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...