One mile at a time, outdoor enthusiasts create new Driftless Area hiking trail
Nestled in a Fillmore County valley is a 200-acre farm that will soon become part of a 100-mile hiking trail from Chatfield to the southernmost tip of the Mississippi in Minnesota.
“It is some of the most beautiful land in the county,” said Marty Walsh, who is spearheading a volunteer effort to establish the Minnesota Driftless Hiking Trail.
A creek gurgles nearby, the ridgelines feel protective. The region's karst topography creates these deep valleys, steep cliffs and stunning vistas that make the area distinctive, said Walsh.
“That's part of the magic of the Driftless Area. You get to these little winding creek valleys and it's easy to imagine that there's nobody for 50 miles,” said Walsh.
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In the state of more than 10,000 lakes, where the banks of the Boundary Waters and Lake Superior dominate Minnesota’s recreational reputation, Walsh and his fellow outdoor enthusiasts hope this new hiking trail — modeled after the Superior Hiking Trail that weaves together state and private land — puts the Driftless Region the spotlight.
It’s a process that will take volunteers to establish trails, but also private landowners willing to let hikers pass through their property and state land.
The idea for the hiking trail came to Walsh in his previous day job. He was doing community development in Fillmore County, a mostly rural area.
“It gave me an appreciation of when you see a town of 500 to 1,000 people, a lot of people think there's not much there. But if you spend any amount of time there, there's a ton of ideas and people and stories there,” he said.
Walsh points to the Root River bike trail that also crisscrosses the region. It's made nearby Lanesboro an economic hub, where bikers stop to eat, have a beer and spend the night.
He hopes the hiking trail has the same effect.
And so far, local reception has been positive, said Walsh. With a growing network of volunteers and a dozen landowners already on board, he’s confident they’ll have 10 to 20 miles open to the public in the next couple of years.
Landowner volunteers
The farm Walsh is showing off today belongs to Stena and Andy Lieb, who inherited it from her parents.
They were the first private landowners to join the project.
“My husband and I have talked in the past about how we've wanted to use our property in the future. And one of the things that we wanted to do was develop hiking trails. So this really fit with what we had already wanted to do for our property,” Lieb said.
She’s hoping that the foot traffic will also bring more overnight visitors to a small cabin rental she and her family maintain on the property.
Her mother, Winifred Unnasch, said it was an easy decision to share their property with the public.
“You get up in the morning, and you hear just about every bird possible to hear. It's just a beautiful valley,” she said.
Walsh is seeking a $425,000 grant to fund a full time staff person to recruit more landowners like the Liebs. Liability is the biggest concern Walsh encounters when he talks to landowners, but he said state recreational access laws protect owners from lawsuits.
Other property owners are worried about privacy, and Walsh said it goes both ways: He envisions a trail that protects the privacy of the landowner and the hiker.
“Generally, if we only can go right in your backyard it's probably not the location for us,” he said.
Local and state partners
The Driftless Area gets its name from what it doesn't have. Because retreating glaciers never penetrated and flattened this region, it remained free of glacial drift, the ice-embedded rocks and soil that glaciers deposit as they recede, according to the Eagle Bluff center.
As the glaciers melted along the edges of the Driftless Area, they released massive amounts of water, which carved the region’s deep river valleys and created its broad hills and bluffs, including Eagle Bluff.
The center was an early and instrumental advocate for creating a Driftless trail, said Walsh.
“We're all about empowering people to care for the Earth and each other and the hiking trail is trying to do exactly that,” said Executive Director Colleen Foehrenbacher.
The learning center's nine miles of trails will eventually be incorporated into the hiking path as well, she said.
But as someone who lives and works in the mostly rural region, she also sees a big economic benefit to the area.
“I think it's going to bring a lot of visibility to the area, to the small towns. Our long term vision is maybe we can work with landowners to have places where people can stay, or encourage them to stay in the small towns,” she said.
The trail would inevitably cover state land much as it does with the Superior Hiking Trail.
The Department of Natural Resources is supportive of these collaborations, said Rachel Hopper who is the visitor services and outreach manager for the DNR's parks and trails division.
“We all know that being outside in nature has so many benefits, and provides health and wellness benefits to individuals,” she said. “But it’s also a huge boost to local economies and the tourism industry.”
But the process can get complicated in part because different types of state land have different rules, she said. It’s possible the lengthy environmental review process could kick in if the trail has a major impact on state land. And legal documents are required.
“So before we could, you know, jump on board and be like, ‘yes, you know, do this.’ We would need to know where the trail was proposing to go if it was using existing trail systems or building new, and then potential impacts on the land."
For his part, Walsh said mapping the exact route of the trail is still a work in progress.
“If somebody has 1,000 acres of land with five miles of hiking trail on it, and they're outside of our planning corridor we'll work with that,” he said. “It's going to depend upon where landowners come forward and say, ‘We want to work with you.’”
