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*
- I think most people stumble across the Niagara Escarpment,
almost literally,
either from the top or the bottom.
You can't encounter it without having a sense of wonder.
- The vertical habitat of the cliff face itself
is really interesting
because of the rock crevices
and the moist, cool conditions
that the cliff gives you for plants--
a lot of very specialized plants grow there.
- You approach the Niagara Escarpment from the bottom.
It's this moist moss-covered cliff face
with tumbling stones
and beautiful gnarled old cedar trees.
If you come at it from the top, you're approaching it
from maybe a hardwood forest that rolls off.
Down below, you see some interesting valley.
- The thing I think is cool about the Escarpment
is the story it tells of geology.
The story it tells of how ecology is happening.
It's seeing the looks in people's eyes
when they're experiencing something new.
- You can imagine pre-European settlement,
hunter-gatherer communities walking below and above it.
How often do you get to go somewhere
where you can separate yourself from the world,
if you choose,
and learn a little bit about nature
and maybe a little about yourself?
*
- The Niagara Escarpment is a geological feature
that spans the North American continent.
I like to think of it
as the ancient backbone of North America.
It actually runs for about a thousand miles
and we actually have
about a quarter of the length of the Escarpment
here in Wisconsin.
It is a ridge of rock that is about 430 million years old,
dating from the Silurian Period.
And we were about 20 degrees south of the equator
at the time of the Silurian.
It would have been a very tropical environment,
kind of like the Bahamas are today.
We're actually able to walk on
what was once the Silurian sea floor.
This rock surface was exposed by quarrying for the lime industry.
Here's something that's really interesting
on this rock surface.
This bull's-eye like structure is called a "stromatolite."
These are actually cyanobacteria that create this feature.
And they photosynthesize during the day
and at night, the sediment washes over.
The next day, the filaments grow through the sediment
and create another layer of filaments
and the sediment comes over again at night.
And you build up through time this layered structure
called a stromatolite.
When they have the top cut off of them,
they form these concentric circles
as you cut through those layers of sediment and algae.
They tell us that
the environment here
was extremely shallow water.
We do have stromatolites
that are alive today.
A very famous place where you can see stromatolites today
is Shark Bay, Australia.
- Evidence of glaciation here,
the things that struck people early on,
who didn't really necessarily know about glaciation,
or science for that matter.
They noticed that there were these strange rocks
that didn't belong here.
Rocks from the Canadian Shield like granite, gneiss and schist.
The other thing I think people noticed early on
was the scratches that occur on the tops of places
where you see the top of the Niagara Escarpment, for example.
You see the glacial striations.
They're pretty striking
and, again, hard to explain in any other way.
- This is one place
where you can actually see evidence
that the glacier came through the area.
It's very nicely accessible
right by Red Bird statue
here in High Cliff State Park.
Can you see the lines that parallel one another?
Glaciers are kind of like giant pieces of sandpaper.
They have all of the rocks and sand and gravel
that's imbedded in the ice.
When it comes across rock,
it can sometimes both polish and make grooves in the rock.
You can feel where it has planed off the surface of the dolomite
that show us the direction
that the ice sheet was moving.
We can tell it was moving north to south
because of the lines created
by that giant sandpaper-like surface
at the bottom of the ice.
-As later episodes of glaciation came through North America
from the Hudson Bay region in Canada,
the glaciers were forced to split into two separate lobes.
One went down the center axis of Lake Michigan.
It was a much thicker, much wider lobe of ice.
The other went through the Green Bay lowlands
and that's the one
that really gave us the Escarpment
as we're looking at today.
The position
of the Green Bay lobe of the glacier
and the Lake Michigan lobe of the glacier
were really controlled by the Escarpment itself.
But the character of the Niagara Escarpment
was controlled by glacial erosion.
- In many places, what I see at the Escarpment
is an old shoreline.
As the glaciers receded from this area,
they impounded the drainage.
The Fox River wants to drain to the north,
but with the glacier in the Green Bay lowland,
it couldn't go north
so it impounded a large lake, glacial Lake Oshkosh.
