Where the Coteau des Prairies breaks down toward the Minnesota line, streams have cut deep wooded ravines into its eastern edge, and in one of them, on the Lake Traverse Reservation of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, the springs come up stained red with iron and the boggy ground along the creek gurgles and quakes. The Dakota name is Sica, bad or evil.
The Dakota tell that it was once Makoce Waste, good land, where peaceful camps sheltered among the trees, until a stranger called Hand came and turned the people against one another, and the waters rose and drowned the hollow, sparing only one young woman, who woke to find it clean again. The red water and the bubbling bogs were understood as the blood and flesh of the ancestors who died there. Settlers picked up the unease, and for a long time few would live in the ravines, which is a large part of why the forest survived.
The creek takes its name from Robert Roi, a trader who settled near the hollow in the 1840s. The National Park Service named Sica Hollow a National Natural Landmark in 1967, and the Trail of Spirits along Roy Creek, a short walk past the red bogs, small falls and footbridges, became a National Recreation Trail in 1971. A seven-mile perimeter loop climbs the ridges for riders and hikers, and in early October the maples and oaks of the ravines turn as bright as anywhere in the state.
The closest stops worth working into your route