Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Ice Dunes of Lake Superior

Walking the Beach

Today Noelle, Parker and I headed over to Wisconsin for a walk along the beach at Wisconsin Point. While not much of the beach was actually accessible, our trip to Wisconsin made for an interesting day nonetheless. Last week's wind storm piled up huge dunes of ice. When I say huge, I mean really huge. Some of the ice was piled up at least 30 feet above the level of the beach. While Noelle looked for interesting natural objects on the shore, I scaled the ice dunes to get a better idea of how sturdy they were and to see if they held any secrets.
Eric & the Frozen Moonscape
That little blip in the middle of the photo is Eric

The dunes turned out to be more like a really short but wide glacier. There were crevasses and the "glacier" even calved into Lake Superior on two occasions, which was actually a bit frightening. Anyway, we ended up walking from lot 8 to the lighthouse.
Lighthouse & Ice

We made our way back to the car by way of the paved road.

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