Mary Ellen and Her Cryptozoans

Mary Ellen and Her Cryptozoans
Exploring Deep Time on the Iron Range

Nonfiction. These events took place in the 1980s and 1990s

If you stop to think about it, 2,200,000,000 is a pretty big number, especially burdensome if you’re pondering it in terms of years. That’s two million, two hundred thousand millennia. For most of us, practically speaking, 2.2 billion years is an unfathomably long time. From a fossil-hunting paleontologist’s point of view, it’s almost hopelessly too far into the past to search for evidence of life. Almost.

Nevertheless, I was looking. It was 1984 and I had an idea about where.

In an unusual, but, as you will see, logical research twist, I decided the place to begin was in the bars and taverns of northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. I started in Hibbing but found nothing open at 8:00 am on a Saturday morning. So, I headed east, through Virginia, all the way to Biwabik, home to some of the earliest mining claims on the Range and, by this time, nearly a ghost town.

The “Range”, as it’s called by Minnesotans, is a conglomerated term early miners coined to denote the mining regions of northern Minnesota. It has since become a bona fide noun for a consortium of counties that hold serious political clout in the statehouse. Representatives of other, less powerful districts, sometimes complain of this overt imbalance of power, issuing disparaging references to the “Iron Range Mafia” – a phrase that, while not exactly well intentioned, is nonetheless telling. Politicos from the Range are quite okay with their dubious reputation, even proud of it.

To be clear, there’s not really one range. The term refers collectively to three distinct mining belts, or ranges – the Vermillion, Mesabi, and Cuyuna – which form outcropping geologic bands of ore starting in far northeastern Minnesota near Hoyt Lakes. The strata trends in a roughly southwesterly direction for about 150 miles, ending near Crosby. The most extensive – and most important – of these iron deposits is the Mesabi. I focused my bar-hopping there.

As I drove past abandoned mines and newly ordained ghost towns it was not hard to imagine these communities when they boomed back in the day, supplying the raw material for America’s war machines over the last century. Starting in the early 1900s Minnesota iron gained serious muscle. By the onset of WWII, over 50% of the world’s entire iron output was being extracted from the Range. Over 50%! In 1943, when copper became too precious to be used in coinage, the US Mint turned to Iron Range steel for the raw material to mint pennies.

It wasn’t until after WWII, though, that the gravy trains really got going for the Range. The hunger for automobiles became insatiable, fueling exponential growth of domestic and global steel markets. In the 1950s, the auto industry employed – either directly, or in indirectly – one out of every six working adults in the US. New mines were brought into production every month, and the infrastructure to support them sprouted towns across the Range. Steel was King and his kingdom was the Range. The times they were a-booming! Those were the Good Old Iron Days…

Alas, it all changed. A combination of domestic and global events kicked the Range in the gut. By the late 50s, as geologists began to understand the interrelationship between primary ores and certain fossils associated with them, they began to find iron deposits in places other than the Range. Especially abroad. Soon foreign competition came on strong. As it did, iron over-supply began plaguing the industry. By the time the Great Recession of the 1970s hit, a steel glut combined with the collapsing economy triggered what became known as the “Steel Crises” in the US, the repercussions of which persist to this day.

By the time I was cruising the Range in the early 80s, the decline had become precipitous. Mines were closing one after the other. Companies went bankrupt weekly. Whole communities became ghost towns overnight. The ones left over exhibited Depression Era atrophy, the most visible trait being a proliferation of bars, dollar stores, and pawnshops. In Biwabik legend had it that, like Dublin, it was impossible to travel from one side of town to the other without passing a drinking establishment. As I drove northeast through the Mesabi, it looked to me like Biwabik wasn’t the only town with such a distinction.

The Making of a Ghost Town
The story of Taconite Harbor typifies the boom-and-bust cycle of Iron Range prosperity. In the 1950s Erie Mining Company, which operated one of the largest mines on the Mesabi Range, was getting sick of the hassles and fees associated with shipping ore out of the Twin Ports. After years of research, they came up with a way to circumvent Duluth and its politics altogether, one straight out of the Big Mining Playbook of the nineteenth century: They bought land along Lake Superior, built their own town, and created a port with it. The town of Taconite Harbor was born.

Initially Erie pulled in trailers for folks to live in – 500 of them! – lined up like shipping containers near the docks. Then the company laid out a townsite – complete with paved roads, basketball courts, a store, a church, and even a town hall. They built dozens of 3 and 4-bedroom single-family residences connected to community water and sewer. Between their operations on the Range and on the lake, Erie employed thousands of people– many of which lived at Taconite Harbor.

The rose was on the iron bloom. Erie enjoyed shipping millions of tons of ore out of Taconite Harbor at its own pace and without having to answer to the whims of the Port of Duluth. But, as providence would have it, things started downhill shortly after they really got going. In the 1960s the price of steel started to slide, even as the costs to produce it rose. Then the recession of the 70s hit. Then the glut. Then the Steel Crisis.

