Churning the Garden

The nights have been a little chilly.  It's hard to imagine that summer is already slowly giving way to fall.

We've had black plastic covering our garden site for about one year now.  Our hope is that this would kill a vast majority of the native seed bank.  Last week we uncovered the plot and with the help of our friend Jim we deep-tilled the area.  Tearing into a garden bed for the first time is full of surprises.  For one, you never really know what the quality of the soil will be until you dig into it.  It's the other surprises; like all the rocks and roots and other "artifacts" that make your first day tilling interesting!

The soil will work.  We have a manageable mix of silt and clay loam to work with.  The work we have ahead of planting is soil amending.  Amending soil is simply feeding the dirt the food that it wants in order to be at the optimal chemistry to grow plants in.  While most loam soils in the midwest are fertile enough to grow native species of plants, growing vegetables is another story.

We know that our soil is mineral rich and a little acidic.  As a result we are planning on amending the soil by adding compost and manure to put some organics into the mix as well as a little lime (a base) to help neutralize the acidic clay-rich soil.

Another important element in healthy soil is nitrogen.  Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere.  Plants need nitrogen to grow as nitrogen is an important building block of many molecules that are essential to life.  Soil, however, is not always a good source of nitrogen.  To best way to get nitrogen into the soil is to plant legumes.  Legumes are a family of plants that fix nitrogen into the soil.  Roots of these plants contain bacteria that allow the plants to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia.  Ammonia in the soil is then used by the garden plants as building blocks for growth.  With only a couple months before our first freeze we are planting buckwheat, a legume.  We will till this in next year before we plant our crops.

Height of the Land Route

The berries are ripe.  The fish are moving to colder water.  It' August.  To us this means the beginning of the paddling season.  Last weekend we paddled a classic border route through Gunflint-Little Gunflint-Little North-North-South-Rat-Rose-Duncan-West Bearskin Lakes.

In our ongoing quest to paddle all of the major canoe routes in the eastern Boundary Waters we've been marking our routes through the years on a regional map.  This winter we noticed something major was missing from the map: we haven't paddled a substantial amount of the Canadian border lakes.

These border lakes have a great historical significance.  Traversing the waterways from the Northern depths of Canada to Lake Superior, the "Voyageur Highway" was the route that Voyageurs traveled during the Fur Trade era of the 1630-1760's.  During this time fleets of birch bark canoes carrying beaver, moose, bear, caribou, fox and wolf pelts paddled and portaged the ancient trail. 

The furs were trapped in the winter by Natives.  They were then traded to representatives of the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies for commodities like guns, traps and other supplies.  French Voyageurs packed up the furs into their canoes and made their way down the Voyageur Highway to the Lake Superior.  At Lake Superior, the "hivernants" (voyageurs who wintered in the north) rendezvoused with the "pork eaters" (voyageurs traveling in 30-40 foot canoes from Montreal). It was here, on the shores of Superior at the Grand Portage outpost that the two groups swapped their cargo loads.  After a couple weeks of celebrating the voyageurs turned around and headed back to complete the trade.  The Northerners carried their supplies North to spend the winter and trade with Natives for the next season of furs.  The large canoes carried the furs back to Montreal to be felted and made into hats for the robust European markets.

I call the route that we took the "Height of the Land route" after the portage between North and South Lakes that straddles the Laurentian Divide.  Geographically speaking, it's a major watershed divide (rivaled only be the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains): all of the water in North Lake flows to the Hudson Bay via the Rainy River watershed.  The water in South Lake flows to the Atlantic via Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes through the St. Lawrence seaway.

Significant as this divide might be portaging it is actually very anticlimactic.  I've seen artistic renditions of this point being some great, steep and rugged ridge in the Northwoods.  The reality is that most of the portage is a flat wetland with balsam, cedar, various sedges and thimble berry.  No, we did not stop at the "top" of the divide and smoke a ceremonial pipe.  I couldn't even really tell where the watershed break was.  Nonetheless, it was one of those places where you could almost still the see the moccasin prints and hear the music of the countless french voyageurs who trotted that trail long before us.

Looking east across Rose Lake into Canada

Phenology

Height of the berry season.  Blueberries, rasberries, strawberries and thimbleberries are all out in full fruit.  A broad-wing hawk has been spotted for the past few mornings hunting on our road.  The broad-wing is one of the most common hawks on the shore.  Inhabiting the forests of most of eastern North America, the broad-wing are famous for the large flocks or "kettles" that they form during migration.  In 2003, over 100,000 broad-wings were spotted in a single day flying past Hawk Ridge in Duluth, MN!

