The Driftless Region

There’s abundant natural beauty to savor around Lanesboro—rolling hills, limestone rock walls, abundant freshwater streams and fertile soil. You have to wonder, though, do the thousands of sightseers who soak in that natural beauty every year have a sense of how all of that beauty came to be? That’s quite a story, an ancient story, all in itself.

The origins of our local limestone base-layer can be traced back 500 million years—before the formation of the Pangea Supercontinent. Southeast Minnesota was the base of a shallow sea teaming with life. Sand, mud and sea creature fossils were deposited over millennia and compacted into the limestone of Northeastern Iowa, Southwestern Wisconsin and Southeastern Minnesota. Over time, erosion and rushing waters broke down those deposits and dissolved sedimentary rock, creating the unique Karst topography we see locally today featuring high bluffs, narrow valleys, underground rivers, sinkholes, and caves.

As the Earth cooled, much of the water on it froze into glaciers, great ice masses that inched slowly across the continents. As that happened, the glaciers melted and the gravel, clay, rocks, and silt left behind collectively became known as “drift.”

Sometime between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago, the last glacier moved across the upper Midwest, leaving enormous piles of drift in its wake. The Karst topography of the area stopped the advancement of the glacier, leaving it free of drift. Today, the entire tri-state area gets its name from our lack of that sediment. This is...The Driftless Region.