The Driftless backroads in April are some of the best driving in the country and almost no one knows them. The hills are still bare enough to read the geology, the streams are full from snowmelt, and the small towns along the bottom roads have not yet hit their tourist season, which in most of these places is short and runs from late May to early October. I took a long loop through three counties last weekend, two days and a night, and I want to put down some notes while it is fresh.

The loop started at a town on the Mississippi where the bluffs come right down to the water. There is a state highway that runs along the bottom of the bluff for thirty miles, and then a series of side roads that go up into the coulees, the narrow valleys that the streams have cut through the limestone. Each coulee is its own small world. You drop down off the ridge into a creek bottom with a hardwood forest and a trout stream and one or two farms, and then you climb back out the other side onto a different ridge with a different view, and the whole pattern repeats every few miles for as long as you want to keep driving.

A Loop Through Three Counties

In April the trees are not yet leafed out. This is the best time of year to read the landscape. You can see the bluff faces from the road, you can see how the side coulees fan out into the main valleys, and you can see the spring birds working the bare branches without having to peer through six layers of green. The first yellow-rumped warblers were already through, working the edges of the floodplain forests where the willows were just starting to break bud.

I stayed Saturday night at an old hotel in a town of about six hundred people. The hotel had been a bank, then a hardware store, then sat empty for fifteen years, and was now eight rooms over a restaurant. There was a small casino at the truck stop on the way into town, the same kind of operation I have seen at a dozen of these rural junctions, with the same dozen machines and the same small bar. I noticed it on the way in and did not stop. The town had a much better attraction, which was a brewpub in an old creamery building that had been making beer for about ten years and was, by any reasonable standard, more interesting than anything the casino could offer.

A Small Town and an Old Hotel

The thing about driving through this kind of country is that the landscape is the destination, and everything you do along the way is just the rhythm of stopping and starting again. I stopped at a county park I had not heard of and walked a loop through a goat prairie that was just beginning to green up. I stopped at a roadside cheese shop because a sign said they had aged cheddar I would not have found at home. I stopped at a creek crossing where a small congregation of cars were already parked, because someone had spotted a bald eagle on a nest above the road, and we stood there for ten minutes with binoculars and then drove on. The Driftless in April lets you do this kind of stopping. The roads are quiet enough that pulling over for ten minutes does not feel like an inconvenience to anyone.

I came home Sunday afternoon with a small list of new places I wanted to come back to. A slow weekend in this country always gives me more places than I went looking for, which I think is the test of a good loop. You leave the route with the map already redrawing itself in your head, the way you do after most good trips through the back roads.

A Landscape That Lets You Stop

The total miles for the loop felt shorter than they were, the way good drives always do when the country gives you more than you went looking for.