Looking Out, photo by Peter Tinetti
What a perfect photo from the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore for the last day of summer as we prepare to make the leap into autumn tomorrow.
View this photo background bigtacular and see more in Peter’s slideshow.
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Hogback Mountain, photo by Chelsea Graham
Shots like these help me remember that behind every great photo, there’s someone who went through all the time and effort to get out there and take it.
Thanks so much to all of you photographers who share your work with me – there’s no way I could do what I do without all of your time, effort and love of Michigan.
View Chelsea’s photo background big and see more in her Michigan slideshow.
More fall wallpaper on Michigan in Pictures.
Lower Harbor Ore Dock, photo by Rudy Malmquist
Travel Marquette shares the story of the Iron Ore Dock in Marquette’s Upper Harbor is also known as the Presque Isle Dock.
The dock was built in 1911 and is still commercially active. Each year approximately 9.5 to 10 million tons of ore are shipped from this dock. The dock is owned and operated by the Cliffs Natural Resources. This steel-framed dock is 1,250 feet long and 60 feet wide, with the top deck sitting 75 feet above the water level. It contains 200 pockets, each of which has a capacity of 250 tons of ore, for a total storage capacity of 50,000 tons. Supporting the dock is a foundation of 10,000 wooden piles enclosed by a 12-inch thick timber sheet plank wall filled with sand.
After being mined the ore is crushed and the iron separated out with either a chemical or magnetic process. The iron is combined with a binding agent (a glorified cornstarch) and rolled into small balls roughly an inch in diameter. The balls are fed through a kiln and fired by temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees F. The result is Taconite Pellets which are loaded on the ore boats and shipped. Most of the pellets shipped from the Presque Isle dock go to Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario the largest integrated steel mill. These pellets, which are roughly 70% iron, will be combined with coke and limestone at the mill to make steel.
The ore comes to the dock via railcars and is dumped into steel “pockets” or bins beneath the tracks. To load the boat, the chute is lowered to the open cargo hatch and a door at the bottom of the pocket opens, allowing the pellets to run into the boat shown in the picture. Loading time is variable, depending on the size of the boat and how prepared the dock is to load. Four hours is typical. Loading is the responsibility of the First Mate. It is important to load the ore in a proper sequence to avoid over-stressing the boat unevenly. Each chute (or drop of ore) is about 20 tons.
View Rudy’s photo big as the sky and see more in his slideshow.
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There’s one in every crowd!, photo by Tom Clark
Here’s hoping that you’re one of them in some way. Our differences are beautiful!
Tom got this shot of red pines set for harvesting in Alger. View it background bigtacular and see more in his Michigan Woodlands slideshow.
munising ice caves/curtains, photo by Paul Wojtkowski
The Freep reports that El Niño in Pacific could mean mild Michigan winter:
Less ice on the Great Lakes would ease the freighter shipping industry’s logistical nightmares of recent winters. Less snow-melt runoff in the spring could forestall flooding that sends nutrients off farms and into Lake Erie, fueling its summer algae blooms. And deer populations that have dropped dramatically in the Upper Peninsula over recent harsh winters could begin to rebound.
…Over a century, comparing Michigan’s normal winter precipitation versus 10 El Niño events between 1915 and 1992, rain and snowfall was about 72% of normal in the Metro Detroit area during the El Niños; 78% of normal in the Thumb area, and in the 80% to 85% range of normal throughout the rest of lower Michigan and the eastern Upper Peninsula, according to NOAA.
You can read on for more. While that means that we might not have as much ice cave fun in Michigan this winter, I think I’m OK with an El Niño intermission!
Check Paul’s photo of this winter’s incredible ice caves on Grand Island out background bigalicious, see more in his slideshow and follow Paul Wojtkowski Photography on Facebook!
More ice caves on Michigan in Pictures!
Free Birds, photo by David Clark
Here’s a pretty cool shot taken last weekend from high above the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Lake Michigan. For reference, if he took this from where I think he did, those people are above a dune bluff that’s several hundred feet high.
