Nature
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Rugged valleys in the hills around this region collect into rivers that feed the Mississippi, and the early French called such a valley a coulee. Large and small, these valleys are still known as coulees, a regional name for a regional landscape. Glaciers never reached here, as the great ice sheets moving out of the north sometimes passed to the west and other times to the east, planing the land, carving out the Great Lakes, and leaving deep deposits of gravel and other sediment everywhere but in coulee country. Views of the coulees along the Mississippi are proudly compared with the Palisades of the Hudson and the hills along the Rhine. Coulee Country is world known through the writings of Hamlin Garland, 1860-1940, a native son.
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Sparta, Wisconsin · United States
