May flowers and things cold at Witches' Gulch

April showers and all that.

Seems we had more April snow, but Helen has been helping Tom work on the yard to get some more flowers and other things moved around. Today has brought May showers, thunder and lightning and more is predicted for tomorrow. When I was working at the library, we got a torrential spell. The good news is that the roof didn't leak the way it had a month or so back when a foot or so of snow had piled up.

It was still cool enough in Witches' Gulch -- one of the sights along the Wisconsin River that is included in the boat tours -- when Tom and Helen were there yesterday that you could see your breath and there are patches of unmelted snow. The boats stop and passengers walk up along the gulch to a rustic snack bar. During the warmer months, it is refreshingly cool there.

According to Native American legend it was a great serpent, wriggling down from the north and his home near the Big Lake, that formed the bed of the Wisconsin River. Crawling over the forests and the fields, his huge body wore an immense groove in the land and the water rushed in behind him. When he came to the sandstone ridge where the Dells begins he thrust his great head into a crevice between the rocks and pushed them aside to form a narrow, winding passage. At his approach, lesser serpents fled forming the canyons which lead off from the main channel. It was these timid, lesser serpents that formed Coldwater Canyon and Witches' Gulch, so the legend goes.