J.B.Bane Wrote:
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> rather flat like Iowa and covered in corn fields.
>
Iowa isn't really all that flat, just where they put the interstates.
Seriously though, once you get off the part that was covered by the Des Moines lobe of the Wisconsin glaciation, Iowa has a good deal of relief, you just have to know where to look. Not mountains, mind, but not flat. Even on the lobe there is quite a bit of steepness to be found where the rivers have cut down over the last 10K years or so. My family's farm on Mud Creek (NW. Jasper County) had about 3/4 of it's land as permanent pasture 'cause the hillsides were too steep to run a tractor on. About 4 miles North, and past the terminal moraines, my great-uncle Merl's place, also on Mud Creek and just south of the CMStP&P main to Omaha, was all farmable, on a gentle slope towards the creek. Go another 5 miles North and you're into land that was settled almost 15 years later 'cause it was so flat it was peat bogs and couldn't be farmed until they figured out how to drain it.
I'll give ya the corn fields though.
Back in High School a couple of my friends and I did up some posters of hidden places we knew for a "Come see scenic Iowa" joke campaign, deep valleys, 50-70' vertical rock faces, things like that. The joke was we never said where they were and many of them you could drive by 1/4 mile off and never know they were there.
hank
PS Just for the record, Southern and Northwestern Illinois are also far from flat, ditto for Nebraska once you get far enough from the Platte River valley. Heck even Kansas is rumored to have a hill or two somewhere.