This gray Keweenawan basalt, whose fifty-foot ramparts flank this stretch of the St. Croix River, is unfathomably old, dating from the Precambrian Eon, somewhere between 500 million and a billion years ago.
It is also the hardest basalt-type rock in America—so hard that boulders of it were used by NASA to test the drills employed on the moon probe.

There are distinctly human
utterances here.
VOICES OF TIME

Near the cliff's base, the St. Croix’s natural scums and dissolved tannins have ranked water-level horizons on the rock face—a subtlety captured in just the last nanosecond of geologic time.
And, perhaps most compelling for their flesh-and-blood kinship with the likes of me, there are distinctly human utterances—portrayals of hands, a buffalo head and other symbols—likely made by Dakota or Ojibwe hunters nearly 1,000 years ago.
3 comments:
As I was reading the post, I just could not keep my eyes off the photos of rocks that were so full of creatures, I was tempted to start drawing them! Awesome and beautiful!
Yes, Jean, like finding faces and forms in clouds -- except that the rocks don't keep moving as we watch.
Well, not physically, Jeff, but they do keep on transforming into other things and becoming part of things I have already found, so for me, they do keep moving :) Keep on watching and you will see what I mean.
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