Bad Axe, N.Fk.

Southwest Wisconsin (the area around La Crosse, in the counties of La Crosse, Vernon and Monroe) is commonly called 'The Coulee Region'. Erosion has divided the area into narrow ridges and steep-sided valleys called coulees,  from the French verb 'couler,' meaning to flow.

With all its rolling terrain, any boater with any imagination who has driven through or looked at it on topographic maps would have to surmise ' There MUST be some good whitewater here!' Unfortunately, there are serious downsides of all that steep coulee terrain. By its nature, it fractures the watersheds into such small subdivisions that where there is gradient, there is not generally much drainage area. By the time there is decent drainage area, you are in the 'bottom lands' where there is not much gradient. Being such smaller drainages, they have very little flow most of the year, thus are likely to have much overhanging or encroaching shrubbery, deadfall, and snags.

All that said, the Bad Axe is one drainage which (beyond its suggestive and colorful name) appears to have some promise. The gradient is spread quite evenly, without encountering significant bedrock or narrows, resulting in mostly 'swiftwater' with little-to-no true whitewater features.  Doing a 'flyover' (via satellite views) suggests much of this section is fairly 'open' (I.E., not running through too much wooded area), so deadfall and snags may not be as much a problem as otherwise might be expected with so small a watershed area.