Phenology

Another warm day on the North Shore.  Highs in the low 80's with lows in the upper 50's.  Cook County is under a "hydrologic outlook".  Apparently we should be expecting a storm tomorrow carrying with it 1-2.5 inches of rain.  After the massive 4 inch rain event a couple of weeks ago the area currently is at about 115% normal precipitation.  Meaning that we have received about 15% more rain that the average year.  The blueberries are ripe on the Gunflint!  Let the harvest begin...

Isle Royale

At nearly 50 miles long and 9 miles wide, Isle Royale is the largest of 200 some remote islands that make up of an archipelago situated roughly 20 miles from the Minnesota-Ontario north shore of Lake Superior.

The island itself is a series of SW/NE trending asymmetric linear ridges.  The rock on the northwest side of the island steeply drops into the cold waters of Superior while the rock on the south side gently slides into the breadth of the lake.  There are two main rock units found on the island.

The Portage Lake volcanics formed during an episode of volcanoes that extruded flood basalts during the Precambrian (about 1.1 billion years ago).  The northern two thirds of the island is comprised of various textured basalts.  These textures (opitic, porphorytic, pegmatic, etc.) are a result of the environment that the rock crystallized.  Copper and secondary minerals like prehnite, greenstone and agate filled the voids that fractures and gas bubbles left.  

The southern third of the island is composed of a unit known as the Copper Harbor Conglomerates.  Deposited in streams, this sedimentary rock unit looks like a bunch of pebbles and sand compressed and cemented together.

To understand the origin of these two rocks we have to think big.  Over a billion years ago Earth was still "figuring itself out".  The beginnings of the North American continent had formed.  However, this mass was unstable and found itself rifting apart down the middle.  Magma from deep within the Earth began to dome upwards as the rifting thinned the surface.  This magma found its way to the surface and lava flowed on the surface and in shallow water (think about the volcanoes of Hawaii).

When billions of tons of heavy, dense iron-rich volcanic basalt oozed to the surface the weight depressed the crust.  The area around the rift began to warp downward.  Soon a syncline (basin) was formed.  Water, always opportunistic, found this relatively low basin and began to flow into it carrying sediment from the highland areas around it.  As a result conglomerates and other beds of siltstone and sandstone were deposited atop the basalts of the Portage Lake Volcanics waiting for us to explore.

Since then four major episodes of glaciation and closely associated changing water levels have carved out the Lake Superior basin and the landscapes that we see today.

Prehistoric people discovered the island and prized it for it's obvious copper wealth.  Over one thousand prehistoric mining pits have been documented on the island.  Apart of it's minerals, Isle Royale was also an important source of wild rice, berries and wild game.

Three major mining booms have since occurred on the island.  The hard work of "blast and dig" mining never proved economical successful and most operations failed without profit.  Many pits and abandoned equipment can still be found throughout the island.

Commercial fishing was also a vibrant part of the island's history.  Isle Royale's unpredictable topography and reefs are wrecked many ships on it's notorious shoals.  A hand full of lighthouses round the island's perimeter and light it's passages.

Isle Royale is now the stage of the dynamic saga for one of the most hailed predator-prey relationships in the world.  For more than 50 years, biologists have been watching the delicate interactions between the grey wolf and moose.  Moose probably swam to Isle Royale around the turn of the 20th century.  At any given year about 1000 individual moose have inhabited the island feeding on the plentiful vegetation of the the island's wetlands.  At one point, moose became too abundant.  The island's vegetation wasn't enough for the booming population.  A die off ensued.  Sometime around 1940 wolves crossed from the mainland on the winter ice.  Since then the two species have been tangled in a natural exhibit of capable predators killing the weak and old.  Today just under twenty wolves inhabit the island.

Now the least visited National Park, Isle Royale is an amazing place to visit.  80% water, one can sail, fish, hike or paddle it's beautiful landscapes.  My only qualm; it should be considered a part of Minnesota not Michigan!

 Sunset over Blake Point.  The northern most point of Isle Royale.

Flash flood!

One of the best things about living in the woods is the opportunity to experience the subtle but continual changes of nature.  Some things, however, aren't very subtle.

