River

On the way back from Marquette two weeks ago I drove along the Wisconsin River from it's source at Lac Vieux Desert most of the way along the river to where it empties into the Mississippi River near Prairie du Chien, WI. Here are some of the pictures I took of the river along the way.

This is the dam at Lac Vieux Desert that holds back the water that makes up the

source of the Wisconsin River.

A stretch of the upper part of the Wisconsin River. This is probably a few miles from the dam in the last picture. Fun fact: the word "Wisconsin" comes from an Indian word "Wees-Kon-Sin" which means "place of gathering waters"

This is on the upper Wisconsin River you can see that the river is quite a bit bigger than it was at the headwaters but not nearly as big as it will get downstream. The water looks a bit on the low side here.

No picture essay of the Wisconsin River would be complete without a picture of a dam. There are some 26 dams on the approximately 430 miles of the river. It is so good for dams because it drops more than 1000 feet from its source to its mouth (for comprison's sake the Mississippi River drops about 600 feet from where the Wisconsin River runs into the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans...a distance of over 1000 miles).

Even though it's dammed all to hell (I apologize for the pun, it wasn't indended...I can almost hear you all groaning) it still has some rapids left in it. Here are some just downstream of one of the dams in Stevens Point, WI.

This was taken after dark (obviously). You can see the river (this is on the lower part of the river) but the main subject of the picture is the sky...and the stars...notice the big dipper. If you look really closely you can see that stars aren't points of light they are streaks. That's because I had to leave the shutter open for over 2 minutes to get enough light for this picture and the stars moved a little bit in that time.