Terry-L

Learned chess at the age of 9 in West Bend, Wisconsin. I am still a Green Bay Packer fan, even though I now live in Hagerstown, Maryland , less than 12 miles from the Appalachian Trail. The photograph with my account is from Devil's Lake State Park, 39 miles Northwest of Madison, Wisconsin. Photo taken from the top of the East Bluff, 500 feet above the sparkling waters of Devil's Lake. The rocks are 1.1 billion year old quartzite. Devil's Lake was formed about 15,000 years ago when a terminal morraine formed on the ice-chocked Wisconsin River, which over the next two or three thousand years relocated itself 6 to 9 miles farther east. When all the glacial ice melted, the terminal morraine remained, acting as a dam, and wondrously beautiful Devil's Lake came into existence, where the Wisconsin River once had flowed. Just a few miles to the west of Devil's Lake lies the "driftless area". It extends all the way west to the Mississippi River and it was never glaciated in the most recent glaciation, causing the landscape to be drastically different than the rest of Wisconsin. The "driftless area" has no natural lakes. Instead, the "driftless area" has deeply erroded valleys and marvelously sculpted areas of different layers of limestone and sandstone, preserved for the ages in parks such as Governor Dodge, Wildcat Mountain, Wyalusing, Nelson Dewey, Blue Mound and Natural Bridge. Once on a warm January day spent hiking at Wyalusing State Park, located at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers, my wife Cathy and I counted 42 Bald Eagles. In January through March Bald Eagles fly down from Canada into MInnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin to be near open water so that they can find fish to eat.