By the time I was sleuthing around the mines, almost every company on the Range was in serious trouble. Erie cut operations to a skeleton crew and took deep austerity measures. One money-saving decision was to get rid of the company town – it was costing too much and most of the inhabitants had already left. In 1986 the remaining residents of Taconite Harbor were told their leases would not be renewed. However, they were offered their houses for a dollar with the stipulation it be moved off the property. After shuddering the town, the company had no need for the structures and wanted to get rid of them.

Several residents took advantage of the offer and moved their houses down the road or up into the woods. At the time, I knew a fellow who would become a key instrument in this scenario. He had the unusual name of Olar Snevets and he specialized in lifting and moving structures around the region. Olar Snevets was not his given name. His birth name was Ralo Stevens. At one point he figured his life was backwards and decided to change his name to reflect that by simply reversing the letters. There’s no accounting for how some people arrive at names. More on that shortly.

The closing of the mines was a boon for Olar. The demand for his talents was off the chart. One evening over a beer at the second Windigo Lodge on the Gunflint Trail (the first had burned down several years prior and this one, too, would burn in the next year only to be rebuilt yet again!) Olar told me the demise of Taconite Harbor would be his last gig – it would set him up for retirement. Sure enough, when the last house was moved in the early 90s, Taconite Harbor became a Ghost Town and I never saw Olar again. Today a quarter century has passed since the final building was hoisted onto wheels and bounced down the road with Olar at the helm. All that remains are a few foundations and a rusting solitary streetlight overlooking the crumbling pavement that was once Brandon Drive. Nature is reclaiming her shoreline.

Alas, the paring down of operations and closing of the company town wasn’t enough. In the late 80s Erie Mining became insolvent. After struggling some years, the assets were eventually bought and reorganized as LTV Steel. Even so, despite valiant efforts to stay afloat, LTV Steel also sank a decade later. Mining on the Range is not for sissies.

Early Life
At this point in my little diatribe here, I think it beneficial for us to take a slight detour to help you bone up on the backstory. Up until the 1970s the world of paleontology was a fairly straight-forward one to live and study in. At the time, the fossil rules were simple: Species appear, thrive for x amount of time, expanded their range, then eventually became extinct. A to B to C to X. In those easy days, the fossil record began in the early Paleozoic Era (literally “fossil life”), some 550 million years ago, at the start of the Cambrian Period. Indeed, for many decades, the Cambrian boundary was defined by the appearance of the first fossils. There was a line contrived at the basal Cambrian beyond which there was no evidence of life. Or so it seemed.

There was a problem, however, and it was a big one – figuratively and literally: All the fossils of the lower Cambrian seemingly appeared suddenly in a big bang straight out of nowhere. Kaboom! – here’s your lifeforms! During the earliest Paleozoic times, everything just suddenly showed up in the fossil record. It’s like this huge shindig magically appears where there was absolutely nothing before. This instant proliferation of organisms defied imagination. The Cambrian Explosion – as it became known – saw the beginnings of nearly all the life phyla we have today, and then some. Even great thinkers at the time – such as Stephen J. Gould – were stymied: How could such diversity and radiation just suddenly appear overnight and out of the blue?

It didn’t.

In the late 1960s researchers studying the Gunflint Chert, a 2-billion-year-old metamorphosed sediment which outcrops along the north shore of Lake Superior, saw something in their microscopes they did not expect: Curious ovoid structures and elongated filaments that looked suspiciously similar to known microorganisms such as bacteria and algae. More samples were gathered, more thin sections made, more researchers consulted.

By the mid 1970s the evidence had become irrefutable: The Gunflint oddities were recognized as a genuine fossil biota, representing lifeforms nearly four times older than the earliest fossils of the Cambrian. The discovery was a veritable earthquake in the world of paleontology. It’s as if someone had found a lost chapter to the Old Testament which documented a lively Tiki Party going down in the Garden of Eden a thousand years before Adam and Eve had set up residence there. The Cambrian Explosion now had an explanation. It didn’t “just happen” after all: There was life floating around for nearly two billion years prior.

Now let’s get back to the story: For geologists – and students thereof, like myself at the time – one of the great benefits of living in the westernmost nook of Lake Superior that is Duluth, is the joyful fact it’s located adjacent to some of the most exciting geology on the entire planet. The Iron Range is among the most ancient and important of bedrock districts, a veritable prism of color on a geologic map: Intense chromatic patterns zig-zag this way and that, arcing and bending across the Northland. Sinuous, doubling-back rock layers expose preposterous outcroppings of Precambrian ores, ancient lava flows, twisted sediments, and metamorphosed greywackes that tickle deep the ganglia of all true Geophiles. The rocks of the Range are altogether interesting, varied, and colorful. And important.

One day, at a rock and gem show in Duluth, I chanced upon some polished samples of “Mary Ellen Jasper”, reputed to be from the Iron Range. Most of the pieces were fairly ordinary quartz stones with varying hues from brown, yellow, and red. Pretty, but pretty common too. Yet some had intriguing small striations and columns that looked a little like bands of an agate. Except it wasn’t agate: the patterns were regular and repeated across many different pieces. It seemed to me this was something more than just jasper.

