On Tuesday night late, a storm blew threw, bringing rain and fall-like temps, and leaving Wednesday wet and cool and gray. Today wasn’t quite so cool, but still not summer-like. It will be warm again, but this is our first taste of fall.

Late Saturday afternoon, we made our way to Granddad Bluff Park in La Crosse. Unlike some of the other vistas we’ve taken in recently, you can drive most of the way to the overlook at Granddad Bluff. From the parking lot, it’s a short walk to the edge of the bluff.

Not sure about that L. I suppose it stands for La Crosse. I didn’t see any other letters to spell out the name, Hollywood Sign-style.Nice views. La Crosse spreads out to the west of the bluff. The city, pop. 51,000 or so, mostly hugs the Mississippi just south of where the Black River joins it.

I’d have guessed that roving Frenchmen founded the place, but apparently not. Lt. Zebulon Pike passed this way in 1805 and called the area Prairie La Crosse, but the town wasn’t founded until 1841 when a New Yorker named Nathan Myrick showed up.

“Myrick found a partner [and] in Nov. 1841, borrowed an army keelboat and a stock of trader’s goods, and poled up the Mississippi River to Prairie la Crosse (now La Crosse, Wis.),” explains the Clark County History Buffs. “There they built a cabin, the first in La Crosse, and became successful in the Indian trade…”

I have my own tenuous connection to La Crosse, even though last weekend was the first time I’d more than passed through the town. La Crosse is the first place I ever saw in Wisconsin, back in 1978 as our bus rolled through, probably on I-90 at the northern edge of town. I remember being impressed by the rolling hills after traveling through so much Midwestern flatland.

We buzzed through in 2005 on the way to Yellowstone, and I thought then it would be good to visit La Crosse someday. The day happened to be September 5, 2020, first with a look from Granddad Bluff.

The bluff was a source of quarried rock in the 19th century, but as a lookout and prominent local feature, La Crosse residents have reportedly always been fond of the place. So much so that more than 100 years ago, when they believed a new owner was doing to destroy it for stone, a wealthy local resident arranged for the city to acquire it for a park.

Here she is in the park: Ellen Hixon, depicted in a bronze by Wisconsin artist Mike Martino.“A subscription was organized and Ellen P. Hixon, encouraged by two of her sons, Frank and Joseph, donated $12,000 to start the fund,” a sign near the bronze says. In current money, that’s more than $310,000. She was the widow of a local lumber baron, Gideon Hixon. Their house is now a museum, which is only open in a limited way now.

“About twenty other local benefactors and companies then contributed another $3,000 to purchase adjacent lands and to fund roads and other improvements. By 1912 the Hixon family was able to transfer title for the property to the city for use as a public park, and the bluff was saved.”

Good for her. As legacies go, Granddad Bluff’s a pretty good one.

Earlier in the day, we stopped briefly at Tower Hill State Park near Spring Green, Wisconsin, which is better known for Taliesin.

It too offers a good vista, but you have to climb a hill to see it.
At the top of the bluff is a reconstruction of the Helena Shot Tower. It’s closed for now.
In the early 1830s, a Green Bay businessman named Daniel Whitney had the shot tower built for the manufacture of lead shot. Molten lead dropped from a height forms into globes on the way down, which harden when hitting a pool of water below.

You’d think such an operation would do serious business during the Civil War, but it was closed by then. Later Jenkin Lloyd Jones, who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle, developed a retreat on the site. His widow gave it to the state of Wisconsin, which created the park in the 20th century and had the shot tower rebuilt.

The view from near the shot tower is toward the Wisconsin River.
Worth the climb, which wasn’t nearly as exhausting as Devil’s Lake SP or Starved Rock SP or Wyalusing SP or Effigy Mounds NM. Been quite a summer for climbing hills, now that I think about it.