(mellow music) - Wisconsin is rich with water resources.

We have over 15,000 inland lakes plentiful groundwater aquifers, and hundreds of miles of great lake shoreline.

We even have over 13,000 miles of rivers and streams.

And of all of those, the Mississippi is one that stands alone and really commands a lot of respect.

Old Man River is truly the elder of our Wisconsin streams and geologic dating indicates that the river has drained the region for at least 70 million years and has only been following the channel as we see it today, since the last glacial retreat, much more recently.

The Mississippi Basin is the largest in North America spanning over 1 million square miles.

It drains water from 31 different states.

The gathering flow from major tributaries like the Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas, and the Red Rivers.

The river's headwaters are in North central Minnesota where it's only a knee deep stream gaining depths as deep as 200 feet near its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.

So the Mississippi is draining a huge chunk of North America and we should picture it like a funnel resting on its side between the continental divides between the Rockies and Appalachia with the funnel at the bottom down near the Gulf of Mexico.

And it creates a 2300 mile system that carries an incredible amount of water.

It's the eighth largest river discharge in the world, carrying up to 600,000 cubic feet of water per second which relates to like four and a half million gallons of water per second.

The flow velocities vary depending on the current conditions, but a drop of water takes like three months to travel its entire corridor from the headwaters to the mouth to the Gulf of Mexico.

Wisconsin is part of the upper Mississippi River basin and the rivers entrenched in our culture and we've relied on it for centuries.

Native Americans and the earliest European settlers certainly used the river as a travel corridor and for commerce when trading and that commercial value remains today as annual commerce supports 500,000 jobs to many people who call Wisconsin home.

And so, from that regard, we should consider it one of our hardest working river systems in the country and it's directly tied to our economic and environmental health.

For many, though its greatest attribute is in the intangible resource that the River Valley offers in terms of a recreation hub.

Recreational trips to the upper Mississippi River Valley actually outnumber some of our most popular national parks and related tourism provides a welcome boost to local economies.

And, for example, it's scenic beauty is unmatched when climbing Grandad Bluff overlooking the city of La Crosse, or even just on a Sunday drive along Highway 35 towards the village of Trempealeau.

But its value isn't only to humans and for our interests alone.

The Mississippi Upper Basin is a showcase for biodiversity and it provides for hundreds of other species inhabiting its watershed.

Its channel and the adjacent prairies are critical habitat for federally protected species like the relic paddlefish, blandings turtles, peregrine falcons, massasauga rattlesnakes, and many other threatened and endangered species.

So the Mississippi reigns as king of Wisconsin streams.

It outlasted the asteroid impact that led to the dinosaurs demise.

It was rerouted by mile, thick ice sheets of the Wisconsin glaciation.

Species and generations come and go, but the river still remains.