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Pedaling into the Past

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Riding the dike at sunset in the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Aaron Teasdale. (left) The Monarch in Fountain City, Wisconsin, has been catering to locals and travelers since 1894.

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The mission of Adventure Cycling Association is to inspire people of all ages to travel by bicycle. We help cyclists explore the landscapes and history of America for fitness, fun, and self-discovery.

SWEET AS TREMPEALEAU HONEY by Aaron Teasdale Protected from the ravages of geologically recent glaciation, the rolling landscape of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, offers up some great road riding.

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RIDING ARIZONA by Patrick O’Grady Mad Dog shakes off winter and takes on Aventure Cycling‘s Arizona Road Adventure.

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ROLLING IN NORTH CAROLINA by Chuck Haney

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Sweet as Trempealeau Honey A father and son explore the riding and their pasts in the Mississippi River Valley and Trempealeau County, Wisconsin.

Story and photos by Aaron Teasdale

Sunshine drenched the cool morning air as three cyclists stood over a pair of graves in a Winona, Minnesota cemetery. One reached down to brush fallen maple leaves off the headstones, revealing the name Teasdale.

“Do you have a plot here Harold?”

David asked my father.

“Oh no,” Dad replied quickly, clearly not relishing the thought. “I think I’ll just have my ashes scattered in the mountains.”

Birdsong filled the cemetery as we considered the graves of my grandparents. I thought about the last times I saw them alive and the moment I watched their coffins lowered into the earth. Looking up, a

flock of migrating geese winged overhead in a loose V and my eyes swept across a thick forest, still verdant that first week of October, blanketing the surrounding hills in countless shades of green. We may have been in a burial ground, but all around us in the trees, sky, and rivers, life carried on in all its swirling beauty.

It might seem strange, but as we rode around the cemetery for a few minutes, with the majestic, century-old trees, the peaceful setting, and the cars driving at a snail’s pace, I realized that riding in cemeteries is actually pretty nice. It was the first of several discoveries we’d make over

Nuts & Bolts: Trempealeau County Where to ride: Incorporating over 400 miles of paved, low-traffic roads in Trempealeau and neighboring Buffalo county, the freely available route maps we used (www.ridebctc.com) lead you through an undulating, pastoral paradise for touring and road riding. Round, blue Trail Steward signs, seen in local businesses and on residential driveway posts, signify bike-friendly locations for assistance, water, or bathroom breaks.

Nearby Rail-Trails: From the Trempealeau Wildlife Refuge, the Great River Trail leads south to the LaCrosse

can be intensely muggy. September tends to be sunny and dry with pleasant temperatures. Mid-October is cooler, but the fall colors are at their peak.

Where to stay: Winona: we stayed at and recommend the historic Carriage House Bed and Breakfast (507-452-8256, www.chbb. com, $100-$150 per night).  Tremepealeau: the Trempealeau Hotel (608-534-6898, www.trempealeau hotel.com) offers Old World character with appealingly simple rooms and a shared bathroom ($40-$50 per night).

Modern rooms and cottages are also available for higher rates. Their restaurant is one of the best in the area. The only downside for cyclists staying in Trempealeau is the lack of any restaurant that serves breakfast, though there are options in nearby towns.  Fountain City: the Monarch’s Irish Traveller Guest House (608-687-4231, ww.monarchtavern.com), adjacent to the recommended Monarch Public House, is adequate and inexpensive.

Some cyclists swear by the higher-end Hawk’s View Cottages (866-2930803, www.hawksview.net), situated on the river bluffs above town. 

Shops: Brone’s Bike Shop (608-687-8601, www.bronesbikeshop.com) in Fountain City is race-oriented, but well stocked and knowledgeable about the area’s best riding.  Adventure Cycle and Ski (507-4524228, www.advcycle.com) in Winona is a full-service shop that also rents comfort bikes. 

River State Trail, Elroy-Sparta Trail, and the 400 Trail for 100 miles of continuous rail-trail.

