It was nice to have an open day on Ted’s and my visit to Wisconsin. We slept late, had lunch followed by those fabulous desserts, and because the weather was so beautiful, we decided to stop in Wisconsin Dells for a boat tour. We’ve been there several times over the years, but the Dells boat tour is always beautiful. (Full disclosure: Several people and groups we wanted to spend time with were only available on certain days during our visit, so we had to schedule around them, giving us one extra day. This was it.)

The city of Wisconsin Dells is a huge and kitschy tourist trap with a lot of hotels and resorts, each of which features some tacky thing to make your kids want to stay there. For example, here’s some information about and a photo of one of the hotels. (Another source mentioned that it takes 10 minutes to tour the “White House.”) I saw these transformer figures at a different hotel, so they were probably added to the upside-down White House photo.

If you skip the tourist trap area like we did and go directly to the river docks on the “quiet side” of the city, you can take a peaceful, leisurely two-hour cruise through the Dells, a unique area on the Wisconsin River. No transformers included.

The dells (originally the “dalles”) were created when a huge glacial lake in central Wisconsin breached its ice dam about 11,000 years ago. The water rushed free in a catastrophic flood, and the force of the water and the sediment it carried and dropped formed the dells in less than a week–perhaps in as little time as three days. It is hypothesized that the noise of the fiercely rushing water could have been heard as far away as in the five surrounding states.

George Crandall’s family moved to the dells area in 1892. Over the years, whenever farmers wanted to sell their land, the family bought it, tore down the barns, and planted trees. It is said they planted over 37,000 trees in the area. The family failed in their effort to make the riverbank a national park, but they turned the land over to a foundation, which later sold it to the state DNR on the condition that it will never be developed. As a result, 11,000 years after the ice dam broke, Ted and I spent a wonderful two hours enjoying the beautiful scenery in the Wisconsin Dells.

Here’s the dock where the Dells tour begins and that’s our boat in the center.

While we were waiting to board the boat, this woman sat beside me, and I asked her if I could take a picture of her shirt. She told me she bought it when she went to Ben & Jerry’s in Vermont.

This was the beginning of our tour.

This rock formation is called “Black Hawk’s Profile.” Surprise! It’s also informally called “The Old Man of the River”–maybe by those who don’t know who Black Hawk was and can’t remember his name.

This is Witches’ Gulch, the first of two shore stops on the boat tour. Gulches like this were quickly carved by tributaries rushing out of the glacial lake when the ice dam broke. Deep in the gulch, we saw “Witches’ Falls” that empty into a pool named “Witches’ Bathtub.” Witches’ Gulch is a popular place for evening ghost tours.

Some of the rock formations were very narrow.

We felt pretty relaxed on our extra day.

As we walked back to our boat, the sun created a pretty scene in the gulch.

The second land stop on our boat tour was at Stand Rock. That would be the tower-like rock on the left in my photo. Stand Rock is 46 feet tall.

H.H. Bennett owned a photography studio near Wisconsin Dells. Due to the low demand for portraits, he decided to do landscape photography, and he took numerous pictures of the sandstone formations in the dells. He didn’t think two-dimensional pictures did justice to the scenery, so he started making stereoscopes. He sold them nationally, and that led to large numbers of people who wanted to visit the dells in person.

Meanwhile, Bennett worked on inventing a stop action shutter to take clear pictures of moving objects. His best-known stop action photo is an 1886 image of his son jumping across the Stand Rock formation. The gap between the two rocks is about five-and-a-half feet. It took 17 tries before Bennett successfully captured his son mid-air between the rock formations. When Boston audiences saw the photo below, they gasped!

The cost of insurance became too high to have humans jump between the rocks for tourists, so a dog makes the jump now. Rescue dogs are specially trained to do this, and you can see the net below that will catch the dog, if necessary. The dog does only one jump–right to left and then back, where his human counterpart has a treat for him. The dog is fast!!! He jumps over, turns around, and jumps back in only a few seconds. I cut this frame from my video. Those who tried to catch the dog mid-air on their stop action cameras missed it.

The dells come to an abrupt end and look like an ordinary riverbank beyond Stand Rock. This was the end point for our boat tour, so we headed back to the dock where we boarded the boat.

This is how the riverbank looks if you turn your head to the right of the above photo. We’re heading back into the dells.

On our way from the boat to our car, we saw this Corvette in a free parking lot. I told you it’s a kitschy tourist town.

It was a lovely, relaxing afternoon. We had a light dinner before leaving Wisconsin Dells and then we headed for Madison, our next stop.