For this weekend's "Big Story" in the Quad-City Times, reporter Jennifer DeWitt gives a written companion to some pictures that Times photographers took along a 400-mile stretch of the Mississippi River—spanning the northeast corner of Iowa to the southeast—as part of a book the Times published last year, entitled The Great River: 400 Miles of the Mississippi.
You can read Ickes's travelogue in the Sunday edition of the Times, or on the newspaper's website.