When to go: May through October is your best bet, though July and August

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the next three days as we rode into the past through a landscape steeped in history and filled with unexpected twists.

David and my father grew up together in and around Winona, a college town of 25,000 on the banks of the Mississippi River. As we left the cemetery and spun through the city, Dad pointed out family landmarks and David showed us his old barbershop that was once written up in Ripley’s Believe it or Not due to the impossibly perfect name of its barber: Harry Trim.

Our wheels carried us onward as we rode out of town on a two-lane county road, the Mississippi visible through the trees on our left and forest-packed bluffs vaulting up on our right, until we reached the tiny hamlet of Homer. After looking at Dad’s old one-room schoolhouse (“It shrunk!” he exclamed), we headed up the road to his childhood home.

“Our house doesn’t usually attract this much attention,” said a smiling man in his sixties as he walked to where we stood in the road, ogling his home. As he and Dad chatted, he said that he and his wife had lived in the old house on a hill overlooking the Mississippi for 16 years, but recent health challenges were making the property “a lot to keep on top of.” With a slight smile he said, “It catches up with all of us.”

He wished us luck on our journey and we sped back down the hill from the house, then turned away from the river and followed the quiet road up Homer Valley.

“This is the hill I used to ride my first bicycle down,” Dad said as we started climbing, and then, pointing to a weathered farm house, he added, “And that’s the house where the dogs lived.” The dogs, he explained, had a supernatural sense of his every passing, charging out for the chase as he whirred past, pedaling his one-speed as fast as his little-boy legs would go.

Then the road tilted upward in earnest, twisting its way up a ravine and through the river bluffs, a brilliant afternoon sun reflecting off exposed sandstone faces along the roadside. Southern Minnesota may be frying-pan flat, but the steep hills along the Mississippi River Valley are the exception, inspiring Greg LeMond to train here during his racing days.

At the top of the climb, where we started looping back towards Winona through a sea of cornfields and pumpkin stands, a graying, LeMond-inspired cyclist in full roadie kit pulled up alongside us. Glancing at our touring bikes and oversized seatbags, he asked where we were headed. When we

explained we were going across the river into Wisconisn for a few days of riding in Trempealeau County he got visibly excited.

“You won’t find better road riding anywhere,” he said emphatically. “The roads are narrower, there’s less traffic, and more hills.” Then, as if reliving them in his mind, he added, “There are some kick-ass hills over there.”

An hour later we’d passed back through Winona and were riding a bridge over the Mississippi, crossing into Wisconsin under a cool, mid-afternoon sun. Turning south along the river’s bottomlands we headed towards the tiny river town of Trempealeau, where we had a room in the historic Trempealeau Hotel reserved for the night.

After a few miles of highway riding, we turned off at our first opportunity into the Trempealeau Wildlife Refuge, where a converted rail-bed led us alongside the Trempealeau River and into a world of wetlands and riverine forest. Everywhere were birds as we rode dirt paths past marshy pools blanketed in waterfowl, where egrets stalked the shallows beneath coursing redshouldered hawks. An avian cacophony of honking, quacking, chirping, and squawking filled our ears — we were in the Mississippi Flyway and it was the heart of

Tranquil trundle. Riding with the great majority in a Winona cemetery.

fall migration. We lingered for probably too long, intoxicated by the explosion of life.

As the sun slipped behind the horizon, we headed into the refuge’s southern reaches hoping to find a backdoor route to Trempealeau, a few miles further south. Pedaling along an earthen dike, the surrounding water’s surface reflected the vibrant hues of sunset until, finally, I had no choice but to stop and take photographs

while Dad and David scouted the route ahead. Then, as if birthed from the sunset’s last light, 25 white pelicans, one of the largest flying birds in the world, flew towards me from the west, skimming across the twilight in a great V. I spun, mouth agape, as they flew directly overhead, low enough to hear their wings whistling in the air. On nine-foot wingspans, they soared straight into a nearly full moon shining like a beacon

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in the dusky-blue sky, the exquisite beauty of it all nearly bringing tears to my eyes.

