Wisconsin Dells offer suprising delights

December 21, 2014 11:00 pm • Last Updated: December 22, 2014 12:42 pm

By By Tim Norris

Palfrey's Glen is one of many scenic areas in Wisconsin.

Destinations can seem so pre-determined — catchy jingles on a hurdy-gurdy, calendar images on a carousel — that travelers can ignore what’s nearby. Sometimes, within reach of the main attraction, are hidden grottoes, architectural marvels, even elephants bathing in a river.

In Wisconsin, host to many wonders, there is a magnet for summer vacationers, especially families: Wisconsin Dells. Before the 1950s, the dells themselves were the draw, with picnics and gentle boat rides along spectacular sandstone cliffs carved by the great Wisconsin River.

Then Tommy Bartlett installed his water-ski show (a version endures), and amphibious mechanical ducks from World War II chugged in, offering land-and-water adventure tours. Promoters found strength in novelty and numbers. The city has become a carnival of family action and faux-rustic attractions: go-carts, water slides, miniature golf, magic shows, zip-line aerial tours, and a life-sized Trojan Horse. It’s the state’s most-visited destination. For anyone trying to escape or recuperate, it might seem a little much.

Relief is near. Just 13 miles south, the state’s second-most-visited space climbs and spreads as quietly as wind in the pines, around a crack in the earth that produced a lake 750 feet deep: Devil’s Lake State Park. There are hiking trails, beach for swimmers and paddlers, scuba-diving, spectacular overlooks and grounds for all kinds of camping, from tents to full-service RVs and vans.

But wait! There’s more. Much more. The town at the park’s gates is Baraboo, cradled in the Baraboo Hills where the great glaciers pulled up, and that’s where French trapper Jean Baribault started his trading post in the early 1800s. It’s also where August and Marie Ruengling (he from Germany via Buffalo, she from France) raised their seven sons. Five of the boys became known to the world and posterity, with a slight Anglo name-change, as the Ringling Brothers.

Their circus, however far it traveled, even with P.T. Barnum’s and James A. Bailey’s show in tow, never really left town.

You can run away to join it by flying into Milwaukee (congenial and convenient airport) or Madison (even easier, but more expensive) and car-renting. I’d rather motor.

Ignore Google. This is a vacation, right? Here’s how I’d reach the area from southern Connecticut and Rhode Island: Head north up to I-90 and west, through Massachusetts and up through New York state and into Ontario, Canada – a welcoming place, and much more direct – and then into Michigan. Stay off the interstate highways wherever possible and drive until you hit Lake Michigan.

Now, go the water route. No, not the northwest passage, but a nautical alternative that lifts you above the awful traffic around Chicago. This transit calls for car ferries.

There are two ferry rides from May to October or November, and the first and longest offers an option. You can take the fast ferry, the Lake Express, out of Muskegon, or you can go for Ludington’s more leisurely and funkier experience with the S.S. Badger, which looks and feels like a SHIP. The rabbit lands you in the big town, Milwaukee, the dowager in Manitowoc, home to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum and a WWII submarine, the U.S.S. Cobia (Submarines once were built there.)

Either way, tolerate multi-lanes to Madison, then look north.

Coming out of the Wisconsin capital on Highway 19 and then through Waunakee, take a right on Highway 113 and follow it through Lodi past postcard farms and along the Wisconsin River to a sign that says “ferry.” Turn into the lot, and into line. The ferry across Lake Wisconsin is brief but scenic, launching and landing near ice cream parlors. It’s also free. Then take a left on Highway 78, then a right back onto 113.

Over the river and through the woods, across the Baraboo city limits where 113 becomes Water Street, bright banners will jump into view. Under them, you’ll find the striped canopy of a real live circus — and a celebration of the circus that WAS. You might even see elephants getting a bath in the Baraboo River.

Circus World is a summer attraction and a year-round museum, boasting, among other things, a mint-fresh collection of original gilded circus wagons — they’re paraded through town each July — and live performers and their animals. Tristan Crist’s magic show starts in spring and runs through fall. This is also home to the Robert L. Parkinson Library, the greatest circus archive on earth. Circus World is owned, in fact, by the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Many of the buildings from the circus’s original Winter Quarters remain, their designations painted on the brick walls. My favorite reads “Baby Chicks.”

In the heart of Baraboo stands the eldest of the brothers’ gifts to the city, the Al. Ringling Theatre. (The period after Al. stems from the careful abbreviation of his name, C. August Albrecht). Newly restored, the ornate Al. hosts live theater, music, entertainers and events.

After the circus’s cotton candy and the theater’s air-popped corn (and a burger, maybe, at the Square Tavern farther down on 4th Street), you might need some fresh air.

