The River Bluffs at Effigy Mounds

“The river does most of the talking up here.”

The woman who says it is standing at a pull-off, looking down through the tree line at the Mississippi. There is a lot of river to look at. It comes around a long bend, spreads into sloughs and side channels, and reassembles downstream as if it had to count itself twice.

This is the Driftless Area of northeastern Iowa. The glaciers stopped short of this country, and the land kept its angles. The bluffs rise hard out of the floodplain, their faces banded with limestone and dolomite. The road into Effigy Mounds National Monument finds a seam in those cliffs and works upward in a set of patient turns. Below, the town is all grain elevators and church steeples. Above, the river becomes something else — not the working water of barges and lock chambers, but a slow argument between land and sky.

The river at this latitude is braided, not a single channel. Islands of willow and silver maple stand in the current, and between them the water moves at different speeds, so the surface is a patchwork of dark and light. The bluffs give the whole scene an unexpected frame: from below the river is the main character, but from above it is the subordinate clause.

The monument does not announce itself from the river. The visitor center is hidden by the trees, and the first sight of the mounds comes only after the climb.

Earth That Keeps Shape

The earthen mounds at Effigy Mounds National Monument sit on the broad top of the bluff, among grasses and black oaks, above reach of the spring floods. Some are low and round, barely more than a swelling in the meadow. Others run long and straight, like lines drawn by someone dragging a hand through wet soil. The ones the monument is named for are shaped like things that moved through the same country: bears, birds, the animals of the valley floor. Some of the mounds stand by themselves; others form clusters along the ridgeline, as if a great deal of thought went into where a person’s eye should land.

The bear mounds are the easiest to read at rest. The body is a long swell of earth; the head is a broader hump; the forelegs are short ridges that trail out to the side. The figure is not monumental in the way carved stone is. It is modest and almost accidental, a shape that someone decided the land already wanted to be.

The shapes are subtle enough that a careless glance does not see them. They need the low light of morning and evening. That is part of the point. The people who made them did not intend to overwhelm; they meant to be understood slowly.

The people who built these mounds lived in the river valley, not on the bluffs. The mound tops were ceremonial ground and burial ground, kept apart from the necessities of daily life. No one knows the full grammar of the effigies — why some mounds were given animal shapes and others simple cones. The forms survive because the bluff was too steep to plow and too rocky to build on, and because the National Park Service now mows the grass instead of letting the forest take the mounds back.

The monument asks visitors to stay on the paths. The request is older than the National Park Service; a ridge that holds the dead has its own ways of enforcing respect. Those who walk close to the mounds often lower their voices without being asked.

A Place to Watch

The river does most of the talking, but not all of it. In spring, the wind gets moving mid-morning and does not settle until sunset. It pushes through the oaks and the junipers and turns the cottonwoods below into a shaking, silver-backed crowd. Turkey vultures ride the updrafts along the bluff, tilting in neat circles. Sometimes a bald eagle goes down the valley, chased by crows, and the whole river seems to notice.

Fall is the sharpest season. The hills hold their colors longer than the bottom does, because the cold drains slowly out of the high ground. On a good afternoon, the two sides of the river are not two colors but one long fire. Then the mist sits in the sloughs until noon, and the mounds take on the gray, bone-colored light of early winter.

Spring is the noisiest season. The valley fills with migrant songbirds, and the floodplain below the bluff becomes a green racket of small voices. The river rises with snowmelt from the north and carries whole trees down in the current.

Winter simplifies the place. Snow fills the low spots of the mounds, and the bear shapes read as white outlines against the dead grass. The river, seen from above, runs dark and almost oily between sheets of ice. The wind is the only thing that does not freeze, and it comes off the water in long, dry gusts.

In summer, the heat accumulates, and the monument’s trails empty out after the middle of the day. The shade under the oaks is thin but real. People sit on benches with their backs to the trees and watch the river move without appearing to move. The Mississippi at this distance hides its force. The water is slow, and the barges are slow, and the only thing in a hurry is the wind.

Reading the Ridgeline

The word effigy turns a lump of dirt into a document. Standing on the bluff, there is a reason the forms were placed here, even if the language they are written in is gone. From the ridgeline, the river draws the shapes already present in the mounds: long curves, broadened middles, necks of water between islands. The effigies repeat the valley below at a smaller scale, as if the people who built them had watched the river long enough to learn that a body of water is also a body.

The mounds are old, but the country they belong to is older. The bluff stone is full of fossils, small spirals and fan shapes pressed into the gray. A walk across the ridgeline goes through time the way the river goes through land, by holding on to the edges and taking the turns slowly.

This is not a dramatic landscape. It has no peaks, no canyons, no distance. It is a place of modest heights and long views, and the power of it is in the pause.

Across the river, Wisconsin rises in the same ridgeline, a darker blue in the evening. Late in the day, the monument shows its best restraint. The low sun throws the mounds into relief, and each one carries a long shadow into the grass. The wind drops. The river below goes from silver to dark pewter. The birds that spent all day in the updrafts come down to the trees and go quiet. Then the only sound is the work of the valley, and the conversation is over.

Effigy Mounds National Monument

Photos: RuggyBearLA (CC BY 2.0)