The wind howls at my back.  My down jacket is full sail.  The lonely northern Minnesota back country road that I have just strolled down acts as a wind tunnel on this dark, blustery, winter night.  Penelope- wrapped in a full fleece suit- curls deeper into the crux of my neck.  Luna, in full regal of her winter coat, shudders with the gust.  A moment of apprehension grasps my thoughts.  I've been out in the elements for less than a half an hour; however, the sun is long set, the batteries in my headlamp are old and dim.  It's time to turn back home to stoke the stove and hunker down for another winter night along Lake Superior.  Turning around now means bracing myself against the full throttle of a December gail-amplified my the tunnel-effect of our road.  Continuing down the hill means turning later when it's darker, colder and in more time for the already-decreped coals in the wood stove to burn down.  I turn.  Luna's tail uprights itself.  She is ready for the return too.  We take the long way home tonight and walk the "perimeter trail".  The woods creak with the wind.  Three ships hunker along the shore- cautiously gauging the water for their crossing.  Life along the fringes of yet another winter storm that went somewhere else: all that we got is the wind...

The Ground We Call Home

The barren earth shuddered.  The immature continental mass of North America was tearing itself at it's seams.  For some unknown reason the plastic mantle-with relatively buoyant crust above it-was unsettled.  Slowly the eastern and western halves of the young continental mass began to diverge through a series of earthquakes.  Soon enough the tectonic events revealed voids.  The voids became the plumbing of huge volcanoes.  The duct work accommodates molten lava driving it's way to the surface.  The earth shuddered as distance fissures spewed felsic flows and deep mafic intrusions rich with metals were emplaced along the rim of a rift that had dissected the continent for over one thousand miles.  The red rhyolite of the Maple Hill exploded into existence as a massive flow hundreds of feet thick.  The viscous flow oozed it's way like a river of mud forming foliations.  Every once and a while exploding high into the atmosphere.  This ancient volcano violently regurged the depths of earth's bowels for about 20 million years forming a line of mountains thousands of feet tall rimming the perimeter of the contemporary Lake Superior basin.

Twenty million years of volcanics left quite the heavy load on the surface of earth.  The weight of the new volcanic group push down upon the depths of earth.  Slowly the weight of these ancient igneous mountains warped downward and led to the subsidence of the land.  On the flakes formed a basin.  To the east and west resilient ridges of hard crystalline rock formed highland areas. 

Millions of years passed.  The elements of time and climate wore on the region.  Rain and snow deluged the area through eons of cyclic time.  In the meanwhile the entire continent drifted millimeter by millimeter to the north and west.  The precipitation and wore grain by grain of rock and slowly eroded the substrate into rivers and streams.  This sediment was soon carried away in water and flowed down into the basin.  Once the slope broke energy dissipated and the sediment settled and deposited itself.

With time the global climate cooled.  As ice house conditions persisted slabs of ice-glaciers-began to creep south from the northern polar reaches towards the equator.  Along the way the ice carved a path of absolute destruction.  A path a denudation the plucked entire mountain ridges of rock from their roots.  Ice would move over, exert a vertical and shear stresses that would eventually lead to a failure of the rock along the minerals' cleavage planes.  The freshly eroded material was then carried away by the passing ice and deposited as low rolling hills known as moraines when the energy dissipated (much like the sediment in rivers)  as the glaciers began to melt.  Sediment within the basin eroded easier than the hard resilient rock of the ridges.  For another two million years ice episodically carved out the easily erodible sandstones of the basin and left the ridges of harder gabbro, basalt, anorthosite &  rhyolite.  These hills soon found themselves topographically above the deepened basin below.

Each time a glacier advanced over the area it receded north by melting.  The melting ice of mile-thick continental glaciers left a lot of water.  To compound- rather impound- the situation landforms known as moraines were deposited.  These rolling hills functioned as a dam when the glaciers retreated the north and melted off huge volumes of water.  In fact, at one point Lake Superior was 500' deeper than today.  This shoreline level can still be found on the slopes of the North Shore.  The Great Lakes continue to drain their melt water into the Atlantic Ocean.  As lake levels lowered it left ancient shoreline deposits along the way.  On our property there are at least three distinct shorelines.  Standing atop such a undulating berm one could imagine waves lapping up on a calm morning.   

