.  I can sit here and dream of the past, for in the fleur-de-lis is a living bridge between the voyageurs and me."
    –Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point

Red Columbine, Aquilegia Canadensis

The Red Columbine had crossed its own bridge some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago during what is called the Pleistocene.  Like a roving band of animals who continuously seek suitable habitat, the Columbine, stemming originally from Eastern Europe, spread across the Bering land bridge from what is modern day Russia down through Alaska, on into the North American continent where it can be found today along the ridge line trails here in Greens Coulee.

End of Loggers Loop Trail, Greens Coulee Park Trails

Enwrapped as we are by these networks of coulees that used to be nearly all farming, it takes little time to move from the modern world to that of the past, the voyage of time Olson describes above.  This is the story for a majority of the La Crosse area: neighborhoods need look little further than over their collective shoulders to see the bluffs, their foothills, and relics of connected fields, to see living

history.  For Olson, his transformative moments occurred over and over again as he took canoe and paddle out onto the great northern lakes surrounding his shack at Listening Point.  As he felt the connection to the robust French Voyageurs of old, – cusping his hand-carved paddle, gliding over the mostly unchanged crystal waters – and spotting the fleur-de-lis flower as a reminder of French descent, we might find in the vision of a columbine the toil of the farmer as she stakes out a fencepost or he herds the dairy cow back down the lush green grazing slope, a log held over his shoulder for the night's dinner fire.