Ancient Reefs in Our Great Lakes

Loreen Niewenhuis is an author, adventurer, and dynamic speaker. 

She has completed a trilogy of 1,000-mile adventures exploring the Great Lakes and has authored three books about these adventures: 

A 1,000-Mile Walk on the Beach  [A Heartland Indie Bestseller]

A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Walk   [Winner of the Great Lakes Great Reads Award] 

A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Island Adventure  [Long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize]

 

To learn more about her work, or to engage her as a speaker, go to http://www.laketrek.com/great-lakes-speaker/

Many people searching the lakeshore for petoskey stones are unaware that it is a fossilized coral. Vast coral reefs grew in the shallow sea covering the middle of this continent long before the glaciers gouged out the basins for our Great Lakes.

I recently visited a remote (and undisclosed) portion of the lakeshore to visit some giant pieces of that ancient reef:

Piece of reef with fossilized corals [size 11 foot included for scale]

Petoskey stones are abundant along some stretches of the lakeshore

Here's another piece of reef with fossilized corals

And I saw a new (to me) moth on this hike, 

the Leconte's Haploa Moth.

Can you find it here?

How about here?

Close-up of Leconte's Haploa Moth