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Current Grand Marais Scenes – July 2021

Because it has been several months since I posted a web page update, I will include photos from winter, spring, and summer.

These three photos were taken at the end of the winter season. The first image was taken from the east side of Sable Lake looking toward the Grand Sable Dunes in the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The second was taken from the top of the dunes looking over the frozen Sable Lake. The third photo shows shore ice in front of the campground in Grand Marais. We had very little ice this winter due to the low snowfall amount as well as the warmer than usual temperatures.

During the spring I was busy finishing up the new book, so I do not have any photos taken in Grand Marais. However, I did participate in an awesome three-day hike in the Porcupine Mountain State Park. The first image shows my friends and me on the shoreline along the Lake Superior Trail in the Porkies. Our hiking club is named Helkarcia (Hel for Helen, Kar for Karen, and Cia for Marcia). We named the falls Helkarcia Falls. The second photo shows a female merganser duck. These are large, long-bodied ducks with thin, pointed wings. Their bills are straight and narrow, unlike the wide, flat bill of a “typical” duck. Females have shaggy crests on the backs of their heads. They are smaller than a Canadian Goose and slightly larger than a mallard duck.  Adult males are patterned with white bodies and dark, iridescent-green heads for most of the year. The back is black and the bill red. Females and immatures are gray-bodied with a white chest and rusty cinnamon heads. From late summer to mid-autumn, males wear a nonbreeding plumage that looks very similar to female plumage. In-flight, both sexes show large white patches on the upper wings (larger in adult males). The third sunset photo was taken from our rented cabin, which was located at the mouth of the Big Carp River along the Lake Superior shoreline.

Grand Marais has a traditional July 4th celebration, which is always held on the 4th of July. Usually our firework display is totally awesome. This year, it seems they just lit off a series of finale, grouped together fireworks. There was not time to ooh and aah individual fireworks. The whole show was over in a hurry. I was able to get a few photos. The third photo shows downtown Grand Marais during the parade, which was better than normal with several floats. The last three photos show a wild rose and other pictures taken during a hike across the Grand Sable Dunes from Sable Lake to Lake Superior, and back.

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Customer Agate Finds – July 2021

So far this season there have not been many great agates brought into the museum. I did receive an email from Jacqueline Schmidt, who is a Michigan transplant now living in Minnesota. She found this almost pound and a half Lake Superior agate in a farmer’s field. Because it was not found on a beach, it suffered less erosion and still has a partial husk.

In June, Dan McGraw, from Manchester, Iowa, came into the museum to show me some Lakers he found in his home state. During the glaciation time, huge walls of ice scraped Minnesota clean and deposited glacial till (including agates) in Iowa. The largest of the four agates, shown below in the upper right, is four pounds. This specimen is clearly an agate, but only a small window with great banding peaks through the husk on the bottom end of the specimen. I am glad I do not have to make the decision whether to cut or face polish the specimen.  The upper left and bottom right specimens are fortification agates. The lower left agate has an amethyst center.

In June, Mark and Kimberly Buda from Bay City, MI visited the Grand Marais area. East of town Kimberly found this fabulous 4.7 ounce Lake Superior agate. Four photos are included to show all sides of this marvelous specimen.

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Rockhounding and Adventure Trips – South Dakota, October 2020

After the crazy busy summer that completely wore me out, my friend, Sharon Smith, asked me to go with her and her boyfriend to South Dakota to go rock hunting.  She, also, has had challenges as of late and needed to get away.  We were going to go later in October, but the SD weather in early October was perfect, so we moved the trip up.  It was sunny the whole week with temperatures in the 70s and 80s.  We timed it perfect since South Dakota had snow the following week.

I left Grand Marais and rendezvoused with Sharon and Tom in Brainerd, MN.  We then headed west to Kadoka, SD.  We found a small campground with almost no people and stayed for several nights.  On the first day of rock hunting, we drove only seven miles away to the White River.  The water level of all the rivers is extremely low.  When we pulled off the highway, we saw a guy driving a four-wheeler, so we drove over to talk with him.  He leases the land and gave us permission to rock hunt.

