Rounding the bend in an old two-track road, our group gaped up at the huge greenish-gray pile of dust that towered above. With weeds growing on the sloped sides and back, and an almost vertical cliff facing us, the landform felt like a poor quality model of the magnificent Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park. Our boots made tracks in the fine sediment under our feet, and water had made tracks and grooves down the steep face of the pile.
Bill Tefft, leader of the Ely Field Naturalist group, explained to participants on the Cable Natural History Museum’s Landscape Ecology in Northern Minnesota program that this was the waste material from a long-closed operation that quarried greenstone bedrock, crushed it into material for asphalt shingles, and then made a pile the stuff that got too powdery. “It extends all the way down to the railroad tracks,” Bill told me as we peered over a steep, forested bank. Green Mountain wasn’t just the cliff, it was the entire area.
We followed the old two-track as it curved down around the side of the pile through thick forest. The group stopped and gawked in awe at the shore of a glimmering lake surrounded by artfully rugged greenstone cliffs. Calm water reflected the lovely patchwork of a mature forest. A few cattails took advantage of the shallow water where the gentle slope of this old road disappeared into the lake.
According to Bill, the quarry operation had to stop about a hundred years ago when they unearthed a spring and water poured into the hole. Rumor has it that some of the mining equipment is still at the bottom. But why were we here on a natural history field trip?
Tom Fitz, geologist extraordinaire, explained that this greenstone bedrock represents a time in Earth’s history about 2.79 billion years ago when lava erupted from the seafloor in a world that was almost entirely ocean. Subsequent action by plate tectonics buried the hardened lava. Heat, pressure, and time transformed some of the components into greenish minerals, and it became a rock called greenstone that’s common around Ely, MN. This is some of the oldest rock exposed at Earth’s surface. Unnatural as they may feel, roadcuts and quarries provide some of the best opportunities to observe this slice of history.
I was just about ready to round up the group and move on when someone exclaimed over a pretty white flower among the weeds. Five luminous petals, each with translucent lines arcing gracefully toward the nectar reservoir in the center, provided the backdrop for a ring of delicate eyelashes tipped with glossy yellow spheres. I could barely believe my eyes!
I first met bog star, or marsh grass-of-Parnassus, during my summer in Alaska while assisting with a snowshoe hare study in the Brooks Range. This little beauty captured my imagination immediately. Their range map includes most of Europe and plenty of other places in the Northern Hemisphere, but in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, they are harder to find. Except where they’re not! Once we started looking, more than a dozen bog stars appeared among the weeds.
The information in the iNaturalist app, when we used it to confirm their identification, mentioned that marsh grass-of-Parnassus is an indicator of the damp, calcareous soil in fens. Calcium-rich soil isn’t common in the Northwoods, since the ancient oceans that deposited limestone were mostly farther south. “Could there be something in the pulverized greenstone of the green mountain that would result in calcareous runoff?” I asked Tom. “Yes,” he answered. In fact, we’d just seen veins of the mineral calcite (calcium carbonate, the same mineral that’s in limestone) in a chunk of greenstone earlier that morning.
After taking a zillion photos of these beautiful flowers, I stood to stretch my back and gaze out over the quarry lake again. How odd, I thought, that this rare friend would be growing in place so impacted by humans. And yet, sorting through old memories from Alaska, I realized that I’d found that first bog star in the gravel beneath the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries oil from Prudhoe Bay.
For a moment, my delight in finding this flower diminished. Wouldn’t it be better to find them in a pristine wetland, untouched by the industrialized footprint of humans? But what part of the Earth is truly untouched? Not only have Indigenous peoples been living in relationship with the Northwoods ecosystem since the glaciers retreated, the impacts of modern humans include dropping mercury, microplastics, and DEET into even the most remote lakes, and changing the patterns of temperature and rainfall over wilderness and cities alike.
And yet wild nature, beautiful nature, survives. That doesn’t give us license to pollute and destroy without restraint. Instead, it gives me hope that if we are careful in how we use the Earth’s natural resources—Natural Gifts, in the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer—the ecosystems who sustain us can heal. With this thought, it was as if the Sun had emerged from a cloud, and the little white bog stars shone brightly again.
Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too. Natural Connections 3 will be published in November 2025!
For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.
Last Update: Aug 20, 2025 10:58 am CDT