I'm lying awake at 2:30 am listening to the rain fall on our metal roof.  I'm anxious because in a couple of hours I'm getting up to drive to Grand Portage to catch a boat to Isle Royale to guide a backpacking trip.  What started as a calm rain shower soon becomes a down pour.  The down pour continues through the remainder of the night and into the morning when at 5:30 I drive down the road.  At this point the ditches are completely full.

Driving up Highway 61 to Grand Portage that morning was like winter driving in July.  As the truck was hydroplaning at every low point in the road I couldn't help but think about the homestead.  I couldn't go back.  I was committed to catching that boat and guiding a five day backpacking trip.  Rolling over 3-5 foot waves later that morning with lightening shattering the distant Canadian sky I knew that the situation at home wasn't good.  However, on the remote island and without any form of communication for five days I had to trust that Amy had the situation under control.

Needless to say the rain poured down relentlessly until mid morning.  Over four inches of rain fell.  Our ditch was scoured down to bedrock.  All of the rock in it was transported by the torrent down to the culvert.  The pipe soon clogged up and with no place to go the water rushed over the driveway and road. Within moments the road was washed away!

Amy headed back home after dropping me off to catch the boat.  Driving up the washed-out County road leading home she knew right away that things were bad.  Debris had covered the base of the driveway.  The culvert was no where to be found.  She was able to locate the outlet of the culvert, paced the line back up to where she thought the inlet would be and started to dig.  As long as the culvert was buried water would continue to run over the road and exacerbate the damage!  After a couple of hours of digging she finally found the inlet and was able to get the runoff to drain into the culvert.  She spent the next two days digging and filling in the freshly incised channels in an attempt to level out the road surface to make it passable.

Five days later I got home to find a place much different than I had left.  We have spent the last few days digging and and "patching" the base of the road of.  Right now we are just happy that we can get to our new home and thinking of ways to deal with the next time it decides to dump 4 inches of rain on us!  Once again we've found that it all comes down to water and how it interacts with the landscape; particularly at it's most violent moments...

Listening to the cicada

The temperature and humidity are dismally closely aligned in the 80's.  Fog blankets Lake Superior day and night.  Every once and a while a misty cloud bank is forced up the driveway by a cool blast of lake air.  The dog is panting on the cement.  We wake in the morning to the sound of cicadas chirping.

We are coming up on a month of living on the property.  Now officially out of our rental in town, every single one of our belongings are here in one place once again.  Slowly, we are steadily building shelves and storage to make sure that  everything finds a home.  Amy has most of the art collection on the walls.  In short life is simple and comfortable.

The chores have just begun.  Beyond hauling the daily water I have begun putting up the upcoming winter's firewood supply.  It's kind of ironic to be thinking about splitting firewood for the winter when the heat index is over one hundred degrees.  That is, however, exactly the direction where my mind and efforts have begun to go!  Last week one of our local loggers delivered three cords of birch.  The logs were delivered in 16' lengths.  It is now my task to buck the logs into 16" lengths, split it in half and stack to dry.  This birch will be supplemented with some poplar cut around the property.

As usual, there's plenty of work to be done.  However, for the time being I just going to sit at my desk, write, and listen to the cicada...

Phenology

Warm, humid.  It's not very often that the North Shore is issued an "excessive heat warning" but with highs in the mid to upper 80's and a humidity level of equal value we find ourselves laying around in the shade-too hot to tackle the projects that we had hoped to accomplish.  This may not sound "hot" to folks further south but keep in mind that the average annual temperature around here is 39.  Our tomatoes, however, are loving the heat.  This morning we noticed our first piece of fruit!

Phenology

Warm, sunny.  Highs in the low 70's and lows in the mid 50's.  Over three inches of rain fell in the last couple of weeks.  Despite this climate data ranks precipitation values about 10% below average.  Dew berries, strawberries and heal-all are in bloom.  Summer on the North Shore is in full swing!

Shoe Lake

Shoe Lake is nestled into the rolling white pine-clad hills of the "Greenwood country" in eastern Cook County.  It's shoreline is rimmed with black spruce, northern white cedar, labrador, sphagnum moss and the occasional tamarack.  Common to many lakes in the higher elevations of the Duluth Complex, Shoe Lake's outlet is bedrock controlled.  The means that the lake's water level is trapped behind bedrock.  The lake is shallow (just shy of 20 feet at it's deepest point) yet it supports a decent population of brook trout and splake (hybrid of brook and lake trout).