Lake Superior shoreline

 Roughly 100 miles south of the Canadian border on Lake Superior, a rugged lava rock point juts into the lake from the Minnesota shoreline. Duluth/Superior is the nearest major port, and large ore ships carrying taconite from Minnesota's iron deposits make their way from there, past rocky reefs and islands , to steel mills further down the Great Lakes. This particular lighthouse sends beams of light across the sky every year on November 10, commemorating the loss of the Great Lakes ore freighter Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew, that sailed out of Superior, Wisconsin , past Split Rock where this lighthouse stands. Loaded with iron ore, she sank further down the lake in a terrible storm in 1975. All 29 crew members onboard were lost in the 35 foot high waves.

 

The shoreline here is rugged and dotted with reefs and islands. Formed  during a time that the continental US tried to tear itself apart as a mid continental rift formed and failed...lava outflows from that period stretch as far south as Kansas, though much of the evidence is buried under sand and gravel that was transported by the glaciers. Here in northern Wisconsin , northern Michigan and Minnesota, the magma formed basalt rocks that were filled with copper and iron ores, and led to the mining industry that still operates to this day.