When the hoped-for route into Trempealeau hit a dead end, we pedaled back along the dike as the last light melted from the sky. Braille-riding our way out of the refuge — beavers splashing their tails in unseen pools, herons hunting silently in moonlit marshes — we emerged onto the smoothly paved roads of Trempealeau County. Riding gleefully in the lunar light, we chased our moonshadows to the Trempealeau Hotel, where sprawling dinners and warm beds awaited.

I’d come back here to the Midwest from Montana for my brother’s wedding, and afterwards Dad, David, and I had driven the two hours south from the Twin Cities for a three-day bike ride through the land of our ancestors. I hadn’t visited Winona in many years, and had never explored the Trempealeau area where our family heritage ran deep. With Dad moving into the latter half of his sixties, I figured the time was now to explore our family history.

But that wasn’t our only reason for coming here. I’d heard rumors of little-known, world-class road cycling in the region, and had come across a map for cycling in Trempealeau County that touted the “nation’s largest connected bicycle loop system.” Though I’m typically a back-

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MINNESOTA country junkie who steers clear of pavement, between the family history and the whispers of exceptional riding, I figured this was too good an opportunity to pass up. Or at least it seemed that way when we planned it several months in advance.

Looking out the window of the Trempealeau Hotel the following morning at a bank of dark thunderheads barreling in our direction, it actually seemed like a pretty easy opportunity to pass up. It didn’t help that the forecast was calling for

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two days of heavy rain with temperatures around 50 degrees. After seriously considering bagging the trip, we decided that we were not going to let a little torrential rain slow us down.

Or at least Dad and I decided that.

David, who claimed that “riding in the rain insults my intelligence,” opted to head back to Minneapolis.

With no real agenda other than to explore, we looked at the 400-plus-mile network of bicycle routes honeycombing

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the map and figured we’d just head out for the day and ride. The closest thing we had to a plan was our spur-of-the-moment decision to spend the night in Fountain City, another river town 20 miles to the north, because my great grandparents had met there.

But first there were things to see in Trempealeau. A few blocks from the hotel we came to the house where my great, great grandparents lived after arriving from Norway. Dad used to spend time there in the summers, and as we looked at the house there was a moment where he grew quiet.

Then we were off again, our ride, like life, moving ever forward.

“It’s now the Bank of Trempealeau, for God’s sake!” Dad said, as we pulled up to a building on Main Street. Formerly our family-owned town market, Dad used to help his uncles there by delivering groceries in the 1950s. Now it was just a genericlooking bank, its history wiped clean.

Then, as an added insult, it started to rain.

As we munched Clif Bars on the sidewalk, a sidewalk my father had stood on countless times over half a century ago, I turned to David, who was soon to break away, and said, “This is the difference between day rides and touring — if you were day riding you wouldn’t go out today.”

After riding out of town and bidding David farewell, Dad and I pedaled up County Road G under a weeping sky. The forecast that morning had called for 10-20 mph winds from the southeast, so I figured we’d use them to head northwest during the first part of the day, looping back towards Fountain City and the Mississippi when the winds were likely to die down in the late afternoon.

Bluff upon bluff stacked into the misty distance as we climbed away from the river into a rolling landscape of farms and patchwork forest, following the road’s twisting black ribbon through marsh and wetland, past red barns and brick farmhouses, dropping into wooded glens and climbing up more forested hills that led to valley after valley. Though the temperature was in the upper forties, we wore waterproof jackets and pants, warm gloves, and, in lieu of booties, plastic bags over our socks cinched with rubber bands around our ankles. We made a few adjustments that first hour to make sure we were just warm enough, but not too warm to sweat through our clothes, and kept pedaling. We’d long ago accepted that the rain would pound us all day and there was nothing we could do about it,

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Pastoral paradise. Even when it’s raining, the riding in Trempealeau County is magnificent.

which was the key. Once we accepted the rain, we were free to simply enjoy the ride.

