Stone Lab photo workshop boat trip. Gibraltar Island dock. Lake Erie.

Jeremy Bruskotter and I took our photo workshop group on a morning field trip. At 6:30 am we boarded our boat for the nearly two hour trip to Kelley’s Island.

Alvar, Kelley’s Island.

Our first location was an “alvar” (photos above and below). Alvars are places where glaciers scraped off all the soil, revealing the earth’s bedrock limestone. Alvars are mostly found in far Northern Europe and around the Great Lakes. Kelley’s Island has a very nice alvar. Plants grow where soil has collected in cracks in the limestone.

Alvar, Kelley’s Island.

Glacial Grooves, Kelley’s Island.

Kelley’s Island also has a nice set of “glacial grooves”. As glaciers scraped the limestone, hard rocks in the ice gouged out big grooves in the softer limestone. The grooves on Kelley’s Island were gouged out about 18,000 years ago. The man standing at the upper right will give you a sense of the size of the grooves. They are 400 feet long, 35 feet wide, and up to 15 feet deep