LUVERNE, Minn. _ Beaver Creek meanders across Touch the Sky Prairie, cascading at one location into a sublime, stair-step waterfall.
Wild bison once roamed this quartzite ridge, grazing in big bluestem grass, rubbing against immense rock outcroppings and looking out at lower land in every direction. Burrowing owls lived here along with river otters and monarch butterflies. Bobolinks and yellow-striped dickcissels returned each spring to fill the air with birdsong.
"It's about a spiritual experience for me ... a deep feeling I get when I'm out here," said Jim Brandenburg, a National Geographic nature photographer who has helped preserve the area as a living, ecological museum.
Brandenburg, who was born here when wire fences, farm buildings and crop machines dotted the hillsides, returned last month to showcase Rock County's 1,000-acre conservation gem for the Governor's Pheasant Hunting Opener. The land, located 5 miles north of Interstate 90, is now the second-largest segment of the Northern Tallgrass Prairie National Wildlife Refuge.
The 18-year-old project is being assembled around rare pieces of remnant prairie in a project area covering 48 western Minnesota counties and 37 northwestern Iowa counties. The buffalo aren't coming back, but land managers are restoring the landscape with plant seeds that will encourage the return of lost prairie wildlife. At Touch the Sky, the number of native plant species has increased from 120 to 170.
Todd Luke, Windom area district manager for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, said each segment is a biological snapshot into the past and Touch the Sky is a priority for continued expansion.
"It's kind of a forgotten part of the state down here," Luke said during a tour one day before local pheasant hunters arrived at the refuge to kick-start the 2018 ringneck season.
For Dakota Sioux people, the high, rolling terrain with vistas of up to 20 miles long was the site of vision quests. Its raw beauty now draws hikers, photographers, birders, students, tour groups, archaeologists and hunters.
Unplowed prairie once covered about 25 million acres of what is now western Minnesota and northwestern Iowa.
Today, rare remnants total only 300,000 acres of untouched grassland wildlife habitat from the Canadian border to Des Moines. The tallgrass prairie refuge project aims to preserve 77,000 of those acres _ 13.5 percent already secured by land acquisitions and permanent easements.
Luke said the Fish & Wildlife Service is actively scouting for additions to Touch the Sky and is in the process of adding a new chunk.
"It's so crucial that landowners are willing to sell," he said.