Later that morning, while paused at the junction of county roads G and J, both of which the map showed as cycling routes, a 1970’s sedan pulled up and an old-timer in a flannel shirt and green, waxed-cotton duckbill hat leaned out the window and said, “You guys need some help?”

“No, thanks,” I said, water cascading off my helmet. “We’re just deciding on our route into Arcadia.”

Flashing a wide smile from the dry warmth of his car, he said, “Boy, you guys must really like the biking!”

At this we laughed and I said, “We’re just out on a three-day ride — can’t control the weather.” This probably made no

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sense to him whatsoever. We might as well have said, “we’re just crazy people, riding around because we were dropped on our heads as babies!” — but he laughed and waved as he drove away.

Around midday we arrived in Arcadia, the largest town in Trempealeau County with 2,400 people, and walked into the Kozy Korner restaurant where I asked, a

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note of desperation in my voice, “Can we still get breakfast?”

Diner-style breakfasts are my comfort food and after hours of riding in cold rain on too little calories, I had needs. There was a pause as the two plump women in aprons behind the counter assessed my father and me, water dripping off our bodies and pooling on the floor.

“Sure,” one of them answered. “You guys look like you could use a warm breakfast.”

After inhaling our food, and not feeling particularly charmed by the relative metropolis of Arcadia, we headed out of town via a new route and back into the Wisconsin countryside. On we rode, over hill and dale, through rural villages and well-kept farms, each big climb leading to a new valley — Eagle Valley, Brandhorst Valley, Myers Valley.

Though glaciers mercilessly flattened most of the landscape in the upper Midwest during the last ice age, through a stroke of geologic luck this pocket of western Wisconsin was spared. Called the Driftless Zone, it was an island of earth in a sea of ice. Its ancient Karst topography emerged unscathed, its valleys carving deeper and deeper as its labyrinths of brooks, creeks, and rivers flushed with glacial melt.

As we pedaled up another winding 500foot climb, the surrounding bluffs clothed in forest, the valley below a green and gold patchwork of field and wetland, I began to understand why one rider referred to the area as the “Tuscany of Wisconsin.” Dad, meanwhile, had been letting out a steady stream of “Wows” and “Goshes,” all day.

“This is all new to me, in a way,” he said as we stopped at the top of the hill to take in a sweeping view of the rolling landscape spilling away before us. “When I was a kid, we just visited the river towns for the restaurants, but I’ve never experienced the area this way.”

“This way,” of course, meant under his own power, in the open air, at 15 miles per hour, even slower up the hills, immersed in the sights, smells, sounds, and biblical rain of the fertile Wisconsin countryside. We had figured it would be pleasant here, but neither of us had any idea it would be this pretty. Nor did we expect the riding to be this flat-out great.

As we let the momentum from another long, twisting descent pull us into a new valley bottom, no cars in sight, eagles taking flight from roadside trees, I heard myself saying, “If there was road riding like this is Montana, I might actually get a road bike.” Which was something the

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traffic-loathing, wilderness lover in me had never thought before. But the riding was so fun, the countryside so inviting, it was true. The roads might not have had shoulders — heck, many of them had no striping whatsoever — but it really doesn’t matter when there’s no traffic. (On the busiest roads, a car passed every few minutes; on the quieter ones, there were no cars at all.)

For the rest of the afternoon we spun along roads that felt more like private bike paths, past quiet pastures, hardwood forests, and golden cornfield after golden cornfield.

Normally, little-used rural roads like these would be gravel, but in Wisconsin, where the dairy industry was once king, the roads were paved to keep the drive smooth for dairy trucks hauling milk in glass bottles to market.

As we rode a sinuous bike-path– like road, along the quiet banks of the Trempealeau River, I began to see these waterways as a metaphor for ancestry. If we think of ourselves as rivers flowing through the channels of our lives, then we all have tributaries that extend back into the landscape of the past — grandparents, great grandparents, each generation splitting off into finer and more distant rivulets that reach back higher into the hills of history.