Woods, water, boat launches, boat rentals, fishing tackle and lures and worms and minnows, all wait within easy reach. And you can find hidden places, too. There is a grotto called Parfrey’s Glen off Route 113, less than a mile in on a path through the woods and connected by other trails to Devil’s Lake. Access to the glen has been damaged, so watch your step, but waterfall there is worth the trek.

Afterward, you might need nourishment. Baraboo itself offers the Little Village Café (blackened catfish, penne rigate al pesto) and the Log Cabin (flapjacks, homemade pie), and, for a classic Midwestern smorgasbord, the Farm Kitchen, and, nearby, the more haute-cuisine Barn.

For the overnight (or two, or three), within or near the cities of Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells, you can find a full range of chain hotels and a variety of family-owned local lodgings, some as frugal as $49 a night. Once settled in, try a day trip.

From Baraboo, head west to Reedsburg and then south on Highway 23 to Spring Green, known for its crafts, art galleries, the nearby American Players Theatre, and its best-known native son, who once described himself, in a court appearance, as “the world’s greatest architect” — Frank Lloyd Wright.

When a reporter asked afterward if his remark was a little immodest, Wright said, “I was under oath.”

The house that Wright built in 1913 for himself and his lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, still proudly stands where he left it, on the brow of a great hill east of the Wisconsin River, with a view to the farm fields of his mother’s family, the Lloyd-Joneses, where Wright spent his childhood. He called his house Taliesin, after a sixth-century Welsh poet —

“I have been a multitude of shapes,

Before I assumed a consistent form.

I have been a sword, narrow, variegated,

I have been a tear in the air,

I have been in the dullest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

I have been a book in the origin.”

— Taliesin Ben Beirdd

The Visitors Center transports guests by van to tours of the home and Hillside Home School, which Wright designed for his school-teacher aunts in 1902. The Taliesin grounds feature soft hills, a dammed-up pond, working farm fields, a dramatic windmill Wright called Romeo and Juliet, and the “world’s most beautiful chicken coop.” Hillside boasts a variety of Wright memorabilia, a theater and the drafting studio, where Wright and his apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship worked. A few still do, as part of a school overseen by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation from Taliesin West, in Arizona.

Tours (which run from May through October) are exceptional; well-trained guides draw their own accounts from the Taliesin Preservation Commission‘s deep pool of knowledge to narrate Wright’s life and work. My favorite place there? A small family cemetery under tall trees, where a visitor can find, among others, the architect’s last resting place (with his second wife, Olgivanna) and also the grave of his niece, the actress Anne Baxter. (A note: The gorgeous property was also the site of seven tragic killings in August, 1914. The guides don’t like talking about it, but they will tell you what they know about the murder of Mamah Borthwick and her two children by the household cook in 1914.)

Highway 23 will bring you to a more popular tourist-snagger, the House on the Rock. Basically, it’s a striking structure on a chimney rock that houses a collection of collections, from pipe organs and mechanical musical instruments to doll houses and weaponry. A lot of people like it.

Or you can head back to Baraboo and north, where the state has turned U.S. 12 into a new multi-lane highway. Avoid that. On the old Route 12, now County Highway BD, you’ll pass the mammoth Ho-Chunk Casino, and a wood products place before you arrive at Cow Pies. The factory makes candy, chocolate, pecans and caramel in delicious concoctions. You can watch the process and sample the sweet outcomes.

Just up the highway, a single modest sign points to the International Crane Foundation. Remember the movie where the guy piloting an ultralight plane is leading a flock of endangered whooping crane-lets to new nesting grounds in Florida? The cranes and the pilot started right here, at the ICF, and you’ll still find some whooping cranes in residence.

Wisconsin Dells sprawls beyond with a water-park and mini-golf and fast-food. And the ride on the motorized ducks IS fun, wending through woods and plunging into the river for a cruise past the dells.

Make sure you follow the sign pointing off U.S. 12 just south of the Dells to Mirror Lake State Park. The lake itself shimmers amid piney woods, and what’s around it can be haunting.

There was a house up there where (I’ve been told) bootleggers and mob bosses partied heartily and hid from prying eyes. Old Scarface, Al Capone, kept a lakefront cabin in Wisconsin, not far away, so that story doesn’t seem a stretch.

But the better story plays out live-and-in-person on Mirror Lake’s scenic shores and its network of foot-friendly trails winding through woods.

Devil’s Lake has many miles of trails, too, just as rewarding, through shadowed forest and across sunlit fields and along marshes and wind-carved sandstone colonnades. Just be forewarned: the colored markers have been replaced by wordy signage. Go early, pack a little food and keep track of your surrounding.

Losing yourself in the Baraboo area, away from the noise and hurry, might help you find yourself. And people there aren‘t just clowning around.

Taliesin courtyard at the home of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.