The peninsula is known for rock. Rocks here, rocks there, rocks everywhere. Rocks, rocks and more rocks.
And pretty thin soils too - which has created an altogether more complicated problem for everyone's drinking water.
Talk to a farmer and they'll wax eloquently about the farmers in Iowa County who will plow the same fields over a lifetime and hardly ever hit a rock.
I once told my brother-in-law how I could look forward to a new crop of rocks every spring.
With a serious expression he said - You mean you get more rocks every spring? Are the delivered?
Frost heaves - silly.
They are either crumbled chunks of the underlying bedrock or glacial boulders being forced to the surface by the freeze-thaw cycle every year.
Which is why Door county is known for its rock piles.
And its rock walls.
And this magnificent glacial boulder.
This came from somewhere in Canada during the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago.
Imagine the power of water and ice that were marshaled to transport that stone all the way to here in an ice sheet a mile thick.
And all that ice melted without the impact of an SUV or a coal-fired power plant.
These rare rocks are called erratics.
They are a gift of the glacier.
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The walls came about because the farmer's kids picked them all up and stacked them at the edge of the field. Do that enough and you get a wall.
ReplyDeleteYou should sell some fieldstones to Pewaukee. The DNR says they used the wrong rocks (quarried) for their retaining wall on the lake.
Hence the large farm families they say...
ReplyDeleteEvery spring you'll see a phalanx of kids out there picking rocks like they were clearing a minefield.
Of course nowadays they use a skid loader.
One of these days I'll have to talk about all of the cool stuff that can be found in a rock pile.
Rock pile archaeology I call it.