Day 10: Hill City MN to Marquette MI

Dawn's Early light

I awoke just before Sunrise to early light shining through the deck.  I'm not even sure how early it was.  We woke up to a very cold room and lots of mosquitoes.  I was eventually able to get the air con to subside, but the bugs continued to attack.  Not the best sleep.  Especially as we approach the higher latitudes on this trip it is getting increasingly difficult to sleep as sunlight is such a natural wake up call for me.  Perhaps this is why I experience these fugues in the early afternoon.  

I make it out to the water.  

The swim was both sublime and as with everything this trip all too brief.  I would have liked staying here longer . . cutoff from fast internet, cell service, just the eerie glow of the late evening in the great north woods.  Throughout my swim I was visited by little sunfish as I watched the morning light reflect off the water.  I cooked breakfast by the firepit using my camp stove and blissed in a life simple and rustic.  A lot of thoughts could catch up to me here and I would let them find me.  but onward.  

Mississippi River Crossing, Grand Rapids MN

We had hoped to make Lake Itasca, but our detours and slow departures were not helping said quest.  So when we saw that the river flowed through Grand Rapids MN we deemed it good enough.  I will say the towns up here feel very different and very far away in a way that no where else has felt.  They are not large towns.  Many have seen times much more prosperous, but they are also not dead or dying, just self reinventing in their own far away manner.  

Every river begins as a small trickle.  I have seen the near beginnings of several major rivers and will see the beginnings of several more before this trip is over.  This one is subtle as if a bunch of streams found a kettle lake and their waters converged.  This town seems to know it is somewhere interesting

We are also now entering the Mesabi Iron Range towns, all along the US 169 corridor.  I heard of these towns first in Bruce Springsteen's 1995 hit "Youngstown" a ballad on the industrial heritage of middle American and the havoc wrought on far flung communities "from the Monongahela Valley to the Mesabi Iron Range, to the coal mines of Appalachia the story's always the same . . ."

Except that they are still mining this ore body and expect to do so for a long time.  That said it is nowhere  the level it was a  few decades ago and the cities feel a little empty, ghosts of busier times, remnants trying to forge something new in place that is a long drive from anywhere else.

Hill annex mine

On the outskirts of Grand Rapids we start seeing signs for the Mesabi Trail:  An example of one of the efforts to draw people into this remote  part of the country.   It winds for 155 miles and has lodging,  and camping and dining along its length.  You can ride it and watch nature reclaim industry.   We were driving US 169, which was virtually empty on a Monday in June.   All along we could see rail lines, abandoned conveyor belts and red rubble piles from a bygone era of aggressive open pit mining.  I wanted to stop so many places, to grab just a small piece of this history but could not find places to pull over or places where I knew it would be mine to take.  Even here nature is reclaiming . . .

We Finally spotted an access point one of the mine sites at Hill Annex Mine.  This was a place I began to question my own existence and the nature of the time we inhabit.  Even now I look at these photos and wonder if I dreamed it all.  Perhaps I need to explain more about the natural history of iron ore deposits to give some perspective:  Early earth for about 2 billion years had no oxygen in its atmosphere.  It was a reducing atmosphere of CO2 and Nitrogen and trace amounts of Methane.  There was life, but all single cellular autotrophs living by photosynthesis and chemosynthesis.  Then about 2.5 billion years ago something changed:  Oxygen began entering the atmosphere in measurable quantities in something known as The Great Oxygenation event.  This would eventually pave the way to complex life, but it would take a really long time meanwhile something interesting was happening in the shallow oceans.  Iron is found in abundance in the rocks of Earth's surface.  In an Oxygen-free atmosphere, Iron will dissolve readily in the oceans.  In the presence of trace amounts of dissolved oxygen however, iron bonds and precipitates out into the sediment.  This is what we are seeing here:  the iron that precipitated out of the ocean during the Great Oxygenation event.  This iron ore has since been reworked by subsequent tectonics and chemical processes into some of the highest grade deposits anywhere on earth.  Mountains have risen here, and been weathered down to nothing.  This was before hard bodied life.  Our continent tried to split much the way Africa is splitting now, but never quite finished.  We are looking here at a depth of time hard to imagine anywhere we've been before. The entire era of Banded Iron formation associated with the great Oxygenation Event is approximately equal to that of the time span since the Cambrian.   This is a lot of time and goes beyond that which even most geologists deal with on a daily basis.