So, in a number of places along the Escarpment
you see evidence of a higher shoreline.
Lake Winnebago is sort of last residue
of a much, much bigger lake
that was here during the recession of the glacier.
Here we are at the base of the Niagara Escarpment.
We're looking at the Silurian dolostone here.
The position at which we're standing right now
is the level which Lake Nipissing stood.
Lake Nipissing is about a 6,000-year old lake,
level when Lake Michigan was a bit higher than it is today.
And so, this is a fossil sea cliff here
that would have formed at that time
by wave action eroding away at, preferentially,
the rock that was more heavily fractured.
This undermining is a critical process
to make the Niagara Escarpment as prominent as it is.
- Here along the Niagara Escarpment,
we have northwest- or west-facing cliffs
because the rock layers are tilted to the east or southeast
into the Michigan Sedimentary Basin.
There are really two distinct groups of rocks
that form the Escarpment here.
You need to have a resistant rock layer at the top,
and at this location at Wequiock we have the Mayville dolomite.
And below that resistant dolomite layer,
we see a more muddy unit.
We call it the "Maquoketa Shale."
And that shale doesn't have much structural integrity,
it was easy for the glaciers to erode,
it was easy for rivers to erode before the glaciers got here.
We're about 100 yards downstream of Wequiock Falls
and we're looking at the best exposure of the Maquoketa Shale
in all of northeastern Wisconsin.
What we're looking at is clay and a little bit of volcanic ash
that was rinsed off of
an early an early part of the Appalachian Mountains.
The Appalachian Mountains began to form
during the late Ordovician Period,
when these rocks were deposited.
So, the Niagara Escarpment
exists really because of three major factors.
First, you have to have
alternating deposition of shale,
which is what we see here
and the more resistant dolomite on top.
Then we had to have tilting of those rock layers to the east.
And the third event or third process
is really erosion of this very weak shale
by rivers and glaciers after the fact.
So, without this shale we would not have the Niagara Escarpment.
[waterfalls whoosh mightily]
Niagara Falls is a place where you have Silurian dolomite
over the top of Ordovician sandstones and shales.
And it's very similar to what we are looking at
here at Wequiock Falls.
It's just that this is a miniature version.
We're looking at the lip of Wequiock Falls
during a very low flow period.
You can see springs and seeps.
Up above, we have the fractured Mayville formation,
the dolomite.
And down below we're progressing into a more muddy system,
but there's enough clay that it is impermeable to water.
So, at that contact, the water can't make its way down
any further into the bed rock.
So, the water leaks down through the fractures
and then moves horizontally and seeps out here at the rock face.
We have a variety of different caves
stretching all along the Niagara Escarpment.
And, in Wisconsin, the two kinds of rocks
that are dissolvable or soluble are limestone and dolostone.
And here in northeast Wisconsin, all we have is dolostone.
These caves formed when naturally acidic rainwater,
over thousands and probably millions of years,
seeps into the rocks
and eroded the faces along these fractures and
where that water pooled along the top of the water table,
you have mixing of two different waters
and it causes dissolution there.
*
- You're standing in the woods at Ledge View Nature Center
right in front of our sink-hole cave, Carolyn's Cavern.
We have Montgomery Cave,
which has been known of at least since the 1860s.
The caves behind me, the sink-hole caves,
have been known of since 1986.
A couple of people from the Wisconsin Speleological Society,
we call them "the cavers,"
they got permission to dig out sink holes
and so they really would be, I guess,
the main explorers and discoverers.
- We're actually volunteers.
We don't get paid for what we do.
This is something we do for fun.
What we're digging through
are what sink holes are on the surface.
A sink holes is actually
where there was a collapse of the cave at one time.
- They're rounded out in places here
because of glacier water pouring in.
This stuff had a lot of sediment in it: sands, clays, and gravel.
That really carved out the walls in here.
You can see scallops.
We have domes.
Here on the wall, you can see places
where the glacial water carved it out.
