Wyalusing State Park
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Wyalusing State Park is on the bluffs above the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, near Bagley in Grant County, a few miles south of Prairie du Chien, and it is one of the oldest state parks in Wisconsin. The legislature approved buying the land in 1912, and the park opened in 1917 under the name of Nelson Dewey, the state’s first governor; it took the name Wyalusing in 1937, two years after a new park named for him was created down the river at Cassville. The bluffs rise 500 to 600 feet above the rivers, in layers of dolomite, shale, and sandstone that the rivers cut down through over hundreds of millions of years, and people of the Hopewell and Effigy Mound cultures built burial mounds along the ridges. Signal Point takes its name from the signal fires once lit there. I spent the late afternoon of November 3, 2021, there, after a stop at Blue Mound State Park, while the oaks were still holding their copper and gold leaves under a sky full of small clouds, and went on to Nelson Dewey State Park the next morning. I started at the old park office, a small stone building the Works Progress Administration put up in 1939, now the Paul Lawrence Interpretive Center, after the park’s first superintendent. Then I walked out to Council Point, where a low stone wall runs along the edge of the bluff, and on to Signal Point, looking out over the islands, backwaters, and channels of the river bottoms to the far bluffs, and finished on the trail down toward Treasure Cave.
Photos from Wyalusing State Park
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The view from Council Point.
The old park office, built in 1939, now the Paul Lawrence Interpretive Center.
The steps down toward Treasure Cave.