Nature Journal: Bliss Road

"The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playful swirls, and the wind hurries on."  – Leopold, from "November," A Sand County Almanac














21 November

With all of the Hixon Forest Trails available in November, when you try Oak, up along the near side of the approach of Bliss Road, you know you're taking off a few degrees and that the day just got colder.  The sun coats the south face and its grand monuments of limestone as if a favored friend.  That warm blanket coats as well the soft underbelly of much of the Forest Hills Golf Course, the first thin snow stays puffy, bright, always alluring to the cross country skier who knows that once the tracks are laid  it's nothing more than smooth skimming over the greased surface of the artificially rolling hillocks.  Up here on Oak, however, the north face, it's a denser world, at least in the growing months – fern, Jack O' the Pulpit, some near old growth white oak that needs its own forest management scheme for handling overgrowth.  We parked and walked down onto a still leafy trail.  Golden maple leaves and the crusty fly-aways of the oak rattle to surges in the wind like careful instruments then gradually turn dormant again.  The great old trail is lean and narrow.  A few other foot tracks and one large continuous knobby pattern from the morning has formed a map of previous motion.  It's always nice to know that others take their chances with the cold too and chase the sunspots that dazzle off the open points of limestone ledges. Those then point to the bright sea of the course below their cold horizons.  We know that oaks of any species were virtually wiped off the face of the state of Wisconsin over a century ago, so here, inside the near-old growth, is as close at it gets to the raw wildness that always seems to teem in less organized patterns: fallen timber coated at its base with a rim of fungus and leaning over the entrance of a naturally forming gully which no doubt has seen many times a violent stream of run-off from the steep contours above, cut out by Bliss Road.  Rocks have fallen over the years down this north slope and now hold a light snow over their broad backs.  By mile two, the woods are no longer about the city of LaCrosse, but about a particular type of forest, serene here, no movement, not a cardinal or deer this afternoon, not a bluejay, not even a squirrel storing hurriedly its last pile of nuts now that mother nature has sent her first warning shot over the bow of the bluffs.  As we reach the bottom and cross back inward toward the golf course, there's less cover and the wind makes itself known, biting at the earlobes and reminding the neck of its own innocence.  The cold of white eyes match that of the ground below and instinct looks upward toward cover.  Old Oak Trail is no longer quite as friendly and we have to toe straight up over slippery leaves and lose our breath, now itself coated, brittle and reminding of just what's in charge of the north slope.