That tells us, for example, that a lot of water did come
through the cave.
Soil bacteria that gets blown in here dissolves the lime
and that dissolved lime
can be carried and put in other places
and an example of that would be the fringe.
I guess you could say it's just a row of mini-stalactites.
Where the water drips,
it leaves behind a little ring of calcium carbonate.
Ours' here grow extremely slowly.
- Excavation work involves
cleaning out the material from the cave.
We're not creating caves.
We're restoring the cave to what it looked like.
This particular section of the cave that you're in
is called the "Sliver Passage."
This is a good representative area here
because it's going to show you the different types of material
that we dig through when we're excavating the caves.
This is a really good example here on the wall here.
Right down here where my finger is pointing
is more of a sandy material.
And if you look in the middle here,
this more of a gravel material.
This is real flaky gravel here.
And a little bit further over, this is actually the clay.
But what we're looking for when we're excavating in caves--
this is encouraging-- is the gravel band here.
We know that this is a tube--
that there was water that was flowing through here.
If we were to start excavating here,
we'd probably be able to find a tube that goes in there.
That's actually probably a passage going in that direction.
There's about 900 feet of passages now in the caves.
You can see how much expansion has been going on in this cave.
Not only the discovery of finding it for the first time,
to be the first person ever to see that section,
but to be sharing your experience.
Showing what you were able to accomplish.
And knowing, after you, hopefully,
get to the age where you can't do this anymore,
you've left this behind for everybody else to see and enjoy.
*
- Welcome to Fonferek's Glen County Park
in eastern Brown County.
We're standing below the Niagara Escarpment,
and more specifically, a natural arch formation
that exists downstream of the waterfalls here.
The waterfalls are the typical attraction,
but if you come downstream a few hundred yards,
you come across a lot of bedrock pavement
until you run into this massive wall of stone
and you can see
the different layers of dolomite material that exist.
Some are harder, such as the caprock,
which encapsulates the arch.
We've got a softer layer of material
you can see is worn away almost into a pillar shape.
Thousands of years ago, when the glaciers receded,
and all the melt waters came downstream
and, eventually, over the falls,
after they work their way back from the edge of the Escarpment
like Niagara Falls,
it hit this wall and started to carve this shape
and turned the water about 90 degrees.
Further erosion from freezing and thawing
and surface water coming through and seeping into this rock
has started to erode it and pick away at it.
You can see a lot of the fresh debris
that exists down near the base.
This is one of the few natural arches in the state,
and to my knowledge,
the only one of dolomite material that exists.
We've got yet another cliff face
on the opposite side of the creek bed.
You can see that this has been subject
to hundreds and thousands of years of erosion as well.
The softer material has created the talus slopes at the base.
The small chunks will periodically fall off.
We also have on this side several large pieces of caprock
that have fallen off from the top of the structure
and these are enormous.
Over time,
as the under materials get cut away,
the weight shifts and those pieces will topple over.
What we have on the right
is one of the best looks
at what's called "block creep" as an erosional process,
whereby a natural fracture within the dolomite
has been pushed away and pushed out
through snow and ice action
and surface waters flowing down between and through this crevice
and at some point, as it continues
to undercut and push out, this too
will topple over into the stream bed.
*
- Here we are at Lime Kiln Trail at High Cliff State Park.
Again, a very accessible area
and what we're looking at here are the ruins
of the Lime Kilns that were the basis of
the lime industry here at High Cliff State Park.
- The first operations for the lime business,
the quarrying business, was located
right on the water
and that made easy access for barges to come and hook up
and take product from High Cliff
to Menasha, Oshkosh, and Fond du Lac.
But the building burned down
a couple of different times
and it was decided that they would
build a building higher up
so that they could take advantage of the rail system.
- A lime kiln is where you burn the rock
to create a white powder called "lime."
- The lime industry here at High Cliff
provided an essential product for the day.
Gravel for roads,
limeate for building homes and for use in agriculture,
and also crushed rock.