The vendor from whom I had bought the specimens had no idea where the material had come from, only that it was supposedly from the Range. He did surmise, however, that the title – Mary Ellen Jasper – likely referred to a town by that name. Not so – I researched it. There was no Mary Ellen listed in the Minnesota Atlas of place names, nor was there a reference I could find on any map. That left it as likely the name of a person – one who wasn’t on the map, as they say. Perhaps Mary Ellen was a relative of the person who first started hawking the stuff to tourists.

What’s in a name?
A lot – or maybe nothing – depending on who or what’s behind it.

Take babies, for example; or actually, the parents of babies to be more accurate. New parents are fairly predictable when it comes to naming their kids. Most, it seems, take names from movies, TV shows, or actors: Greta for Greta Garbo, Clint for Clint Eastwood, John for John Wayne. Like I said, predictable.

Some parents, however, are high on drugs or otherwise mentally absent when choosing their child’s name. Frank Zappa led the way with Moon Unit, and Dweezle. But now there is no dearth of wacky baby names. I once knew a guy whose last name was Andy. He smoked a lot of pot. He got a kick out of naming his son, guess what? – Andy. At social gatherings he’d invariably make sure he got an opportunity to talk about his kid. Andy Andy, he would say with a laugh, get it? Yeah, we got it, you doofus…

Incredibly, come to find out, there are several Andy Andy’s in the world. In retrospect it’s not so bad. Today, for example, I discovered that over the last year many people have named their babies Covid or Corona. A couple in India felt like they hit the jackpot when they had boy and girl twins. Guess what they named them? Covid and Corona! Can you believe that? Naming your kid after a scourge that killed millions? That’s like naming your child Syphilis. Now there’s a name that can withstand the test of time. Why not use that? Hey Syphilis, how’d your job interview at United Healthcare go? The point is, when it comes to naming a child, most parents put little thought into it.

Natural History scientists are even more loose with the rules. But they don’t usually call upon a movie star or boring social trend – or pandemic! – when it comes to naming species, whether living, dead, long-dead (as in fossils), or inanimate (such as minerals) – even though they could if they wanted to. The only rule of thumb they seem to follow is you must not name a species after yourself. But otherwise, if you’re the author, you have free reign to base the name on whatever suits your fancy – be it color, chemical makeup, location it was found, a relative, a friend, a thing (real or imagined), or even an abstract impression you got while tripping on LSD. You could name a mineral MoonUnitZappaite, if you were so ridiculously inclined. Just don’t name it for yourself and you’ll be good to go.

Nonetheless some genus and species names get downright comical, if not weird. Hallucigenia, for example, from the Cambrian-age Burgess Shale of Canada – one of the founding members of the Cambrian Explosion, as mentioned above – is among the more unusual animals in the fossil record. It’s little more than an inch long, with tall, spindly legs holding up an elongated, spikey body hosting a gigantic mouth on one end, and a who-knows-what curly-cued thing on the other. As the story goes, the author of the name – Simon Conway Morris – said when he first looked at it, he thought he was hallucinating. He was: When originally described and drawn in an artist reconstruction, he mistakenly depicted it upside-down and backwards.

A scientific name can also be an honor. The caddisfly Itauara julia, is a recently discovered species from streams in South America. It is small and brown with a characteristic white spot on its forewings. It was named by a University of Minnesota grad student – Desiree Robertson -who decided to name the species for the artist that illustrated it for her paper. This same artist happens to be – yes, I will brag about it – my wife, Julie Martinez. Some people get all the glory. I, on the other hand, get no such respect: Exactly zero species have been named after me. Somehow, I manage to bugger on despite my lack of credentials.

The mineral industry, too, follows similarly loose nomenclature rules. There are, to be sure, straight forward names such as Franklinite from Franklin, New Jersey, and Appalachite from the Appalachian Mountains. Easy enough. But wherefrom Kermesite? Good luck locating a town called Kermeville, or Kermeburg. And, in case you have led your mind astray based on the Hallucigenia story above, Kermesite has nothing to do with Kermit the Frog. This mineral was named for its appearance – kermes in Greek means crimson, a color associated with the originally-described form. It goes to show lots of scientists like to use fancy Latin and Greek root words for the names they choose. They could have just as easily called the stuff “Crimsonite” and more people would have understood without having to look it up.

Then there’s people-based mineral names like Raygrantite, named for, you guessed it, Ray Grant, a well-known geologist and educator in Arizona. He didn’t discover the mineral, or even describe it. He just happens to be a nice guy admired by the mining engineer who first found the new species and decided to honor him in the name.

Which brings us back to Mary Ellen Jasper. As there obviously was no town in Minnesota by that name, I was left wondering who was Mary Ellen? Since the material came from the Range, there was one sure-fire way to find out: hit the bars and talk to the old-timers. Someone was bound to know of this gal. And by finding her I hoped to find the original mine source of the material.

