Wisconsin Dells: Canyon, Camera, and Waterparks

The Wisconsin Dells began as a sandstone gorge. Glacial meltwater, draining south about ten thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, cut through the sandstone of the Wisconsin River corridor in a series of narrow channels and dramatic curved walls. The formations along the Upper Dells have names: Stand Rock, Witches Gulch, Romance Cliff. The rock is roughly five hundred million years old. The gorge is a few thousand.

H.H. Bennett, a photographer in the Dells from eighteen sixty-five onward, made the gorge nationally famous before the railroad even arrived. His images included some of the first stop-action photographs ever made, including a famous shot of a man leaping across a gap in the rocks. Bennett's studio in Wisconsin Dells is still there. It is a photograph gallery in continuous operation since the eighteen sixties and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The gorge his photographs made famous is still there too.

The Ho-Chunk Nation maintained cultural and ceremonial sites throughout the Dells corridor for centuries before European settlement. They were removed from this land repeatedly and kept returning. Their descendants operate tourism businesses in the area today, as they have for generations.

The world's highest concentration of waterparks now surrounds the original canyon: indoor parks, outdoor parks, hotel parks, parks with wave pools and tube slides and lazy rivers. The gorge is not closed. It is accessible by boat tour on the river or on foot through the state park. The roughly-five-hundred-million-year-old sandstone is not competing with the waterparks. It is simply waiting.