'Cause the plant closed in about 1956,
the State of Wisconsin had its eye on this area.
They really wanted it for a state park.
The land was purchased piece-by-piece,
and here today we have a wonderful 1,200-acre park.
*
- We're on the actual Niagara Escarpment here
on the east shore of Lake Winnebago.
I think we're about 300, 350 feet up from the lake.
- Where I'm standing here today,
if you were to go directly east and could walk across the ocean,
you'd find yourself walking
through Tuscany, Italy and Bordeaux, France,
which are the premium wine regions of the world.
And from April through October,
our climatic conditions are identical.
- We typically grow the same types of grapes grown in Europe,
which is a cool climate grape.
- Here, you get that constant wind that blows
so if we get a good rain during the day,
if the wind's blowing,
within 15 minutes, half an hour, everything's dry again.
- We get air currents off the water
and that protects us from frost
so we get a little bit longer growing season.
- When we were planting,
people would drive by and go, "What are you doing?"
and I'm like, "Planting wine grapes."
And they're like, "Grapes don't grow here in Wisconsin."
And, you know, now they buy the wine.
So, it's been an evolution over the years.
- We're able to grow some very high quality grapes in our area
and transform those into some very high quality wines.
It's not just rose wines.
Now we're making dry reds that are barrel-aged
that stand up to a Cabernet or a Pinot Noir.
They're a great Wisconsin-made wine
that truly has its own flavor.
- An "AVA" stands for "American Viticultural Area"
and it's a federal designation
that is awarded to a specific region
if there is proof that there is something different
about your climate, your soil, and topography
that lends itself to a distinctiveness in the wines.
- I believe it took five years to get it established.
From the first filing with the government
that Steve DeBaker did
to when it actually got approved.
- Some of the things that make it unique
are the microclimate that exists around us.
With the lakes that surround us
like Lake Michigan,
the Bay of Green Bay, Lake Winnebago,
you have your own little microclimate here
where you have temperatures are very moderating
by the body of water around us.
- This AVA is a combination of those factors
of the geography, and its location, the weather patterns.
It's also a function of the soil,
the type of terrain.
- The Wisconsin Ledge
consists of almost a quarter million acres of land.
It incorporates almost twenty different bonded wineries
throughout the state.
- People set aside a full weekend and they come and visit
and tour all the wineries
and get to see the true flavor of our Viticultural Area.
- Winemaking is the ultimate example
of taking something from the earth,
putting it into a bottle to have a family enjoy it.
That process is something
that is a motivating factor for a winemaker.
*
- We're here on the Niagara Escarpment
and in 1845,
a group of four men from Fort Atkinson
came to the Neda Mine area.
They discovered what they called "a peculiar red earth."
And this peculiar red earth was sent off
to a blacksmith in Illinois.
He said, "Yes, it does contain Iron,"
and the mine was started shortly thereafter.
It was mined on and off
and owned by a number of different mining companies,
up until the early 1900s.
We're here at this time of the year
because bats that hibernate at this mine location
are returning to the mine
to prepare for winter hibernation.
The Niagara Escarpment is one of those linear features
that bats can follow
and it leads them right to this site.
We're going to be able to experience
one of the most beautiful phenomenon
that I think anyone can experience in Wisconsin
and that's the swarming of 143,000 bats
here around the entrances of the mine.
The fall swarm is this time period when bats are returning
from wherever they've spent the summer
and they're investigating the openings to the mine.
There's four miles of tunnels
and lots of deep cracks and crevices,
lots of corners and different passage ways.
If you stand near an entrance,
you can actually feel the little breath of wind
that comes from the flitting wings
and you can hear the fluttering
as bats are circling around you.
The bats will be going in and investigating
those different areas of the mine.
That will continue to occur for the next several weeks
until the bats eventually do hunker down for the winter,
lower their body temperature,
and lower their breathing, and their heart rate,
and go into a very deep sleep.
*
- Today, we went down and hiked to the pictographs.
They are fairly weathered.
They're not something that just pops out
and you definitely have to look for them.