Hull-Rust-mahoning and Hill of 3 waters

Onward we continued up to Hibbing MN in the heart of Iron Range.  I wasn't sure what we'd find here only that there was just north of town "Hill of 3 waters"  where the drainage basins of the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and the Mississippi all meet . . . a place of importance long before the colonization of N. America.   Supposedly there are times when one can visit.  This was not likely to be one of those times.  What we found instead was the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine overlook and exhibit.

Again Scale really hits you over the head.  They call the open pit mines up here "The Grand Canyon Of the north, and it is a testimony to Anthropocene and earth movement.  Now all the industrial infrastructure we saw along US 169 begins to make sense.  This is how it gets to the factories.  Unlike our last stop Hull Rust Mahoning is still in operation and you can see various giant vehicles operating.  I went inside the visitor center and had a long chat with the volunteer.  Ended up with a bunch of souvenir iron ore packets.

As for hill of 3 waters,  They have left it alone. They say it is like stepping back 300 years into the wilderness, albeit 1/2 mile from active mining activity.  As this was as close as I was going to get I took my photographs and wandered.  None of these pictures capture the full scale of being there, the intensity of the winds the feeling of the air, they only capture a bit of how red the rock is.  You may notice there  is less water here than at the previous mine.  In most place the water table is within a few hundred feet of the surface. Needless to say these open pit mines are deeper go below the water table.  one of the big issues here is the amount of water they have to pump on a continuous basis to keep the excavation happening.  

I learned that every rock in a mine has an owner with a claim and of some of the efforts to track every element with precision and keep things to the contract.  I learned how the ore bodies varied from place to place and the work done to process it before transport.

I believe this marked the northernmost point on our revised journey, now at 47 25' N.  To get to Canada there would still be over 100 miles of more detour.  This is also our last journey to things remote.  Indeed a good chunk of the rest of today and tomorrow is getting back south toward more familiar things in our psyche.  I wish to make it back to these northlands in a time with more time to linger, explore, see.

Duluth and upper Wisconsin

Duluth was a little over 1 hour south of Hibbing and we began driving to make time.  We also began descending.  The Western end of Lake Superior and several of the peninsulas on it's southwest shores contain features related to the Mid Continent Rift system - a region of divergent motion and volcanism that almost broke up the continent at the end of the "Boring Billion."  The rifting ultimately failed but the lavas remain and can be detected with magnetometers as far south as Iowa.  Here the lava rocks are often exposed right near the surface.  We would see a few of them en route to Marquette. 

 

Our first sighting of Lake superior outside Duluth was as jaw dropping as we could have imagined.  A deep shade of blue amid forested steep mountains dropping off.  I hear Duluth described as the San Francisco of the North and would love to spend more time here.  Indeed the shores of Superior are the place I regret most not lingering.    A better plan would have been to go all the way to Virgina MN, hike some trails that exposed the banded iron, then stay in Duluth.  Spend the following day doing what we tried to cover in a single afternoon.

As you cross state lines the cliamte and vegetation usually stay about the same, but what does change almost instantly is the sense of urban planning, the names on the convenience stores and the Architecture of older buildings.  Wisconsin was certainly no exception.  I wish i had made a list of the different names each state had for its quickie marts and other institutions. It was also our first traffic jam since Yellowstone.

Soon it all faded away and we were looking at some pristine beaches along the shores as we drove Highway 2 Eastbound.  Between the beaches surprisingly long climbs and descents.  I honestly was not aware of how hilly this region was.  We are now in a region where there are widespread precambrian rocks at the surface when the vegetation doesn't cover things up.  this is in contrast to eastern North Dakota and much of Minnesota where said rocks were covered with glacial drift.  In part this is due to Lake Superior and the physics of subglacial water (though other explanations also exist and play a role):

Ice is one of the few substances whose melting point decreases with pressure.  This is why ice skates work - they locally increase pressure and create a thin film of lubricating water between the blade and the ice.   In glacial settings this means that the melting point of ice is lower at the ice base in regions of thick ice.  Ice flow direction is governed primarily by ice surface slope.  Water flow under ice is controlled ~ 90 % by surface slope and 10 % bedrock slope.  In other words water under ice routinely flows uphill.   Lake Superior is incredibly deep, its deepest point below sea level.  Between the depth of the lake and where we are driving  subglacial water flowed uphill.  

So why the better exposure?   

