Integrative Natural History of Minnesota's North Shore, Part 18: Taking It All In | Gooseberry Falls State Park
Looking more or less northward. Taken from the park's River View Trail.
The bridge visible above the falls is part of State Route 61, the main coastal road from Duluth to Ontario.
This was the first North Shore state park I ever visited. At that time I remember thinking, "If the rest of the way to the Canadian border looks like this and has this much geology and botany, I'm going to be in heaven." As it turned out, I wasn't disappointed. And Gooseberry makes the perfect point of entry for the whole experience.
This photo is a good introduction to this site for a number of reasons. For one thing, it captures two of this property's five waterfalls. For another, it gives a decent long-range view of the North Shore Volcanic Group basalt flows over which the Gooseberry River spills on its way to Lake Superior. And then again, it's a nice family portrait of the locale's predominant tree species.
The two cascades visible in this image are the Middle Falls and the Lower Falls, and I trust you can figure out which is which. The bedrock under and around them dates to the end of the Mesoproterozoic era. It began about 1.1 Ga ago as mafic lava flows that poured out of fissures onto the stretched and faulted floor of the Midcontinent Rift.
That huge breach, often abbreviated to MCR, extended across Laurentia (ancestral North America) in a great horseshoe shape from at least Kansas up to the Lake Superior region, and then down again to southeastern Michigan, and perhaps all the way to Alabama.
One consequence of the MCR's eruptive activity is the bedrock you see in this park. It comes in three varieties: basalt, more basalt, and even more bloody basalt. But this unrelieved expanse of dark-toned igneous stone constitutes only a tiny fraction of the MCR's total lava output, which may well have been as much as 2 million cubic km (about 480,000 cubic mi).
As far as the North-Woodsy trees here go, the predominant softwood, evergreen, and conifer is that lover of Great Lakes shorelines, Arbor Vitae (Thuja occidentalis). It's also known as Northern White Cedar, though a true cedar it isn't. It's joined by the most common hardwood in view, the white-barked Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera).
Part 19 of this series shows the Arbor Vitae in remarkably intimate association with the North Shore Volcanic Group.
To see the other photos and descriptions of this series, visit
my Integrative Natural History of Minnesota's North Shore album.
Integrative Natural History of Minnesota's North Shore, Part 18: Taking It All In | Gooseberry Falls State Park
Looking more or less northward. Taken from the park's River View Trail.
The bridge visible above the falls is part of State Route 61, the main coastal road from Duluth to Ontario.
This was the first North Shore state park I ever visited. At that time I remember thinking, "If the rest of the way to the Canadian border looks like this and has this much geology and botany, I'm going to be in heaven." As it turned out, I wasn't disappointed. And Gooseberry makes the perfect point of entry for the whole experience.
This photo is a good introduction to this site for a number of reasons. For one thing, it captures two of this property's five waterfalls. For another, it gives a decent long-range view of the North Shore Volcanic Group basalt flows over which the Gooseberry River spills on its way to Lake Superior. And then again, it's a nice family portrait of the locale's predominant tree species.
The two cascades visible in this image are the Middle Falls and the Lower Falls, and I trust you can figure out which is which. The bedrock under and around them dates to the end of the Mesoproterozoic era. It began about 1.1 Ga ago as mafic lava flows that poured out of fissures onto the stretched and faulted floor of the Midcontinent Rift.
That huge breach, often abbreviated to MCR, extended across Laurentia (ancestral North America) in a great horseshoe shape from at least Kansas up to the Lake Superior region, and then down again to southeastern Michigan, and perhaps all the way to Alabama.
One consequence of the MCR's eruptive activity is the bedrock you see in this park. It comes in three varieties: basalt, more basalt, and even more bloody basalt. But this unrelieved expanse of dark-toned igneous stone constitutes only a tiny fraction of the MCR's total lava output, which may well have been as much as 2 million cubic km (about 480,000 cubic mi).
As far as the North-Woodsy trees here go, the predominant softwood, evergreen, and conifer is that lover of Great Lakes shorelines, Arbor Vitae (Thuja occidentalis). It's also known as Northern White Cedar, though a true cedar it isn't. It's joined by the most common hardwood in view, the white-barked Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera).
Part 19 of this series shows the Arbor Vitae in remarkably intimate association with the North Shore Volcanic Group.
To see the other photos and descriptions of this series, visit
my Integrative Natural History of Minnesota's North Shore album.