Which brings us back to the story: I got to Biwabik about 10:30am and drove around the small town scoping out the pubs and restaurants. The rumors about the proliferation of bars were, sadly, true. Even more true than I would have believed: Standing on a corner in the middle of town I counted a dozen bars within sight. Some of them were already opening for lunch. I picked the one with the most activity, entered, and ordered a breakfast sandwich. I asked the waiter if there were any folks around that had worked in the old mines. We wouldn’t be in business if there weren’t, he deadpanned. (Stupid questions do exist, despite what Sister Mary said in our Catholic elementary school…)

The waiter introduced me to Charlie, an affable, if talkative, fellow. Charlie recognized me as his audience of one and started right in: Although he himself had not worked in the mines he knew a guy that did blasting, and another who operated a drilling rig, and someone else that did this and that, and the nephew of a friend who drove trucks, and a friend of a friend who was a welder and, and, and… you get the picture. It was a veritable Rubix Cube of mine-related relationships. When I finally got a word in edge-wise, I asked Charlie if he could steer me to a living, breathing, human who had actually worked in the old mines.

Well, tell you what, he said scratching his chin, I’d say the guy you’d want to see is Howard Thomlinson, of course. The “of course” was made to sound as if that was another stupid question that I should have known the answer to.

And where might I find him? I asked, steeling for a marathon reply of twists and turns, ups and downs. Surprisingly, he pointed toward a table by the window, Right over there…

I finished my sandwich and ambled over to the table occupied by a lone figure straight out of a Minnesota Historical Society retrospective of the Iron Range, if there is such a thing (if there isn’t one, there should be. Somebody call the DNR…). Mr. Thomlinson certainly looked the part: ancient leathery skin, wild white hair sticking out from under a road-worn, yellow Caterpillar ball cap. He wore a shabby plaid shirt under grease-stained coveralls, and beat-up old work boots splitting at the seams. He appeared worn down and wore out, like a greying old draft horse put out to pasture. Yet, when he looked up at me, I was met with alert, glowing green eyes and a strong, cheerful greeting that took me aback. After I introduced myself, he bade me join him. I did so. Call me Howie, he insisted.

Howie had worked in the mines nearly all his life. Did everything: Worked drills, ran loaders, drove trucks, blasted rock. There’s not any job in the mines I can’t do, and do well! he declared proudly. But eventually the work took its toll. The old body broke down, he lamented, so after 50 years I had ta quit. After a rich backstory of his life, I asked if he knew anything about the elusive gal Mary Ellen.

Born right next to her! he said.

That so? I replied, a little confused. So there was a town named Mary Ellen?

Not a town – a mine! If ya can give this old miner a ride, I’ll show you around.

Howie was an incredibly rich source of history – an Iron Range living treasure if you ask me. I could barely keep up with all his stories. He showed me his parent’s old place, which turned out to be literally a stone’s throw from the back of the old Mary Ellen mine property. The lot backed up to the feeder tracks where the trains came in to get the ore. The house was long gone, but the railroad bed was still there gradually being reclaimed by poplar, birch, and pine.

I spent all afternoon with Howie. We drove around for hours, eventually landing at the headquarters of Mesabi Powder Company, one of the primary suppliers of blasting materials to mines on the Range. The company owned a large portion of the old Mary Ellen land and had their plant adjacent to the lake that now occupied the pit. Howie introduced me to Larry Unger who ran the plant, inadvertently starting a friendship that would last decades.

Later that day, as I dropped Howie off at his house, I asked him why they named the mine Mary Ellen. He honestly didn’t know. He never worked there – most of his career was with Erie up at Hoyt Lakes. He speculated it may have something to do with a wife or daughter of the owner.

Now I have a question for you, he said. How old do you think I am? Since he told me he was recently retired, I figured it was safe to say he was in his seventies. Eighty six, he said, not a day less! He chuckled and shook my hand rigorously, green eyes a-blazing. As he closed the door and walked away, I realized more fully what he had just told me: Howie was born before 1900. That meant he grew up on a different planet – before cars, phones, electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, air-conditioning, refrigerators, radio, TV, calculators, computers, airplanes…. To a geologist, eighty-six years does not even register as a blip on the time scale of the planet. But as a human being, eight and a half decades is a substantially long history. Almost an eternity.

I camped in the forest that night, on the edge of the old Mary Ellen mine, across the lake from the powder plant. The crisp, cold air brought the stars into focus. I could easily see the Milky Way’s galactic bulge and nebula. As I lay in my sleeping bag atop the ancient sediments, I stared into the sky and pondered what I call the Cassiopeia Conundrum. Cassiopeia contains some of the most distant stars we can see with the naked eye. The red star V762 Cassiopeia, for example, is some 4,000 or more (perhaps as much as 16,000!) light years away and appears as a very faint spot in the night sky. But, in reality, it’s a supergiant – over 100,000 times more luminous than our own Sun. I contemplated the fossil photons of Cassiopeia hitting my eye. I was looking into the past: The photons I was just then receiving were emitted from stars over a thousand years before King Tutankhamun assumed his throne in Egypt.

Extraterrestrial Standards
You likely don’t know – and probably couldn’t care less – that iron deposits on our planet are not very pure. All the iron on Earth’s surface is oxidized – that is, bound up with oxygen. Unlike other metallic ores such as copper, which can, in places, be found naturally 100% pure, the best you can hope for in native iron ores is about 70% purity. There is no such thing as pure native iron.

And here’s something you can impress your friends with at the next party: Iron has an extraterrestrial standard. That is, a standard of measure not from Earth. Many years ago, when the US National Bureau of Standards was looking to standardize mineral ores, they needed samples by which to compare purity. This created a problem with iron: As I said earlier there are no pure iron deposits. There are, however, occurrences on Earth that are nearly 100% pure iron. But they came from somewhere else.