We parked the truck and followed cow paths down the bluff, through the willows, and over rocky terrain to the river.  All along what is currently a dry part of the riverbed there were thousands of rocks.

We found vast quantities of chalcedony seam agate, petrified wood, and Sharon found the only Fairburn of the week.  We also found petrified wood and chalcedony.

The next morning, we drove around 20 miles to the southwest of our campground and met up with a woman, Carol, who is a relative of one of Sharon’s friends.  There were rocks covering vast sections of the terrain.

The next morning, we drove through the Badlands National Park to and from our next rock hunting area, which was the Railroad Butte area.  There were tons of buttes with adjoining drainage ditches.  Again, there were rocks everywhere.

Of course, we had to stop and take pictures of the badlands formations.

During our drive, we saw bison, a mountain goat, and a ram.

Here are some more close-ups of some of the rocks I found.  I’ll start with some of the chalcedonies.

I also found petrified wood and one piece of rose quartz.

In the past, I have brought with me on trips out west my standard rock hunting UV lights.  This time I decided to bring a couple of the 365 wavelength UV lights, which are used on the Lake Superior shoreline to find the fluorescent syenite rocks.  OMG.  The amount of fluorescence was amazing.  The chalcedony fluoresced mostly green and the petrified wood orange.  The first photo shows some of the specimens in normal light.  The remainder shows fluorescence under 365 wavelength UV light.  I did not notice until I arrived home, but some of the chalcedony specimens had phosphorescence after the UV light was turned off.

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Mineral of the Month – Royal Aztec Agate November 2020

While I was on my fall trip to South Dakota to agate hunt and recover from the crazy summer, I was given a lead from a friend regarding a rock shop that had gone out of business.  I met with one of the co-owners the first time to go over the exceptionally large inventory, but we ran out of time.  I went back a few days later and bought quite a bit.  One of the boxes of specimens I purchased was Royal Aztec purple agate.  This agate was mined out in the 1960s, so it is now extremely rare and difficult to find.  It is considered one of the best seam agates ever found on Earth.  The deepness of the purple color can vary, as can the amount of banding and other structure.  One unusual thing about this agate is that if it is stored in sunlight, the deepness of the color will fade.

The agate was found in Durango, Mexico.

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History Gem – Gitchee Agomowin (Grand Marais history article) November 2020

Reprinted from The Alger Echo, Vol. 1, No. 9, Fall 1969

Gitchee Agomowin

In early times, med stayed close to the shore when traveling on Lake Superior; Their light crafts were no match for the lake in its angry moods.  Indians and early French knew well the sheltered spot they both called Great Bay or Great Harbor – “Gitchee Agomowin” in the Chippewa language, and “Grand Marais” in French.

The use of the harbor on the long stretch of shelterless coast began centuries before recorded history.  Activity there was noted in the earliest French accounts, and it was mentioned frequently by most travelers from that time on.

The first white man to record his visit to Grand Marais was Pierre Esprit Radisson in the summer of 1658.  Many expeditions followed, and about 200 years later, in 1853, a permanent settlement was established.  Fur trading, then commercial fishing and lumbering were responsible for the beginnings and development of the Grand Marais area during its early decades.  It became Alger County’s largest and fastest-growing town during the pine lumber boom of the 1890s.

After a sharp decline in 1910 following the abandonment of the Manistique Railway, Grand Marais settled into a small but stable village where fishing and lumbering and later, tourism, provided a livelihood for this historic and beautiful community.

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Current Grand Marais Scenes November 2020

Given the crazy busy summer, I did not have much time to get out and go on adventures.  But I did get out at least a few times to get a few photos.  Of course, I always must include a Lake Superior sunset picture.

I also have to include some beach photos.  The three photos below were taken on a beach east of Grand Marais.

It is also imperative that I include a couple of photos from the Grand Sable Dunes.

When I was with friends east of town, we ventured down the beach to see part of a shipwreck.

When my son and his family were up visiting, we drove into the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  We hiked into the Au Sable lighthouse and stopped at the mouth of the Hurricane River.

The next photo was taken from town looking across the bay toward Lonesome Point, showing the break wall in the foreground.

