Glacial Lakes Hunting Area

Our area has a landscape dotted with bountiful natural lakes nestled in green waving valleys. Land so rich its building blocks of soil, water and sunshine provide havens for wildlife plants and the continuance of "small town America." During your visit you'll be exposed to the bold, yet calming landscape of lake and prairies. You'll begin to wonder what natural and mighty force sculpted these magnificent features.

About 20 thousand years ago, the last in a series of glaciers moved across North America like a pancake spreading on a griddle. As the glacier entered South Dakota from the northeast it essentially buried the land. Imagine that just one cubic foot of ice weighs 57 pounds and a glacier 1600 feet thick would exert 45 tons of pressure on every square foot of ground it covers.

Now imagine that glaciers have the ability to move -- even if just a few inches a day. A moving mountain of ice acts like a white bulldozer. It can scour and scrape the land, level high places and fill in low ones, smooth surfaces and gouge others. Thus the resulting landscape is a formation called a glacial moraine.

The glacial lakes -- the clear blue waters that give the region its name -- were also formed by the white bulldozer. Huge chucks of ice were left behind as the glacier retreated. When the ice chunks themselves melted and the land around them slumped in, they left large round holes that later filled with water.

As time progressed this glacial moraine continued to change, from ice to glacial lakes and waving grasses. French explorers of the early 1800s, knowing no other word for the rolling ocean of grass and wildflowers, called it "prairie," meaning meadow. Lewis and Clark called it simply plains, while others called it steppe, but prairie prevailed. Thus early explorers termed this region Coteau des Prairies, or "hills of the prairie."

According to the accounts of early travelers, the sheer vastness of the prairie was overwhelming. Grass in some places was so tall a man on horseback could scarcely see over it and a man on foot was helpless.