Drive up a narrow road with steep bluffs on one side and a busy railroad on the other, and you reach the visitors’ center for the Effigy Mounds National Monument.

After an epic hike up the bluffs, you reach a prairie, and then after a little while more, you reach the effigy mounds, where an army of earthen bears are strung out across the bluffs. These were made long before Cahokia Mounds.

On the climb back down, I tried to capture the sublime magnitude of the cliffs and rocky outcroppings of the hollow that stretches up from the valley to the bluffs.