My Labor Day weekend trip to Manitoulin Island at the top of Lake Huron added more to my conviction that the upper Great Lakes Region is filled with emerald and sapphire vistas that are among the most beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world.  One part of that region is the La Cloche Mountains that form part of the arch at the top of the lake—an elaborate frieze carved by the hand of our Creator.  I always look forward to this magnificent approach to Manitoulin Island.  Below is a sampler of images from the La Cloche Mountains:

My love of botany and geology makes this trip a sort of schizophrenic delight: my attention flitting from rock to flower so rapidly that it is hard to pay attention to my driving—meaning that I have to stop the car many times, for safety’s sake!  The La Cloche Mountains are made up of Precambrian rock of the Canadian Shield that dips down toward Lake Huron where later fossil-laden limestone has laid out a flat pavement formed when creatures in early oceans died and settled to the ocean bottom.  But over the top of all of these various bedrock formations ancient glaciers did their work.  In the two photos below you can see first where the bottom of the glacier carried rocks, stones, and sand to carve out and polish troughs that still show the striations made by the movement of thousands of tons of ice against the bedrock.

Down out of the mountains and onto the limestone pavement, called “alvar,” the glaciers left a load of pebbles, stones, and rocks—glacial erratics.  This is geology in the raw—an amazing sight for those of us who live atop several feet of topsoil with its fields and forests.  On the alvar, there is little soil.  Most of it is made up of water and wind-carried silt and dust that settled into cracks over the centuries—creating neat lines of hardy vegetation, much of which is extremely rare.

In my next post we’ll journey over the Little Current swing bridge and onto fascinating Manitoulin Island.

See you outdoors!

Dean