PICKWICK, Minn. – the mouth of Big Trout Creek at the Mississippi River lost its beauty years ago. Repeated flooding had killed the trees and left only snags, scrap reeds and grasses, and muck. A tornado in December added to the stark barrenness. The EF-10, at speeds of 75 mph, dropped into the Big Trout mud flat from the west, whipped over combined U.S Highways 14 and 61, twisted down briefly on a small island in the Mississippi, climbed over Eagle Bluff and Chicken Breast Bluff on the Wisconsin side, then ripped through a northwest Trempealeau neighborhood and damaged several homes. There were no injuries in the two minutes that the tornado was shredding its path, It alighted first at 8:23 p.m. In all, more than a dozen tornadoes were part of a massive storm that hit northern Iowa, southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin that night.
Desolate and battered. Big Trout Creek is more barren than ever. In December a tornado snapped off brittle limbs from trees that were long-dead from the 1930s when the Trempealeau Dam backed up the Mississippi River and flooded into the mouth of Big Trout Creek. This is three miles downstream from Pickwick at the junction of Winona County Road 3 and U.S. 61. Image: Steve Lunde