The western edge of the Midwest and the Great Plains are often referred to as a “fly over zone.”  In other words, it is a good place to fly over but the region has nothing that you want to see.

I have a friend who just spent 4+ months living in this area for the first time—she experienced interesting weather—wide-ranging temperatures and wind—wide open spaces, buffalo burgers, and small-town life and yes, they have live theater, pharmacies, and coffee shops there!

Often it takes living some place to start to pay attention.

My mother grew up near Red Rock Ridge on the Little Cottonwood Creek in southwest Minnesota. She would tell me how she would play in the creek as a child, followed the stream to its “waterfall” and imagined how it flowed into the Des Moines River which flowed into the Mississippi River which flowed into the ocean. She paid attention to where she was living but extended her imagination from that place outward, placing the creek in the context of the larger ocean.

Though just up the road, the geological feature that created the Red Rock Ridge extends far beyond the neighborhood where my mother grew up. The influence of this rock outcropping, that occasionally appears across southwest Minnesota, southeastern South Dakota and a small part of Nebraska, is seen in the red rock on the gravel roads and in the construction of old courthouses across this region. The actual rock, called Sioux Quartzite, is a metamorphic rock that is one of the oldest rocks in the world. It is exposed at the surface in this area because of uplift along a line stretching from southwest to northeast. Sioux Quartzite is extremely resistant to erosion so it has formed a topographic ridge that has been exposed in places along this line.

I recently spent some time with a cousin who lives in Sioux Falls to explore this area on the border between the Midwest and the Great Plains. Sioux Falls is shaped by the same Red Rock Ridge that I grew up hearing about. My cousin, her husband, and I spent a beautiful evening downtown Sioux Falls and walked along the Big Sioux River that flows through the city. We ended our walk at the falls of Sioux Falls which are created by this resistant quartzite ridge. First creating opportunity for water power, the falls are now part of a downtown revitalization effort, making the river and falls a hub for local recreation. As we walked among the Sioux Quartzite that made up the falls, I was thinking of the Red Rock Ridge that was 100 miles away just up the road from our mothers’ home place.

We did travel to Red Rock Ridge on another day, to try and visit the Red Rock Petroglyphs just up the road from our mothers’ home place. (https://www.mnhs.org/jefferspetroglyphs/)  The park was closed but we still got a visit to Little Cottonwood Creek and skipped rocks as my mother had taught me along the creek when I was small, and we followed the creek to its little waterfall. My souvenir was several pieces of Sioux Quartzite from the creek bed to take home for my shelf.

Anybody who has lived in this area knows about wind. The topography of this part of the world is flat from the arctic to the subtropical Gulf of Mexico. Wind is generated from differences in air masses so the combination of flat landscape and contrasting arctic to subtropical airmass sources makes wind a constant. While geologists write about the Sioux Quartzite ridge as a prominent feature that shapes the landscape, this feature is subtle. It takes some paying attention to appreciate its importance. The wind, in contrast, can be anything but subtle.

One windy day we drove to the Lewis and Clark Recreation Area along the Missouri River. We were in search of a place to hike where we might get out of the wind. This park is located in one of the few hilly areas of the region—the loess hills. The loess hills consist of thick deposits of silt. This silt is found spread across the Midwest, but along this part of the Missouri River the silt forms hills that dominate the landscape. Loess is characterized by its uniform texture, yellow color, and its erosion in almost vertical slopes, all features of these hills. The process of forming the loess hills involved ice, water, and wind. The meltwater from continental glaciers that flowed down what is now the Missouri River Valley sorted particles by size, depositing sand and silt in its valley when it receded. Wind picked up the silt and deposited it on the uplands during the dry winter months. Subsequently the loess hill deposits were eroded by streams, creating the landscape we see today.

We had a hike through the forest that now cover the hills. The hike involved going up and down steep hills and was mostly out of the wind. At different points along the way, the vertical slopes and yellow silt became visible, pointing to the processes that shaped the hills.

As we drove out of the loess hills and back toward Sioux Falls, we drove through a dust storm with sustained winds of about 60 miles an hour. With no ground cover on the fields at this time of year, I could easily imagine the winds that created the loess hills and led to the dust storms of the 30s as shown in the film, The Plow that Broke the Plains. At one point we could not see more than a foot in front of us.

I don’t believe in “fly over zones.”  So often we miss experiences because we don’t pay attention to what is around us. In doing so we fail to connect one place to another, missing the richness of the world around us and limiting our imagination. We don’t see how Little Cottonwood Creek runs into the ocean.

If you say there is nothing there to see, then you haven’t looked.