“This looks like it’s going to be a fun

one!” I called out that evening as we came to the edge of the bluffs over the Mississippi River. We’d picked County Road YY for our descent into Fountain City and it pitched downward at a surprisingly steep angle.

In a flash, gravity pulled me to 35 mph as I shot down the serpentine strip of pavement, water on its surface reflecting the early evening light. Clouds clung to the bluffs and greenery arced over the roadside, making it feel for all the world like plummeting through a Central American cloudforest.

“That certainly qualified as a ‘kick-ass hill,’” I said to Dad when he caught up with me at the bottom, remembering the enthusiastic words of the racy rider in Minnesota the previous morning.

We were now on the outskirts of Fountain City, which we knew pretty much nothing about, though I’d envisioned us rolling down Main Street and up to a historic hotel like the one in Trempealeau. But under the heaviest rain of the day, in dimming evening light, and with no hotels in sight, we quickly pulled into Brone’s Bike Shop to ask for advice. When Mark, the young man working there, said Fountain City had turned into a bedroom community for Winona and didn’t offer much for food and lodging, we were crestfallen. Looking at us for a minute — drenched, hungry, and clearly not mak-

ing it anywhere but Fountain City for the night — he made a quick phone call and told us to head over to the Monarch Public House, an Irish pub downtown.

When we walked in the front door of the Monarch a short while later we were greeted by John Harrington, the smiling, Gaelic-speaking owner. We could stay in his guest apartment next door, he said, but first why didn’t we sit down for some hot food.

He didn’t have to offer twice. As we tilted back Irish ales and munched on leprechaun legs (also known as battered green beans) in his beautifully restored historic pub, John pointed us out to everyone that walked in from the rain with the booming announcement, “Those two guys have been riding bicycles since 9:00 this morning!”

When a pair of cyclists from the Twin Cities came over to chat, they looked at us admiringly and admitted that they’d planned to ride today, but were on fenderless go-fast bikes and had decided against it. Down for a few days of riding, they were itching to get out on a 100-miler the next day. The riding here is as good as anywhere, they said, “and it’s like this all the way to Madison.”

As we tooled around town for a while the next morning, exploring the neighborhood streets that terraced up the lower river bluffs, Dad pointed to a restored steamboat

Bike path or road? Cruising a car-free lane along the Trempeleau River.

on the river and said that my great grandparents had met here while working as a deckhand and a cook on steamboats. After I loaded up on caffeine at a local coffee shop, where several graying farmers in flannel shirts each tried to convince us that the roads around their particular farm were the most scenic in the area, we climbed 600 feet back up the river bluffs and into the countryside for our final day of riding.

The rain started falling again, but we didn’t care. We could have bagged the trip after the first day, but we decided to embrace the rain. We were here to ride together, father and son, through the terrain of our ancestral past.

That afternoon, after hours of some of the best riding of the trip, the rain lightened as we climbed a steep road out of Joos Valley. Heating up, I stripped off gloves,

helmet, and headband to feel the crisp fall air flow across my skin. Suddenly, an eruption of birdsong came from the forest spilling over the roadsides, blue jays and robins flying back and forth overhead. Marveling at their chorus, I looked up at the stream of life coursing above me. Legs pumping as I spun upwards through rich greenery, a light, cool rain misting my face, my father pedaling up the hill ahead, I had one of those crystalline moments where everything becomes supremely vivid, and the combined whole of your perceptions leave an imprint in your mind of such richness and beauty you know it’s a moment you’ll always remember. Savoring the feeling, I was acutely aware of time spinning inexorably forward. I knew that at some point, like the generations that came before, we’d be passing on — my father, me, all of us — but right then all I knew was that life was beautiful and that it was good to be there, my Dad and I, in the land of our ancestors.

It was good to be alive.

Aaron Teasdale is a long-time Adventure Cyclist writer and a former deputy editor of this magazine.

He’s also written for many other national publications.

For more information about Aaron, visit aaronteas dale.com. You can also read his blog at aaronteasdale. blogspot.com.

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