A post-winter check on Quarry Beach - jackets, not sunscreen, needed!

 Quarry Beach is one of the hidden gems in our little town of Port Wing.  When the town was first founded in the late 1800's, this was the site of a sandstone quarry where stone workers quarried out large pieces of Port Wing brownstone that was destined to be building materials for many structures.  The passage below lists some of the buildings where the brownstone was used, and I copied it from this website detailing the history of the Port Wing Quarry:

Stone from Port Wing was used in the Wisconsin Building at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. It was also used in William Jennings Bryan's home in Lincoln, Nebraska; George Crosby's home in Duluth; and the Martin Patterson Mansion in Superior. The Department of Interior Building in Washington D.C. was constructed of Port Wing Brownstone. These are only a few examples of well-known structures in which our stone was used.

Locally, the basement floor of the Port Wing School, the foundation of the Lutheran Parsonage, and the O.T. Bagstad warehouse were constructed of Brownstone.

Now today, the old quarry is a favorite place to hang out at the beach and look at Lake Superior.  The pictures above and below show how it looks on a typical, beautiful summer day.  Those of us living on the "South Shore" like to promote our long, sandy beaches, compared with the rocky shores on the Minnesota and Canadian "North Shore."

View looking toward the town of Port Wing

Since today is NOT a summer day, the view is a little different.  The north wind was blowing like crazy, so the nice blue sky makes it looks more comfortable than we felt.

This was what we found today:

Again, we are looking east toward town, but the first 100+ feet of beach out to where the waves are crashing is lots of ice in layers and piles.  And the extent of the "sandy beach" is quite narrow right now.  We will need to make frequent trips to see how it changes as the ice melts.

This is the view looking northwest, same view as the first picture above.  Over toward the trees is usually a good place to hunt for "pretty rocks" (I have never found an agate in my life!) but it looked too treacherous to check for rocks today!

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And finally, I just have to share something I saw posted by Bayfield County Tourism on Facebook today, and I'm just kicking myself that I didn't think of it first!  I'm going to put the link here because the YouTube page didn't give me the option to embed it.  

Seven months in a minute and a half!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM1uVevri7c