The shores of this ancient sea continued to drop to their present elevation.  The rock slowly eroded, was washed away and was then subject to rain, oxygen & carbon dioxide .  This chemical and physical weathering of the parent material resulted in the lowest mineral soil horizons.  Above that generations of successive vegetative species- all subject to the ever changing climatic conditions- grew and died leaving behind a thin veneer of organics.

Within a blink of a geologic eye humans (probably following game) found the north woods with it's numerous wild rice-rimmed fresh water lakes teeming with fish and thick forests full of fur bearing animals.  In another half blink a fairer complexion of man found their way.  They brought guns and traps and axes.  Forests of old growth pines were cut, milled and sent off to build Chicago and Minneapolis.  Iron ore was mined and sent east in ships to build railways to the west.  Poplar and birch grew in the place of pine.  The first homesteaders planted a potato patch on the south facing slope where our garden is today.  About 80 years ago a huge wildfire decimated the landscape.  Balsam fir, white spruce, poplar and a few birch took root and continue to persevere. 

Then, a few years ago, a white dog and two more humans began a daily trudge up the snow-laden hill.  Armed with a vision they began to carve out their niche in the wilderness...   

Warmer.  Highs in the upper twenties and lows in the teens.  It's raining to the south of us.  We're watching the clouds hoping for some more snow. 

About a half dozen deer have been spending the night bedded down around our cabin.  In the morning we wake to new beds hoofed into the grass and encircling us.  Every once and a while one will walk close enough to set off our motion sensor light in the middle of the night.  I stir them up every time I step outside after dark- white tails at attention as they prance off into the ink black woods.  I wonder if they aren't bedding down close to humans because the wolves are around?  Maybe they figure they're safer closer to humans where the wolves are less likely to venture?

The late season wolf rifle/trapping season is drawing to a close.  Only about 10 remain on the quota that is alloted to this region.

Lake Effect

There is nothing on the radar.  No blue, green, yellow or pink for that matter.  Despite that fact lake effect snow still falls after the second major snow storm of the season.  While the heavier-hit regions to the south of us have already shoveled themselves out; Lake Superior- for the third straight day- graces us with a not-so-subtle dose of lake effect. The low pressure system that brought this storm is well to the east of the upper Midwest.  However, the counter-clockwise rotation of such a system is pushing relatively cold air over the warmer air of Lake Superior.  This temperature difference creates instability which convects moisture into the atmosphere.  The greater the difference in temperature, the more moisture goes aloft.  The farther the air travels over the water (i.e. the bigger the lake), the more moisture goes up too.  Once this precipitation-laden air mass confronts colder air (relative to the lake) of the landmass the precipitation falls as snow.  This effect is exaggerated by the hills of the north shore.  Just like a mountain range, the higher up you go the the colder the air and the more snow is freed from the air.  This is known as the orographic effect.  On the ground we barely have six inches.  However, you never know how long these events last.  It all depends on how slowly the pressure system takes to move eastward.

The last few days have been a roller coaster of a ride.  First, Penelope started to crawl.  Her nudging around on the floor has given way to a full-fledged army crawl.  The reality that she is mobile struck us.  Unfortunately within hours of her triumph something else struck us and we all came down the the stomach flu.  All three of us!  We have spent the last 48 hours in complete disarray and completely oblivious to the storm outside. It was the first time that we have dealt with a sick child.  It has been nerve racking at times but an essential lesson in parenthood nonetheless. 

Outside the snow is elegantly falling.  Chickadees are going to town on our sunflower feeder.  Inside I find myself typing one handed.  The other is holding Penelope as she sleeps on my chest.  The dog is sleeping at my feet.  My fire is dying as I don't dare to disturb the resting and recovering child to add birch to the dwindling flames.  Christmas tree lights illuminate the otherwise drab light of the overcast day.  Jazz plays in the background.  I'm sipping my first cup of coffee in days; thoughts lost in the lake effect...

One could feel the warm southern air off the lake.  It was an unwelcome warm front.  The ski season had begun with a bang and then a bust.  Rain fell for most of the weekend and melted the base that we had hoped would last.  I accomplished little but plowing through another Alaskan adventure novel.  Now a dense fog dims the evening light.  Ravens are busy cleaning up the remaining deer carcasses.  Blue jays are content raiding the local birdfeeders.  The woods are dark, humid and quiet...