That somewhere else happens to be about 110 million miles away. On occasion, pieces of the Asteroid Belt – located between Mars and Jupiter – wander off and are captured by Earth’s gravity, causing them to fall on our planet’s surface. The Space Aliens responsible for sending these huge chunks of iron our way, were considerate enough to have a particularly important one hit central Arizona very near where Interstate 40 would pass by some 50,000 years later. The impact site, cleverly named “Meteor Crater”, is now a famous tourist attraction. Beyond the touristy appeal of a gigantic hole in the ground, the Canyon Diablo Meteor – the proper name given to the mass that blasted out this big hole – has special significance: Its iron content is exceedingly pure. Because of that, it was chosen as the original standard against which all Earthly iron ores could be measured. Now you can sign up for a slot on Jeopardy and be assured of scoring points in the “Extraterrestrial Standards” category.

Size Matters #1
Let’s return to Earth: Early the next morning I set out on foot to circumnavigate the property. The Mary Ellen wasn’t a big mine as open pit mines on the Range go. Still, it took over four hours for me to get around the whole property, primarily because I stopped to check every pile of rocks I came upon. In case you didn’t know it, there are a lot of rock piles surrounding old open-pit mines. Along the way I collected several pieces of the jasper for which the mine was known. While I found plenty to admire, I was not satisfied.

I hunger for context, especially when it comes to geology. A little of this, a little of that, and a little of the other, does not a full geologic meal make. I need to see what’s above, what’s below, and on each side. I want to study the rocks in situ. Sure, rocks in a pile have something to say. But the problem is it’s out of context, and what they can tell you is limited as a result. One has a hard time understanding how they fit into the overall picture. But show me the spot where those rocks came from, and I can read them like pages of a book. The story of geology really comes together when there is context.

On my walk-about, all I saw were displaced rocks in piles – pieces large and small just thrown to the side as you might expect. I came to realize that in this severely disrupted place I would likely never see intact strata. It was long buried below these spoil piles and back-fillings. In addition, what was left of the pit was flooded. The Mary Ellen Jasper story had many gaps and it left me dissatisfied.

I returned to my makeshift camp along the overgrown access road above the lake-filled pit. It was a beautiful late spring day, migrating birds chirping in the bush, and the trees starting to show their buds. The ground was still holding onto the winter frost, but in open, shade-less patches, the dark rocks warmed me like a lizard in the sun. I took out a jar of olives and bush-wacked over to the edge of the escarpment to sit above the blue-green lake that now occupied the once bustling pit.

When I got to the top of the slope, I realized it was made up of giant boulders, some of which were as large as trucks. It dawned on me that considering their size and the equipment used back in the day, these boulders could not have been moved far from their original site – perhaps only a 100 yards. I was elated – while I might never see the rocks in situ, these offered a pretty good glimpse of the geology down-under. As I sat munching away on olives, I scanned the boulder slope around me and imagined the bustling, noisy, dirty mine in full operation back in its prime.

In the early days of mining on the Range, (before 1900) getting to the iron layers was haphazard work. The first order of business was removal of the tenacious quartz-rich matrix rock overlaying the primary ores. For obvious reasons they called this the “Upper Cherty Layer”. Blasting off this overburden was standard practice. In those days, however, blasting technique was anything but scientific. It consisted of little more than drilling holes willy-nilly and guessing the amount of powder to put into them. You drilled a hole, packed in powder, wired the charges, and yelled Fire in the hole! while pressing the plunger. KA-BOOM! you’ve created a gigantic mess.

After the smoke cleared, what you had was a fractured 3-D puzzle of rock large and small that had to be moved out of the way to get to the ore. Small stuff was easily moved with steam shovels. But the big pieces were a problem. Teams did whatever they had to in order to get these menaces out of the way – including lassoing the big boulders with steel cables and chains, securing them to a giant derrick which lifted them up and dropped them in piles on the edge of the pit. That’s what I was sitting atop: an old waste pile of discarded boulders.

Nowadays, by contrast, blasting is an art, as well as a science. The company geologist closely examines drill core samples studying the rock they will be blasting. From this he/she prescribes the hole diameter, the spacing and alignment of the drill hole pattern, the type of powder at each level in the holes, and the timing of the delays for sequencing the blasting of each. It takes months to prepare a “shoot” and when one occurs on the Range these days, it often includes hundreds of holes over dozens of acres. Even so, when the smoke clears, nary a rock is left that’s larger than a basketball and it’s all piled up in neat mounds that look like they were put there by a giant gopher.

As I scrambled over the boulders, I stumbled upon one that had a thick red layer with intriguing columnar striations: Mary Ellen jasper – precisely what I was looking for. Only here it was in matrix, surrounded by layers of quartz and iron ore that gave it context. I was smitten. Maybe I couldn’t have the whole Mary Ellen puzzle completely assembled, but I now had a lot of context and could fill in many blanks. I scouted the area further and found several more boulders with similar layers. Soon I was able to predict what rocks would have the layers and which would not. I went back to the truck and got some tools. In several hours I had collected about 80 pounds of samples.

