August 15, 2017 Tuesday
Lake Erie was a bit choppy when we left Edgewater Marina at sunrise but smoothed out after a few hours and we had a laid-back day on the water, albeit with poor visibility. We decided to do a little island hopping and made our way to Kelleys Island to visit the Glacial Grooves State Memorial. This section of grooves from the Wisconsin Glacier is 400-feet long, 35-feet wide, and up to 15-feet deep and was excavated in 1972. The plaque at the Glacier Grooves gives the following explanation for the grooves:
The Wisconsin Glacier: “The glacier responsible for the sculpting of these grooves began forming in the highlands of Labrador, Canada when the climate was cooler and wetter than it is now. During those wet and cold winters such a large quantity of snow fell that it did not all melt during the short, mild summers. As the snow piled up year after year, the weight of the snow mass increased, and the great pressure exerted on the deepest, oldest snow slowly converted it to ice. The glacier continued to grow, the pressure became greater, and more and more ice was formed. The thick ice under heavy pressure, even though it was still very solid, began to flow and ooze over the land surface like a sticky pancake batter in a ‘head over heels’ fashion. The ice at the bottom of the glacier dragged slowly over the ground and was continually overrun by the slightly faster-moving ice above it. Such movement is very slow, perhaps at a rate of only an inch or two per day.
It may have taken 5,000 years for the glacier, which advanced in a southwesterly direction during what is called the main Wisconsin glacial advance, to finally make its way from the point of origin to the area of Ohio. By the time the sculpting of the grooves reached its climax, the glacier was more than a mile thick here and it covered many thousands of square miles of land surface.”
Touring the rest of the island we discovered the 10-area Herndon Sculpture Garden, an eclectic array of work ranging from bright red modern pieces to classical pieces, all done by Charles Henderson. The gallery was closed but we enjoyed a peaceful stroll around the garden, we really liked his abstract stone sculptors.
