der Wandersmann's occasional thoughts and pics

Thank you, Eva ... I hope so, too. I'm sick of these summers that keep me imprisoned with the heat. I might as well be living out West again, in Navajo country.

That area is only a few hundred feet back from the edge of the bluff that borders the lake, but it is a good 100 feet higher. I think it was a bog back at the last glaciation, when the lake was a deal higher than it is now because of ice damming, backing the waters up into what is now the basin for Lake Michigan, which was depressed by the mass of the ice before it melted (I seem to recall that the geomorphologists have said that the Great Lakes bottoms are still rebounding).
It stayed a bog, and with the vagaries of micro-landforms, the edge of the bluff is higher than the land behind it, thus trapping a lot of the drainage for a time before it gets high enough to flow into the lake. So it's had many millennia to decompose whatever fell into it, resulting in the richest, blackest soil I've ever seen anywhere. It's prime farmland, except when we get enough spring rains to cause flooding, which can be quite long-lasting, since there is a layer of clay ("Greatlakean Till") some feet below the surface. But it almost looks like the soil itself should be nutritious, and I suppose it is ... for vegetables.

I believe it did. Many things are beginning to be discovered / figured out about the last glaciation and its aftermath, and its effects upon the land. Many things that used to puzzle geomorphologists are beginning to get explanations.

Thank you, Rosh.

Thank you, Jill ... I don't find orchids to be particularly attractive, in general, but these were so spectacularly bizarre that I figured they were worth a few frames.

I'm off to see the orchids!