Deciphering Cryptozoans
Upon my return to Duluth, I dove into the literature. The older publications referred to these enigmatic patterns as Cryptozoa – literally “puzzling life”. Some researchers suspected they were organic in origin, but they had no clue how or what had made them. The problem with calling them fossils back then was: a) They didn’t look anything like other known organisms and, b) They were four times older than the oldest described lifeform at the time. At the time it was a stretch to even suggest they might be biologic in origin. So Cryptozoa was as far as it went.

More recent papers, however, assumed a biological connection and went so far as suggesting they were related to the Gunflint Chert fossils, which are about the same age. Several researchers jumped on that bandwagon and boldly labeled the structures as blue-green algae, a hasty conclusion only half accurate. Whatever they were, they certainly were puzzling, considering the age. The strata these are found in has been dated by many researchers at 2.1 – 2.2 billion years. If, in fact, these were actually fossils, there was no doubt they were very old ones.

For the next step in my research I decided to go straight to the top: To track down the world authority on early lifeforms. It didn’t take long to find Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who literally wrote the book on the subject with the aptly-named title of “Early Life”. I mailed her some of the Mary Ellen specimens. She was thrilled.

Your samples are lovely! What you have are Precambrian stromatolites, she explained in a letter not two weeks later. They are formed by colonial photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, which are prokaryotes.

The Iron Range Cryptozoans were no longer so cryptic.

I wrote back and asked her about the connection to blue green algae referenced in some of the papers I had found. She was visibly displeased: Stromatolites are accretions from prokaryotes – they are NOT algae (which are eukaryotes). They’re in a completely different Kingdom! I felt a bit embarrassed to have asked the algae question, even though it wasn’t my idea. To bone up on my evolutionary biology, I bought both of Lynn’s textbooks: “Five Kingdoms” and “Early Life”. These seminal landmark texts in early evolution opened me to the fascinating world of Earth’s earliest lifeforms, of which stromatolites were key.

The Rise and Fall of Stromatolites
Some people collect tchotchkes, I collect stromatolites. In simple terms, stromatolites are the housing structures made by a group of photosynthesizing bacteria, very similar to corals. They live in the oceans and, in rare cases, lakes. (There are even some in lakes in Minnesota – see my story in Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine “The Rise and Fall of Stromatolites”, July-August 1996. You can find it online) Stromatolites are among the oldest fossils known. They formed the first biologic reefs – which looked not unlike coral reefs today (minus the fish) – and ruled the Earth for almost two billion years. They still exist today, although in most cases they’re on the very edge of extinction.

By now you may be wondering “What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?”, as Mom would say when exacerbated. Well, in a word: oxygen. Cyanobacteria, stromatolites, and their prokaryote brethren were photosynthesizing organisms that out-gassed oxygen. And, you have to admit, breathing free oxygen is a pretty good deal for us.

Before cyanobacteria and stromatolites came along Earth’s atmosphere was mostly nitrogen and CO2. Stromatolites thrived in those environs and, while doing so, gave off oxygen as a byproduct of their photosynthesis, much like green plants do today. They first appeared on the scene about 3.5 billion years ago and, with no competition for resources, quickly expanded world-wide. Once established, their populations grew exponentially, becoming ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans in a very short time.

As they extended their empire and world domination, oxygen started to accumulate and O2 levels began going up. And up, and up, until the whole atmospheric apple cart tipped over in a worldwide cataclysm known as the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) which occurred between 2.4 and 2.0 billion years ago. It was during this time that free oxygen in the air accumulated to levels approximating what it is today. By the end of the upheaval, many stromatolites succumbed to the very environment they created, poisoned by their own success. During and after the GOE, stromatolites declined rapidly. Some managed to adapt to the new normal of high oxygen levels.

But then, in Cambrian time, about 550 million years ago, another event happened that spelled certain doom for many of the stromatolite holdouts who survived the GOE. Remember the Cambrian Explosion? Some of the players who made a debut in that show were grazing mollusks – especially snails. And if your diet consists chiefly of chowing down on prokaryotes, then stromatolites become a veritable smorgasbord of fresh, tasty meals served 24 hours a day. With no way to defend themselves, stromatolites became a sitting duck. Most were grazed into oblivion. Nevertheless, some stromatolites are still valiantly holding on, if barely, in extreme environments that exclude their predators. The most famous location is Shark Bay in Australia.

How-so the Iron Range?
And how does this relate to Mary Ellen? Besides the obvious fact that Mary Ellen Jasper is now known to be fossil stromatolites, there is another important correlation I must point out: If it wasn’t for the stromatolites living in the ancient oceans that covered Northern Minnesota at the time, we wouldn’t have the iron. No iron, no Iron Range. To be precise: It was the stromatolites that concentrated the iron, that became the ore body, that led to mine, that became Mary Ellen. And that modus operandi repeats for primary iron deposits around the world.

So how did it all happen right here in northern Lake Woebegone Country? I’m glad you asked: Remember I mentioned the rocks of the Iron Range are about 2.2 billion years old, from the time of the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). The iron found on the Range did not just magically appear – well, actually magic did occur, geologic magic – but the point is, the iron wasn’t originally from the spot it sits at now.

