Finding community and connection in Iowa’s nature
After a childhood of moving from place to place to follow her parents in the military, Kelly Madigan craved connection – to a landscape, to a community, to someplace she could call home. While living in Nebraska, Kelly passed through Iowa’s Loess Hills countless times as she made the drive to visit family in southern Minnesota. She fell in love with the landscape from a distance. Then, years later, she decided to make the hills her permanent home and set her sights on helping to protect them.
In 2007, she purchased an old farmhouse in the countryside near Onawa and eventually joined the local conservation efforts, which include raising awareness about the hills’ unique biodiversity through public events and encouraging artists to use its vistas as inspiration.
“When I discovered the Loess Hills and all these pockets of remote valleys and ridges where you can be away from big cities, it spoke to me like it does to a lot of people,” Kelly said. “You don’t have to live here to have an appreciation for them.”
Discovering a Geological Gem
Iowa’s Loess Hills are one of the only places in the world with such deep deposits of loess soil, a silt-like sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust. The only place with similar deposits is China’s Loess Plateau. Iowa’s hills also include some of the state’s largest public conservation and recreation areas, efforts that strongly resonated with Kelly, who’s a nature lover, certified wildland firefighter, volunteer bald eagle nest monitor, writer and long-distance walker.
The latter led her on the walk of a lifetime in 2020 when she made a goal of identifying a walking route that spans the entire length of the Loess Hills, from Plymouth County in northwest Iowa all the way down to the Missouri border. So, she set off and spent six weeks walking 270 miles through the hills, scouting and mapping it along the way through stretches of public conservation and recreation areas, as well as along gravel, dirt and paved roads in between.
Kelly quickly coined it as the LoHi Trail to describe the path, playing on the name of the hills and its elevation changes and steep slopes. She also created a Facebook page to document her journey, and it quickly gained hundreds of followers. The online community turned into a place where interested hikers could ask for ideas and advice for planning their own journey through the hills.
RELATED: Read more about Kelly’s hike and how to experience Iowa’s Loess Hills.
After Kelly completed her route, she was determined to continue raising awareness for, and improving access to, the hills. In 2021, she partnered with western Iowa’s Golden Hills Resource Conservation & Development (RC&D) organization to host the first LoHi Trek, a multi-day guided hike and camping trip through the Loess Hills. Today, the annual event connects participants with conservation experts to increase awareness and allows them to explore parts of the hills that aren’t open to the public. Its limited spots fill up quickly and the one-of-a-kind experience attracts outdoor enthusiasts from around the country. Last year, the group had the rare opportunity to hike through the Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve’s bison enclosure, and were thrilled to discover tufts of bison fur on shrubs along their route.
“It’s more than an event, it’s more like we’re trying to build both a culture and a community,” Kelly said. “People tend to have transformational experiences during the trip. The profound effect of being in a natural area is sometimes hard to help them understand, so making these kinds of experiences available is important.”
Championing the Cause
While Kelly also helps organize the Loess Hills Prairie Seminar, an annual educational event for conservationists, nature enthusiasts and curious explorers, she’s since turned her focus to increasing the collection of written and visual works depicting the Loess Hills.
As an award-winning poet and essayist, Kelly started teaching creative writing classes in 2021, both in person and virtually, using the hills’ geography as writing prompts. She’s also conceptualizing a variety of ideas alongside Golden Hills RC&D, including creating Loess Hills-focused literary publications, hosting readings in the hills, creating a cohort of Loess Hills writers, establishing artist residencies similar to those in Waubonsie State Park and hosting readings and art events with the hills as inspiration.
As if that isn’t enough, Kelly also continues working toward creating a greenway or corridor of safe passageway – for humans and animals alike – through the entirety of the Loess Hills.
“I’ve always been drawn to wilderness and how it corresponds to the wildness in us,” Kelly said. “The Loess Hills create such a unique cradle of biodiversity. To have these steep slopes and protected pockets where we find hundreds of prairie plants that used to be widely distributed across the Great Plains, that’s pretty inspirational.”
