Fly Fishing the Midwest's Driftless Area

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In The New York Times, Gustave Axelson follows cow trails through one of the U.S.’s least-accessed but most promising trout fisheries, the Driftless region straddling the borders of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. “The word ‘driftless’ refers to the lack of gravelly drift in the region from the last glaciation 12,000 years ago. The Wisconsonian glacier that plowed under much of the upper Midwest missed this pocket of more than 600 spring-fed creeks, and so the Driftless endures as 500-million-year-old karst country, where steep forested valleys descend into shadowed coulees.”