Wausau — Wisconsin | Shared Latitude

A central Wisconsin river city built in the shadow of Rib Mountain, home to a small museum obsessed entirely with birds and a downtown that still smells faintly of the paper mills that built it. Lia, a lifelong bird-watcher, planned an entire detour around one wing of that museum.

Wausau grew up on the Wisconsin River, where nineteenth-century logging companies floated white pine downstream to sawmills and, later, paper mills that still operate on the edges of town today. Lia and I crossed the river on the Third Avenue bridge at sunset, watching the water run fast over the old dam, and it was easy to picture the log drives that once choked this same channel, a business so central to Wausau’s founding that the city was originally platted specifically to serve the timber trade.

The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum

The real reason we’d routed through Wausau was the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, a free art museum built by a paper-mill family that has, somewhat improbably, become one of the most respected bird-art institutions in the country, hosting the “Birds in Art” exhibition every year since 1976. Lia, who keeps a life list, spent nearly two hours in front of a room of hyper-detailed watercolor shorebirds while I wandered the sculpture garden outside, where bronze cranes stand in a reflecting pool.

Bronze crane sculptures in the reflecting pool garden at the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin

Rib Mountain

West of downtown, Rib Mountain rises about 700 feet above the surrounding plain, and geologists will tell you its quartzite core is more than a billion years old, among the oldest exposed rock on Earth, worn down by glaciers that flowed around rather than over it. We hiked to the summit observation tower inside Rib Mountain State Park and could see the Wisconsin River threading through the whole valley below, the paper mill’s steam rising white against the tree line.

Getting There

Central Wisconsin Airport (CWA), just north in Mosinee, is the closest with commercial service, about 15 minutes from downtown. From Milwaukee it’s roughly three hours northwest on I-39/US-51. A car is necessary for reaching Rib Mountain State Park, a short drive from downtown but not walkable.