The final two photos were taken in October after one of our early snowfalls.  A friend and I hiked through the school forest to the bluff over Lake Superior.  The erosion on the shoreline continues.  During the hike, my friend spotted the barred owl that was resting on a lower branch around 100 feet to the right of the trail.

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Customer Agate Finds November 2020

The first thing I must do is to apologize to Auden Lloyd (Northville, MI), and Carrie and Dan Wiersma (Appleton, WI), and Michael (no last name or home town was given).  Auden visited the museum on August 3rd; Carrie and Dan on August 28th, and Michael on September 11th.   I used my iPad to take photos of their agates.  Carrie and Dan had a four-pounder!  Two days ago as I was starting to work on this web page update, my iPad screen went black as I was using it.  I have spent hours following instructions and advice from several sources.  It appears the motherboard quit functioning on the iPad.  I was hoping the photos were sent to iCloud, but I can not seem to find them.  I may have had the automatic upload turned off.  Yesterday I drove to Marquette to buy a new iPad.  I turned the automatic upload function at this time.  I deeply apologize that I cannot share pictures of these agates.  If you read this and would like to send me photos, I will have them added to this web page update.  Please send them to
.

In addition, I must apologize to the readers for not taking many photos of agates this summer.  It was VERY busy and on most days, I did not have time.  It was all I could do to do what I had to do to take care of customers’ needs.

On July 2nd, Ken Myles came into the Gitche Gumee to show me a fantastic candy stripper that also exhibits shadow banding.  What is funny is that a guy was in the museum the day before who was shown the agate on the beach.  Then I got to see it, too!

Katrina Fryfogle, from Flushing, MI visited the museum on July 31st.  She found a great shadow agate that exhibited the shadow even though the agate was only beach polished.  In many cases, you cannot see the shadow until the agate surface has been polished because you need good optics for the shadow phenomenon to show.

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Mineral of the Month – Chrysocolla, Malachite Combination Rock May 2020

At the end of January, I drove from Florida to Arizona to purchase minerals for the Gitche Gumee Museum’s gift shop. I used to go to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show every year. Now, to minimize expenses, I go every three to four years. But it is always to go to this huge show (which is actually more than 40 separate shows located all over the city)!

One of the minerals I purchased this year for the first time is a combination rock from the Democratic-Republican of the Congo (formerly Zaire). This country of more than 100 million people is in the middle of the African continent.

In the past, the museum has sold Chrysocolla and Malachite but never had I had the privilege of selling this combination rock. The green in these specimens is malachite; the blue is chrysocolla. There is also black heterogenite included in some of the specimens. These minerals are secondary-fill copper minerals that form deep underground.

Chrysocolla has a blue-green/cyan color and is a minor secondary ore of copper that formed when copper ores were altered by mineral-rich fluids
Malachite also gets its color from copper, which makes up about 58 percent of its content.

Technically, malachite is a “secondary mineral,” which means it formed when copper-rich rocks were dissolved or chemically altered by circulating fluids. Malachite’s characteristic swirling and concentric patterns are a result of this formation process. This beautiful mineral was mined in Egypt over 6,000 years ago. Not only was it used as both a gemstone and a decorative stone, but it was ground into green pigments for painting and cosmetics. Synthetic green pigments equaling the vivid color of Malachite were not developed for thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution. But if you decide to work on polishing and cutting malachite, BE CAREFUL! The copper content of the dust released from grinding malachite is toxic! Please keep the rough stone wet and wear protective respiratory gear.

Chrysocolla-Malachite is a combination of two copper-derived silicate minerals. Since these specimens contain different minerals, they are considered rocks. Minerals are consistent in their make-up; rocks contain different minerals and are not consistent in how much of each mineral they contain. An easy way to understand the difference is that rocks are like cookies: they contain different ingredients such as flour or sugar (which are like minerals). The sugar making up cookies may be the same, but other ingredients in cookies change – so cookies are not always the same!

