Minnesota has lost 99 percent of its native prairies and 92 percent of its old-growth forests, and this 13-acre parcel seeks to recover part of that original landscape in southeastern Minnesota, a diverse region of prairies and bluffs, ravines and river valleys, rich wetlands, and the Mississippi. For thousands of years, this transition zone between prairie grasslands to the west and coniferous forests to the east has been shaped by geology and human use. About 75,000 years ago, a great sheet of ice centered on what is now Hudson Bay moved south but did not pass over this region, instead covering lands to the west and east while scraping and flattening them and depositing rock and gravel. When the last glacier to cover North America began to melt, tremendous torrents of water carved these bluffs and ravines and created what would become the Mississippi, the longest river valley in North America. In this varied landscape, mastodons, mammoths, turtles, and giant river fish found a home, and over time its diverse food supply attracted early Native Americans, with people walking this land for roughly 12,000 years. The most significant change began in the mid 1800s, when riverboats brought early settlers, prairies became farmland, oak groves were harvested for houses, gravel was excavated for roads and railroad beds, and the native landscape was transformed. This area is an effort to restore a sample of Goodhue County's native prairies and woodlands.