Epic Snowshoe--Second Posting

Today's photo blog posting includes the second batch of pictures from our long snowshoe hike in the dunes. Since today's pictures include some of Lake Superior, I decided to look up a few facts:

--Lake Superior is 350 miles long and 160 miles wide, encompassing 31,700 square miles of surface area.

--The deepest spot in Lake Superior is 1,333 feet, which is located 46 miles southwest of Caribou Island, or 25 miles northeast of Grand Marais. The average depth is 482 feet. The deepest lake in the U.S. is Crater Lake in Oregon at 1,644 feet.

--There are 425,000 Canadians and 181,500 Americans who live in towns and communities around Lake Superior.

--There are 2,725 miles of shoreline around Lake Superior, including that of all the islands. That is about the same as it is from Key West, FL to Seattle, WA. The shoreline length of the lake without the islands is 1,826, which is farther than it is from Chicago to Los Angeles, which is 1,747 miles.

--There are 78 species of fish that live in Lake Superior.

--The highest elevation of Lake Superior occurred in 1876 at 602.8 feet above sea level. The lowest level of the lake ever recorded was in September of 2007 at 598 feet.

--In most places Lake Superior's pristine water allows 65 to 75 feet of visibility.

--There are 3,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water in Lake Superior, or 4440 trillion cubic feet. This represents 10% of the world's fresh water, or enough to flood all of North and South America one foot deep.

--Lake Superior could hold the water from all of the other Great Lakes, along with three more Lake Eries.

--There are 200 rivers that drain into Lake Superior.

--It takes at least 200 years for all the water in Lake Superior to complete flush and be replaced.

--The average temperature of Lake Superior is 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The average temperature has increased 4.5 degrees since 1979, compared to an average increase of the air temperature in the region of only 2.7 degrees. This is most likely due to decreased ice cover, which results in more solar radiation heating the water.

--The maximum wave ever recorded in Lake Superior was 31 feet tall.

--There have been 350 shipwrecks with 1,000 lives lost in the waters of Lake Superior.

The photo below shows floating ice gathered off of Au Sable Point.



Below is a view of Au Sable lighthouse taken using my camera's zoom. This shot was taken from the bluff around half-way between the log slide and Sable Falls.



Here is a shot with Helen, Wendy, and Kim standing on a dune near the bluff.



More iceberg photos...





Our snowshoe trail...



Another snow melt pattern...



Our car was parked at Sable Lake. So after walking east along the bluff for a while, we headed south to work our way back to the Sable Lake area. We had to bushwhack it through the forest and climb a dune, which provided a different view of Sable Lake.



We ended up on the high dune across from the overlook. Here is a shot of Helen carefully descending the dune. The entire hike was hard, but beautiful and incredible.