View David’s photo big as the sky and see more in his Sleeping Bear 2015 slideshow.
Beach Day at Port Austin, photo courtesy Don Harrison/UpNorth Memories
I believe this spot is now the Port Austin Harbor, but if you’re looking for a swim, the Port Crescent State Park on Lake Huron looks pretty great!
Check the photo out background big and see TONS more pics mainly from Michigan in Don’s massive UpNorth Memories Photo Tribute to Michigan Historian Dave Tinder slideshow.
More beaches, more Lake Huron and more Throwback Thursdays on Michigan in Pictures!
Detroit Industry, photo by Maia C
A very happy Labor Day to everyone and also a salute the generations of hard-working Michiganders whose struggles helped to build the society we have today.
View Maia’s photo background big and see more in her Rivera Court, Detroit Institute of Arts slideshow.
More Labor Day and more about the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art on Michigan in Pictures.
Michigan County Monument, photo by Ragnar II
Monument to the Dean of Michigan’s Tourism Activity on Roadside America says:
If someone asked, “Who has had a rock pyramid built in their honor?” you might think of an Egyptian pharaoh or an Aztec king. You would probably not think of a bespectacled, middle-aged, mid-western man named Hugh J. Gray. Nevertheless, Hugh has one — on a smaller scale compared to the ones in Egypt and Mexico, but a rock pyramid nevertheless.
Hugh was, according to the plaque on his pyramid, the “Dean of Michigan’s Tourist Activity.” The pyramid, erected in 1938, stands on Cairn Highway, named apparently in reference to Hugh’s pile of rocks. Cairn Highway is an obscure back road today, which says something about the transient nature of fame.
Hugh’s pyramid is built of rocks from each of Michigan’s 83 counties.
Ragnar suggests that you plug the coordinates 44.948227, -85.352708 into Google Maps to find your way there. View his photo background big and see more in his slideshow.
More roadside attractions on Michigan in Pictures!
Sand Waves, photo by Charles Bonham
Confession: I probably don’t give Silver Lake Dunes State Park enough love. What an incredible place.
In Scientific American Robert S. Anderson, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz explains why regular, wavelike shapes form when the wind blows over the sand on the beach for a long time:
Ripples in sand, found on both beaches and dunes, are one of nature’s most ubiquitous and spectacular examples of self-organization. They do not result from some predetermined pattern in the wind that is somehow impressed on the surface, but rather from the dynamics of individual grains in motion across the surface. They arise whenever wind blows strongly enough over a sand surface to entrain grains into the wind. The subsequent hopping and leaping of these grains is called saltation. Saltating grains travel elongated, asymmetric trajectories: Rising relatively steeply off the bed, their path is then stretched downwind as they are accelerated by drag forces. They impact the sand surface centimeters to tens of centimeters downwind, typically at a low angle, around 10 degrees. It is this beam of wind-accelerated grains impacting the sand surface at a low angle that is responsible for ripples.
“An artificially flattened sand surface will not remain flat for long. (Try it on the beach or on the upwind side of a dune and see for yourself.) Small irregular mottles in the sand surface, perhaps a couple centimeters in wavelength, rapidly arise and grow once the wind starts to blow hard enough to initiate saltation. They then slowly organize themselves into more regular waves whose low crests are aligned perpendicular to the wind direction and begin to march slowly downwind. Typical ripple spacing is about 10 centimeters, whereas the typical height of the crests above the troughs is a few millimeters. The pattern is never perfect, but instead the ripple crests occasionally split or terminate, generating a pattern that looks remarkably like one’s fingerprint.
Read on for a whole lot more including Michigan Sea Grant educator Walt Hoagman explaining how the speed of wind (and water) over sand influences the waves.
View Charles’s photo background bigilicious and definitely check out his incredible Silver Lake Dunes photos.
More science, more dunes and more summer wallpaper on Michigan in Pictures.
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