The great bulk of Earth’s iron is in the core and mantle, way under the crustal plates. It made its way to the surface mixed in lavas that flowed from volcanoes and fissures along the shore of the Precambrian seas, part of which happened to be in Northern Minnesota at the time. And guess who lived in that sea? Yes, stromatolites! Lucky for us they had formed extensive reefs just offshore of the landmass where the lava flows were piling up. Think of a barrier reef -like those found in tropical waters – and you get the idea.

On the land, as weathering elements broke down the volcanic rock, it released iron into the waters that flowed into the ocean. Once in the ocean, the oxygen produced by our stromatolitic friends found the iron molecules and quickly bound to them, collecting on the sea floor in an iron-rich sediment. That reddish muck became, happily, the primary iron ores of the Range. Some 2,199,999 years later Andrew Carnegie – the steel magnate of the 19th century – would be immensely pleased with the result.

In the locations where this happened, there often is found evidence of a cyclical pattern of cyanobacteria boom and bust, resulting in iron rich layers of hematite and magnetite alternating with iron poor ones of quartz and jasper. Banded Iron Formation (BIF) – the moniker applied to this type of strata – is a startlingly beautiful rock with silver and red banding. It was first described from an outcrop in northern Michigan. BIF has since become emblematic of primary iron deposits across the globe. It’s interesting to note that BIFs, and all other primary iron deposits, are restricted in geologic time: They do not appear before, or after, the Great Oxygenation Event. They all formed around 2.2 billion years ago, squarely within the GOE.

Size Matters #2
Now we jump ahead a few years. During my Potomac Museum Group days of the early 1990s, the story of Earth’s early life had become more colorfully enriched and was just then receiving interest from the world’s premier natural history museums. As our business was providing that market with the currency of its trade – that is, fossils and mineral exhibits – Hal and I got together a consortium of museums from around the world to underwrite the excavation of large display pieces of both Mary Ellen Jasper in Minnesota, and Banded Iron Formation in Michigan. The group featured museums from Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the US. A particular museum in Germany was especially keen on getting pieces that were bigger than the ones at the Smithsonian. In the case of Mary Ellen Jasper, that was no problem: the largest piece at the Smithsonian was about football size. The BIF, however, was another matter. The one displayed at the National Museum in Washington, DC was large and impressive – about 3’ x 5’ and weighting around two tons.

Size does matter to museums. The agents of the German museums were all about beating the Smithsonian at their own game, especially when it came to displaying samples of iron ores. The German steel industry has been the pride of its prosperity since the first Saxons fashioned steel swords in an attempt to conquer Europe. The enthusiasm of the Germans on the project was rooted in their determination to outdo everyone else. They wanted nothing less than the biggest pieces we could find. Gigantisch, gigantisch!! they would say. “Gigantic” became their rallying cry.

The Japanese, by contrast, were more about the journey: They sent over a film crew to document the search and recovery for educational TV. They really didn’t care if they got “gigantisch” pieces, just so long as they got something that was “honorable” for their institutions.

For the Mary Ellen pieces we engaged the help of our friend Larry Unger at Mesabi Powder. Over the course of two summers, we scoured the old Mary Ellen mine for the biggest and best museum pieces we could find. Hal and I excavated several large stromatolite-bearing boulders from the old mine tailing piles, the smallest of which was about 2’ x 3’ x 4’. Extracting the specimens from among the boulder pile was sometimes a challenge. Luckily, we had an explosives expert on our team – Larry – one who had an endless supply of blasting products with which to do battle.

On one memorable occasion, we located a nice display-worthy piece, but it was trapped under a much larger boulder. The upper one was way too big to move with the equipment we had. We were stymied at how to get at the lower boulder. Larry had an idea: We’ll use a couple of our “Rock Crushers” to get rid of the upper one’ he said confidently, referring to cone-shaped explosive charges they were developing and marketed to mines for just such a purpose. I need to test out the new ones anyhow.

On the chosen day – a Saturday – we met Larry at the site. He had a whole duffle bag of product. He studied the boulder and took a step back. Usually, we just wire up a couple of these and let ‘er rip without worrying about what’s next to it. he said, thinking. In the mines, an errant boulder is just blown to smithereens, made into road gravel on the spot. The problem here was we had to be careful – we didn’t want to damage the boulder laying below.

To be on the safe side, Larry decided on using several small charges instead of any big ones. If the initial blast didn’t take care of it, we could do it again and again until the upper one was cracked up enough to move out of the way. He ringed the upper boulder with what looked like six small ice cream cones. We helped him set the charges by pressing them into the surface. He wired up the array and we ran the wire about 75 yards out to a very large boulder behind which we would take cover during the blast. When the time came, we all huddled low behind the barrier. Larry pulled out a 6 volt lantern battery and wired in the push-button. It was the moment of truth.

You guys ready? Larry asked, finger on the button. Time to Fire-In-The-Hole.

Yeah, we’re ready,

No you’re not… he said, pushing the button.

He was right.

