Lansing to Dyersville

Click the map for route details

The driftless zone
Iowa. Fields of opportunities (corn subsidies). Shunned by all glaciers. Roads without paved shoulders. Grid over contour. Land of the dead racoon. But I am getting ahead of myself. First things first.

Northeast Iowa is beautiful. It is much like southeast Minnesota or southwest Wisconsin, all are part of the driftless area that was untouched by glaciers through all four ice ages. The result is a beautiful landscape with gorgeous bluffs, like these, coming out of Lansing:

Iowa's bluffs

The many trees, by the way, are a result of relatively recent fire-suppression practices, which came with the white settlers. The Native Americans used to just let fires burn or even set fires to keep the natural prairie healthy. Average tree growth was about one tree per square mile.

The result of being missed by glaciers also makes for interesting riding. And it is not like in the Rockies, where the roads are graded. No, here it is just straight up and down, usually at 10-12 percent. As always, you can find all route information by clicking on the map at the top of this post, but the elevation profile for today should be singled out:

600' to 1100' to 600' to 1100' to 600' to. . .

After the first few climbs, the road took my past the Effigy Mounds National Monument, so I decided to have a look. It was a two-mile hike to actually get to the burial mounds. I decided I could probably use the exercise, put on my walking shoes, and went up to see what was there.

The first thing, right at the start of the trail, was a group of burial mounds with a sign next to it explaining how this ground is sacred to many living Native Americans and how one should not step on the mounds out of respect for them and those buried there.

Keeping the grass respectfully short

It seems to me that a better way to respect these sites would be to just not let anyone near them, and certainly not to mow them, but who am I to argue with the National Park Service? It should also be said that there are a couple hundred of these mounds as part of the monument, out of thousands that originally were in this area. Most of them were respectfully plowed over to make room for corn fields, although some were also lost to natural erosion, as the NPS will quickly tell you.

Well, the top of the trail treated me to some spectacular views of the Mississippi, even if it was a little noisy from all the sport boat traffic down below.

The Mississippi by Effigy Mounds National Monument

More crowded than it was for Tom and Huck

The burial mounds at the top of the bluffs were impressive. Not huge, but thousands of years old, and majestically quiet.

A glorious resting place

"This land was your land, now it is our land,
from California, to New York island..."

After a little more ups and downs along the bluff, there was a final up, and I was in what one might immediately recognize as Iowa.

Coming up from the bluffs into...

...Iowa as we know and love it

With the corn fields and the power lines came, you guessed it, the crazed red-winged blackbirds, too. This time, I managed to squeeze in an action shot and once even stopped to take a video of an excited fellow.

Under constant attack, all day long

Generally, these guys are all talk and now walk, but sometimes they dive so close that they almost touch you. Smart as they are, they do not go for the helmet (which would not bother me much), but swoop around to the ears, which is a little more unnerving. I think they enjoy it.

Through fields of opportunity to the field of dreams
The rest of the ride was spectacularly uneventful.

View from the road

Well, it's not quite that bad all the way, some corners of Iowa are still more interesting, but not many.

Iowa is not just cornfields. Not quite.

But the fact remains that Iowa has less untouched land than any other state in the nation. Huge monocultures of corn, okay, some soybeans, are what you get for implementing ridiculous farm-subsidy policies whose only outcome is that farmers wil squeeze more and more corn out of the land. It used to be, until the Nixon administration, that farm subsidies were doled out in the form of loans and grain purchase programs that served to level the demand and encouraged farmers to grow less corn in times of abundance and more corn when it was needed. Nowadays, you get a guaranteed price per bushel of corn, usually above market rates, and that's it. What would you do, not matter what the market demanded? Grow more corn, of course. You can't really blame the farmers, they are just trying to make a living.

For biodiversity, though, cornfields are about as awesome as parking lots. Which is reflected in the road kill statistics below.

Well, I ended my day in the quaint little city of Dyersville, which has a nice little downtown and is apparently home to the "Field of Dreams" movie set. I thought this movie was very boring and marked the beginning of the end of Kevin Costner's career, so I did not go to check it out and instead treated myself to a 2/3 pound Monster Thickburger at Hardee's, which was okay.

Downtown Dyersville

The police in Dyersville are nice, and they let you camp right between the little (real) baseball stadium and the city pool. Good night.

My field of dreams

Road Kill Tally
Today the racoons made their intentions for GC know with a vengeance. 20 kills in a single day is impressive by almost any measure. Everybody else had a rather poor showing, though. Think this has something to do with the universal adaptability of racoons and the huge monocultures of corn? Think it doesn't?

1. Racoon: 33
2. Groundhog: 11
3. Deer: 11
4. Skunk: 10
5. Cat: 8
6. Squirrel: 7
7. Mouse: 6
8. Opossum: 5
9. Frog: 4
10. Snake: 4
11. Turtle: 2
12. Fox: 2
13. Bunnywabbit: 2
14. Porcupine: 1

• Bird: 38