In the case of Chrysocolla-Malachite, it is a combination of two Copper minerals.  Copper typically formed as a sulfide, which oxidized when exposed to water.  If that water also contained carbonic acid, it dissolved the copper and formed new compounds, including green malachite.  If the copper was oxidized, cyan-colored chrysocolla also may have formed.  Sometimes these two situations happened in the same spot and at the same time resulting in both chrysocolla and malachite developing next to each other and intertwining – which is what happened to form these combination rocks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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History Gem – Michigan’s Glacial Gemstones of Northeastern Upper Peninsula May 2020

In 1972 the founder of the Gitche Gumee Museum, Axel Niemi, published the first of what would be three printings of his book. Although the publication covers rocks and minerals other than agate, the main focus of the book is the Lake Superior agate. The book is around 32 pages long and is 5” wide and 7.5” tall. The first chapter is included below (slightly edited).

KNOW YOUR AGATES

How to tell agates from other beach stones.

If you should find a smooth, brown beach stone, chances are that you have a common chert, light brown smooth, and waxy on the surface. An agate has similar qualities, except for a few differences.

  1. Agate is translucent, which means light passes through it. Another stone, jasper-agate is opaque, although otherwise similar in markings to agate. No light passes through jasper.
  2. Agate is colorful and can be red, red-brown, whitish, brown, sometimes green, black, or blue. Agates can also be combinations of these colors.
  3. Common chert found on Lake Superior beaches is opaque. Colors can be grey, tan, or brown. Like jasper, chert is opaque.
  4. Picture or scenic chert is tan and purple-lavender, making a pretty cabochon. A cabochon is an oval or cushion-shaped dome fashioned by the lapidary grinder to make the stone into a form used in jewelry.
  5. Agate may be found as a whole nodule, or as a part of or chip from a whole agate. In order to understand agate better, we must necessarily know how agate is formed. We must go back millions of years to the period when the Killarney Mountains were formed (now known as the Midcontinental Rift). The lava cooled leaving empty seams and bubble-pockets that hardened. Since the volcanic rock is porous, mineral-filled liquids seeped into these pockets to slowly fill them. The liquid was probably water in the form of superheated steam from below or rainwater from above. Some authorities believe the mineral-rich water simply seeped into the pockets leaving the silicon dioxide and coloring agents behind to fill in the pockets. Another theory has it that silicone gel-filled the pockets and then slowly crystallized into the agate with various beautiful patterns. After millions of years of erosion, glacial wear and transportation, weathering, frost action, and other natural forces — a fracture-free Lake Superior agate is quite rare. Most agates are of the reddish or reddish-brown color due to the high content of iron in this area (iron oxide in solution was deposited together with the silica).

All agates have a cool, waxy, rounded look when beach-worn. Chipped pieces have a smooth or rippled surface appearance. Chert has a similar appearance since like agate, it fractures in a conchoidal manner.

Old rockhounds never die—they just petrify!

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Current Grand Marais Scenes May 2020

As many of you know, for the first time I decided to go to Florida for a few months this past winter to work on my golf game. After leaving Grand Marais, I visited both kids and their families for Christmas before heading to Panama City Beach. Shutting down my house in Grand Marais paid for renting the condo. Finally, after working on my game for over two months, I met my goal of shooting less than 100 shots for 18 holes two days before leaving Florida! Thanks to all my family and friends for supporting me during the two years of working on my golf swing! It was my first time golfing at Signal Hill, but I had a 95!

I arrived home in Grand Marais at the end of March. I knew there was still snow on the ground, but it was still weird to go from sunny weather with temperatures in the 80s to winter weather with temperatures in the teens! Here are photos of the snow at the museum, on the south side of my house, in front of a garage on Coast Guard Point, and in the woods on the national park’s cross-country ski trail.

After arriving home, I self-quarantined at home for three weeks. I did, however, spend time along the Lake Superior shoreline.

I also spent time hiking near Sable Lake as well as in the Grand Sable Dunes!

As the snow started to melt, the deer began hanging out in front of my house. Since I was in quarantine, it was nice to have company!

Slowly but surely the snow started to melt. I had amazing icicles hanging from my roof. Also, the water table is VERY high. There is flooding in low areas more than normal.