KA BLAAM! The world went berserk in a Hell-On-Earth doomsday explosion. The ground shook with a violent earthquake. Our ears and chests exploded. I cannot relate how incredibly deafening was the sound, nor how overwhelming was the explosive force. The intense pressure wave literally knocked us over. I lay on the ground feeling my skull had been blown apart and my chest had been stomped on by Godzilla. At the same time shards of rock screamed overhead shredding the trees, stripping them of their bark and leaves, pieces of which now showered down on us. I thought, This is what being bombed in wartime feels like…

Even Larry was unprepared for the conflagration. Holy Crap!, he exclaimed after catching his breath. A little more powerful than I expected… That was the understatement of the year.

When we recovered a few moments later, Larry pulled out a pair of binoculars and surveyed the spot from the safety of our shelter, looking for any charges that had not gone off. There were none. We slowly approached the place where the boulder had been. The acrid smell of spent explosive and whisps of smoke yet wafted in the air. As we approached the area, we had no trouble determining exactly where the event had happened. A small crater occupied the spot. The offending boulder was completely gone. But so too was the boulder we were intending to collect. There was scant little left of either.

Ten minutes later, here comes the Sheriff, red lights flashing. As the cruiser turned into the property across the lake, Larry became visibly worried. Oh shit, he muttered, watching the car. Frigging Sheriff Thomlinson, no less!. The cruiser zoomed over to the building then noticed us across the water, spun around and made his way over.

Larry! Sheriff yelled out the window, What the hell just happened? You guys have an accident or something?

Well, no Sheriff. We were just trying out a new line of small stuff – working with these museum guys here.

Small stuff, my ass! Jezzus, man, my office windows damn-near blew out. And now our phones are jammed with irate people calling in the Holocaust.

Larry cowed, Sorry, Sheriff. I take full blame. Guess I underestimated the power of these new poppers.

This is bullshit Larry! I should have OSHA kick your ass for this! You just ruined a perfectly good weekend for me!

About then it dawned on me the sheriff’s name sounded familiar. So, I asked the obvious question: Sheriff, are you related to Howard Thomlinson?

That old hoot? That worn out old windbag? That smelly old Swede???… Yeah, he’s my dad.

I told him how I’d met his father a few years prior. He lightened up. Howard had told him about my visit and our tour of the mines together. Apparently, the old man had a great time, just as I had. The air calmed and tempers thawed. I asked after his dad. He’s still boring people with his stories… I smiled, it was comforting to know some old things on the Range still abide.

Well next time, Larry, let us know when you’re gonna play war games, OK? The Sheriff hit the gas and took off.

Even without the prize boulder that was blown into the next county, we did get some great examples of Mary Ellen stromatolite for the museums, one of which is at the Minnesota Discovery Center in Chisholm and another at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St Paul.

By contrast, the recovery of Banded Iron Formation (BIF) samples was not so cataclysmic. That episode was downright prosaic, by comparison. We found a great outcropping in Ishpeming, Michigan, at Jasper Knob, the type locality where the original BIF discovery was recognized for its uniqueness. We traced the strata to an exposure about a half mile away – a place where we could maneuver a good-sized loader and flatbed truck. With the help of Cliffs Mining, which owned the land, we successfully removed the largest BIF piece ever excavated for display: a monster boulder that measured almost 5’ x 5’ x 9’ long. It was almost too much.

The huge front-loader we had was rated to a working load of 36,000 pounds. However, the piece we had in mind would tip the scale at about 45,000. The equipment operator, however, was very game: No problem, he announced, we do this sort of thing all the time – just don’t tell OSHA! He explained there was a large safety margin built into the working 18 ton figure. By counter-weighting the loader with a pickup truck chained to its back end we were just barely able to pick up the monster rock and get it on the flatbed. Olar Snevitz would have been proud. The Germans were thrilled. They got a piece over four times the size of the one at the Smithsonian.

I’m happy to report that our excursions in the Iron ranges of Minnesota and Michigan helped fill out countless Early Life displays in museums around the world. Along the way, we learned a lot about the subject ourselves. And it was the experiences we had with local people that were the most story-worthy. But I never did find out who Mary Ellen was!

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AFTERWARDS
Even before my time on the Range, I was enthralled with seeking out and documenting as many waterfalls as I could possibly find along the North Shore. The North Shore Waterfall Project effectively began when George and I discovered the inner canyons of Kadunce Creek in the late 1970’s. The idea blossomed and has since become something of an obsession that carries on to this day.

There are approximately 100 tributaries flowing into Lake Superior between Duluth and the Canadian border at Pigeon River. Due to the simple fact that there’s a significant drop in elevation from the inland (upwards of 600 feet) which takes place over a short horizontal distance, there are invariably multiple waterfalls on every tributary. Many are small, some are large, all are delightful and invigorating. Over the years I have found that, on average, there are 10 waterfalls on each. That equates to 1,000 waterfalls! So far, I’ve formally documented over 300 of them.

Two Island River flows right through the area that was once the town of Taconite Harbor. But since it’s not far from the Cross River – which is far bigger and very dramatic itself – I had not given it much thought until one day I finally decided to survey it. To my delighted surprise I found 22 waterfalls within three miles! It also has some of the most interesting potholes of any North Shore tributary. Two Island now sits in the top tier of my list of overall most-enjoyable waterfall hiking adventures on the North Shore.