Collecting Hepatics along Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota

Abstract

I have been asked by your Secretary to take you on a collecting trip. The weather is inclement, the distance is great, the season is past. Let us use the magic of memory. We are all at the Head of the Great Lakes. It is August Ist. We are off, at sunrise, in motor cars with camping outfit and food, for a collecting trip along the north shore of Lake Superior from Duluth-Superior to Pigeon River, the International Boundary. For the first 25 miles to Two Harbo s the road is of concrete and skirts the lake shore, with the morning sun glistening the white breakers of the deep blue water. From Two Harbors the Arrowhead Highway winds in and out along the bays, through rock cuts of the headlands and palisades, and the land side becomes more wooded. At Silver Creek cliff we stop to read a memorial tablet, in memory of the early French Voyagers who passed this way long before the New England Colonies, and we realize that we are in an old but ever new country. The road winds about the rocky cliffs, across rivers and deep-cut rock gorges, and by waterfalls. Small mountains are on the left and Lake Superior ever in sight on the right, with palisades, islands, and small sheltered beaches where we can stop for a pocket full of agates. We stop at Gooseberry River to see the falls and the gorge, and to collect. Some of us find Nardia hyalina, Preissia quadrata, Lophozia Kaurini, L. badensis, Plagiochila asplenioides. Some of us come back with fragrant fern, W.oodsia alpina, Woodsia ilvensis, and yard-long fronds of bladder ferns. The woods are dry from sun and fire and we go on through ever changing scenery of lake shore, rocks, rock-topped hills, over rivers, gorges and by waterfalls, to Cascade River where we stop for lunch, on the shelving rocks of the lake shore. We leave with reluctance the Cascade, with the dozen of waterfalls and trout pools set in a virgin forest. We find that the north shore range, stretching from Duluth to Port Arthur, rises to an elevation of 600 to 700 feet above the level of the lake shore to one mile west, and is cut by many rivers, which make the drop to the lake level, near the lake. We pass many waterfalls and deep gorges. However, the forest is mostly second-growth, and fire and drought have destroyed much of the original growth of bryophytes. We reach Grand Marais in the afternoon and rest at hotel or camp site. Near this village a circling beach ends in a rocky peninsula, almost an island, which proves to be a paradise for Bryophytes. An acre in extent, the area is broken by rock ridges well covered witl humus and which support a rich growth of spruce, balsam and cedar. The surface is wet and the depressions swampy. The ground cover is of Ledum, sphagnum, mountain cranberry, and mosses. The bare rocks are richly covered with lichens, and the seams of rock ledges are outlined by Primula mistassinica and pinguiculas: a typical northern heath bog set on top of a rocky island. The lake side is a level slope or rock; the northwestern side a broken ledge of trap, and it is here that we find a surprising growth of hepatics. The place was first visited by a Wisconsin botanist, L. S. Cheney of the University of Wisconsin, in I889. He found 84 flowering plants, 41 mosses, and 7 hepatics near Grand Marais.