Timber Coulee is the heart of the Driftless — that strange, lovely pocket of southwest Wisconsin the glaciers somehow missed, leaving a country of steep wooded ridges and spring-fed limestone valleys where the coldwater creeks run clear and the wild brown trout are thick as anywhere in America. It's a small spring creek winding through a hayfield-and-woodlot coulee, cold and fertile off the limestone aquifer, the subject of decades of habitat work that turned a degraded ditch into a model wild-trout stream. The bed is gravel and silt over limestone, the banks rebuilt with lunker structure and undercut sod, the water clear and bug-rich. Wading is easy on firm gravel, the casting tight against the brush and the grass. Timber Coulee is proof of what spring water and patient restoration can do, and on a good evening with the trout rising along the cut banks, it is as good as small-stream fishing gets.

Wading: Tight brushy casting, soft silt pockets