Camping - Blue Mounds State Park

The weekend of July 20-22 we went camping at Blue Mounds State Park, near Luverne.  The name of the park is due to a 90-foot ridge of 1,700 million year old  reddish or purplish Sioux Quartzite, as early settlers approached the area from the east, the ridge appeared blue to them.

It was the first time that we had used a cart-in campsite.  We had to cart all of our materials a couple hundred of yards from the car to the campsite.  Since Sarah and Lex were camping with us, we needed another tent.  Kieran refused to leave his tent, so he slept with me (our tent is the yellow one on the left).  Luke jumped ship and slept in the borrowed tent with Sarah and Lex...oh well.

It was a great campsite with a couple of large boulders nearby and isolated from the other sites.  Unfortunately the weather for the weekend was about 95 degrees with dewpoints pushing 70.  The campsite was also down a slight hill from the other campsites, ours was about 15-20 feet in elevation below the others.  There was a nice breeze for most of the weekend that made things feel okay, but in our campsite, we didn't feel it.  We saw the leaves blowing in the breeze about 15 feet off the ground with great envy.  It's the first time that I slept in the tent with the fly partially taken off, though both nights I had to put in on in the early morning with a threat of thunderstorms.

Saturday morning, Kieran said he wanted to see a bison and it's skull.  The park has a resident herd of bison, but we didn't see them until we left Sunday morning (and it was at quite a distance then).  So we went to the interpretive center on the other side of the park.  It's a unique buidling that was built into the side of a quartize cliff.

They have lots of displays in the building, but we were after the bison skull.  Here they have the skull and horns of an evolutionary ancestor to today's bison.  Bison occidentalis lived during the Pleistocene and was much larger than the North American bison today.  They also had the tusk of a mammoth, both of these had been found nearby.

Lately, when we've camped at state parks, Kieran has been reading signs about kits that they loan for use.  The kits include birding, geocaching and others, so Kieran got to borrow one for a few days.  He carried it everywhere, you can see it over his shoulder....it was the birding kit and including a pair of binoculars and a few bird identification guides.

Hiking isn't really Lex's thing yet with the little legs of hers, Sarah basically carried her on her back for most of the time.  That was fine with me, because I was too busy sweating already.  Luke digressed quite a bit this weekend as well.  After doing a lot of impressive hikes through rough terrain in late June, he didn't want much of hiking at the park.

Near the center was a couple of nice stops.  The first was a large boulder of quartzite sitting atop of the prairie.  Of course I had to climb to the top when the sign said that it was 300 feet above the city of Luverne, seen in the distance.

The other is a 1,250 foot long line of quartzite rocks that have been aligned in an east-west direction.  On the spring and fall equinox, the sunrise and sunset are in perfect alignment with this stone line.  It's unknown who took the time to arrange these rocks into this line.

Saturday afternoon we drove the short distance to Pipestone National Monument in Pipestone.  We took the 3/4 mile hike along the paved trail to see most of the sites at the monument, Lex went along for the ride.

I had previously told the boys that we would be seeing a waterfall here and they kept talking about waterfalls with Sarah.  She kept saying that there weren't a look of waterfalls in the area and they should expect too much.  I should have told her there is a 10-15 foot waterfall of a ridge of Sioux Quartzite.

Though the biggest hit of the day was seeing the large snapping turtle at the bottom of the waterfall.  Glad it was in the water and not on the trail....

The Sioux Quartzite weathers along vertical fractures and can form interesting features.  Can you see the faces in the two pictures below?

The monument is there because Native Americans have historically (and continue to do so) quarry pipestone (technically called catlinite) out of the Sioux Quartzite.  They use the pipestone to create pipes and other materials, many of which can be bought in the area.  The catlinite is beneath about 10 feet of quartzite and dip to the east about 5-10 degrees.  Which means that to keep quarrying the catlinite, Native Americans have to remove more and more of the quartzite (which is a very hard rock).  The park service has cleaned out one quarry for people to walk into, the catlinite is about 10-15 inches at the bottom of quarry face.

Near the entrance to the park we had to stop at the Three Maidens.  Native Americans recognized that these boulders were different from the area's bedrock and gave them spiritual significance.  In reality, these boulders are a glacial erratic that has been weathered via the process of ice wedging.  Glaciers carried a granite boulder from the north only to be deposited here, over time, water has seeped into the fractures in the granite and expanded when the water froze.  This has broken the original boulder into 7-10 boulders now.  Kieran is there in the picture some where, can you find him?

What do you do after a long hot day of camping and hiking?  You eat!

Sunday was Lex's 2nd birthday, but she was in no mood for celebration.  Pretty sure she did not like the heat, pretty sure she hated it more than me.  So Kieran and went for a hike, the birding kit came along.  It wasn't too long before Kieran said "dad, there aren't any trees on this hike, it's not the same as by Lake Superior", which made me explain the differences of a prairie and the coniferous forests of the north.

It wasn't too long before Kieran noticed a difference of his own, numerous outcrops of quartzite have Prickly Pear Cacti growing on them, one of two species of cactus found in Minnesota.

The trail took us to the bottom of the 90-foot cliff of quartzite, through some pretty easy walking.

What did Sarah, Lex and Luke do while we were gone?  Apprently they played at the park's playground and hung out and the fishing dock.  The park also has a swimming beach that the kids used a couple of times during the weekend as well.

Leaving the park, I had to take this picture.  For some reason I have to have a picture of the boys sitting in front of signs indicating places that we've been.

When we got home Sunday night, Lex was in a much more celebratory mood for her birthday.  As you might be able to see while wearing her brand new, birthday sunglasses!