They give a sense of awe and surprise to me.
We're up here in northern Door County,
up in Death's Door
and we're going to be looking at some pictographs
that I was shown when I was a child.
This is the deer, at least what I think looks like a deer.
The antlers are up top,
there, there, there, there,
and a little head there.
The neck, body, a leg and a leg.
We're moving down below the deer.
We've got a large canoe here
with one, two, three, four, five, six people in it,
looks like.
And my favorite character, which is the Birdman.
He's got his little head up here,
which has been a little roughed up,
and a feather on his left,
and a feather on his right,
and two legs there.
And moving down,
one of the other more visual items of the pictograph
would be this horse.
The body of the animal.
A leg,
and you see a leg back there,
but the head looks like it has two ears.
This area gets some large storms
and has been beaten on a lot being up in Death's Door.
So, I'm surprised that they're still around
and just got a lot of reverence for these.
*
- We're in Brown County near Dyckesville
at a state natural area called the "Red Banks Alvar."
An alvar is a unique plant community
that's not found in many places in the world.
Alvars are formed over dolomite or limestone
and in most places, there is very little soil or no soil
and you get a type of alvar called an "alvar pavement."
But where you have deposits of sand
or along the cracks in the rocks,
you can have trees and other things form.
But also you need the influence of a large body of water.
So, in Wisconsin here we have the Bay of Green Bay.
The type of alvar we're standing in now is
an "alvar shrubland savannah" or "alvar savannah."
One of the plants that I want to show you first
is this little white
four-petaled flower down here.
This is "Bluet."
It's a very nice plant that grows both in prairies,
true prairies that is, but also here in this alvar.
This plant here is "Pale-Spike Lobelia."
It has just a few leaves on the main stem that alternate.
The next plant I want to show you is "Mountain Mint."
So, if you pull a little off, crush it and smell it--
very fragrant.
Another pretty common plant in most prairies
is "Black-eyed Susan."
It's easy to identify.
Gold petals, brown center, hairy stem,
with alternate leaves.
This is "Northern Bedstraw."
Northern Bedstraw can persist
in this sort of dry to dry mesic kind of savannah,
but it can also grow in wetter environments.
This little purple one here that has bell shaped flowers
is named just that.
It's called "Bell Flower"... sometimes "Hair Bell."
Very delicate, long, linear-leaved plant,
it grows in prairies and can grow on rock outcroppings.
There's a few interesting things you can be looking for
from a fauna and also a flora standpoint.
And the vegetation here
transitions from a forest-type plant community
to a prairie- and savannah- type community.
*
- It's definitely the case that parks are located
where the rocks are well exposed.
The National Park Service
recognized that this was a huge influence
on where our National Parks were located.
Where there was geology,
people are just attracted to the geology
and I think the same is true for the Niagara Escarpment.
- It's the contrast in the landscape
that are really appealing.
For me, a cliff
next to a lowland
or a cliff especially near the Bay of Green Bay
is visually and aesthetically appealing.
- The towering bluffs overhead
definitely puts you in your place a little bit.
It gives me a sense of home.
This is definitely home for me and always will be.
- It tells us about the history of our planet.
It is something tangible.
You can go to, you can look at the rocks,
you can learn about what the environment was like
430 million years ago.
- It just gives you a sense of wonder and awe
as you look at that and understand how old it is.
- When I'm near the Escarpment, I feel like this is my place.
- The landscape is just part of the story.
It also sets up a micro-habitat.
- You can get a sense for
what formed these rocks,
what kind of fossils are present,
what organisms lived here
four hundred and some odd million years ago.
- It's a wonderful opportunity to know a place,
to really know a place,
to know it well enough to sit there
and be comfortable not saying anything
to yourself or to anybody else.
- It's also a place to find peace.
Peace in nature, the plants,
just a place to sit and reflect on one's life.
- We protect things that we feel close to
and having that feeling for this sense of place
is something that allows us to preserve and sustain
areas of beauty like this.
*
[waterfall whooshes]