valley towns such as Coon Valley, Wisconsin, La Farge, Wisconsin and Viola, Wisconsin. The Kickapoo River flood stage is 13 feet but was recorded as high as 23 feet during the 2018 flood which was declared a statewide emergency. Many community members were rescued by boats sent by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Days later, when two dams in Ontario, Wisconsin broke, it created flood water downstream in Readstown, Wisconsin, Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin and Gays Mills, Wisconsin. The history of this portion of the Upper Mississippi River dates back to an origin "as an ice-marginal stream during what had been referred to as the “Nebraskan glaciation.”" Current terminology would place this outdated and abandoned period in the Pre-Illinoian Stage. The level of erosion often exposes Cambrian limestone of about 510 million years of age. Evidence from soil borings and recent Lidar imagery in the lower Wisconsin River valley in the Driftless area suggests that the river in the valley used to flow towards the east, rather than its present westerly course towards its confluence with the Mississippi River. This has led to the new hypothesis that the ancient Upper Mississippi River (also named the Wyalusing River) at one time flowed east through the current Wisconsin River valley and into the Great Lakes/Saint Laurence River system somewhere near the Door Peninsula. The hypothesis posits that the flow of the ancient Wyalusing River was ultimately captured by the ancestral Mississippi River to the south when that river eroded through the Military Ridge near Wyalusing State Park, possibly as a result of an ancient ice sheet in a previous continental glaciation blocking the Wyalusing River to the east. The resulting Proglacial lake would have filled the Wyalusing River valley until it overtopped the Military Ridge, ultimately carving through the ridge and draining the lake. This resulted in the ancient Upper Mississippi River changing course and flowing south towards the Gulf of Mexico, as it does currently, instead of east into the Saint Lawrence River and the North Atlantic Ocean. The Stream capture hypothesis for the Upper Mississippi River would have created a substantial diversion of water from the Great Lakes Basin and the Saint Lawrence River, reducing the inflow of fresh water into the North Atlantic with possible impacts to Ocean currents and Climate. The Mississippi River trench is one of the few places in the Driftless Area where the bedrock is