Water flowing uphill is passing under progressively thinner ice and experiencing a decrease in pressure along flow.  As stated earlier this means its melting point is getting higher as it moves downstream. At the ice base water temperature is always at the freezing point.  In order to stay liquid, subglacial water at the ice base flowing uphill needs a source of heat.  While the increase of kinetic energy translates into some of this heat, additional heat is released as water freezes back on to the base of the ice, through a process known as accretion.  This freezing process also traps sediment and transports it to more suitable environments for deposition.  While, thin but sufficiently opaque soil cover had no trouble covering up a lot of what we see here in the intervening 10 - 20 K years,  there is a lot more bare rock and the amount of bare rock is increasing as we head east along the shore closer to deeper water. 

Anyway, I spent a good chunk of my PhD and Post Doctoral life exploring these concepts theoretically and with data from Antarctica.  It's nice to see have some real world outlet to see this in reality.

Upper P

Our third state of the day was marked with a sign, some new convenience store chains, and yet another shift in the architecture of  random buildings from bygone decades.  A lot of people don't leave their state much, but will go to its very edges, seeking something different, and yet familiar trappings.  I'm still not sure what "Pure Michigan" is but I am likely in it.

We are now over 2 hours past Duluth (A city with few direct flights) and again in one of those remote corners of the country that requires a genuine effort to reach:  the Upper Peninsula or "U P."  Residents call themselves "Yoopers."  Of anywhere we travelled this was the place I am most eager to return to.  Here we have landforms and rocks that make the Appalachians look young by comparison.  Not as steep, but more subtle and complex.  There is a quality to the woodlands that suggests long winters and heavy snows.   There is of course the two lakes on either side, but there are also 100's upon 100's of little lakes in the peninsula interior.  There are waterfalls, rivers, water everywhere and endless wildernesses of hills.    

Soon we diverge from US 2, and tack toward the Porcupine Mountains.  These are one of the most dramatic expressions of the Mid Continent rift system and exemplify a sort of topographic inversion where the lowest places become the highest - tectonic inversion and weathering:

Once you break the crust in a given location, it easier to break it again as the stresses change.  this is why old faults are often scrambled up and crooked as new faulting smears and reverses old scars.  Meanwhile "unbroken" [relatively speaking] regions of rock can transmit stresses 10's even 100's of  km from the source of the stress to these zones of weakness.  What we see the Porcupine mountains is that the rifting of North America created a zone of weakness.  As an ancient North America's east coast then began to collide with other land masses, some of these stresses reactivated faults and uplifted the bottoms of the rift valley to the mountains we see today.  I kept looking for basalt outcrops as we drove.  I wanted to stop so many places and detour far more deeply, butit was 4 PM and we had 2 hours + a time zone crossing to Marquette.

Not just Basalts from the rift, but all the surrounding rock, much of it metamorphic, revealing a series of ancient collisions over several supercontinent cycles barely discussed in most texts.  The boring billion a time of stable climate - low oxygen, low biodiveristy, few mountains and little change. But here in a structure also known as the "Wisconsin Dome" you have Collisions that made mountains like Shasta (minus the beautiful forest), Slivers of the older parts of the North American Core, long forgotten hot spot tracks,  and of course the rift discussed earlier.  And of course many of the associated sediments.  There's also plenty of Great oxygenation event Iron Range deposits here.  Essentially you get a full freaking Wilson cycle and associated sediments preserved in this + North Wisconsin.  I could easily spend a whole month or longer frolicking around here creating a collection of of these remnants of long ago.

One of the challenges this trip has been the logistics of getting food once we get into town.  We often arrive later than hoped.  Restaurants are short staffed and crowded.  We are usually too fried to cook much and facilities for doing so are not always abundant.  So this time we called ahead.  Surprisingly several restaurants were slammed beyond all recognition.  Then finally I found a pizza place just off the main highway. In Marquette and so called ahead.  We have been in the hills for the last few hours, far away from any traffic or towns, or any recognizeable bit of geography.  It has gotten later and we have grown more tired, especially as I keep trying to get us to our lodge closer to 5.  it is past 7 now. But on the horizon the view of Lake Superior greets us once again .  It is a most welcome and beautiful sight.  Our pizza is waiting for us and our lodge on the east side of town is  happy to see us.  

We rapidly devour a Detroit-style pizza that just might be among the best pizza we've had and as there is still light, we do one more walkabout on the lake.   It has been a long and beautiful day, but we are fortunate to be here for even the all too short time we are.