A Flower Chaser Fall

October 11, 2024

Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo

Fall offers fewer and fewer blooming wildflowers to chase, so early one morning we head out to Morton Outcrops Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) to look for a different kind of color: lichens. Lichens aren’t plants—they’re a relationship between fungi, algae, and sometimes cyanobacteria, and Minnesota has as many as a thousand different kinds.  For help in identification we bring along our copy of Lichens of the North Woods by Joe Walewski. We arrive just after the sun is rising and wander among granite outcrops 3.6 billions years old, some of the oldest rock on our planet. Splotches of orange, gray, brown, green and yellow dot the pink-and-gray rippled rock, and we tentatively identify yellow cobblestone lichen and rock greenshield lichen.

The year is far enough into fall that it’s possible to wander places we couldn’t get to earlier in the season without thrashing through undergrowth, and we like to avoid thrashing whenever we can.  Now we can easily visit the northeastern edge of the old quarry in the SNA, where cubes of blasted  rocks are piled up like a giant’s building blocks and wind ripples the water in the bottom of the quarry.  

We aren’t many miles from Gneiss Outcrops SNA, so we drive on west to revisit it. In a previous summer visit we were defeated by tall, thick growth (think thrashing) and barely got past the first outcrop near the edge of the SNA.  Now much of that growth has died back, and we head toward a lake on the far edge of the SNA following trampled trails in the grasses, making our way around thickets of bushes and trees. The hike is longer than it looks on the map, but at last we spot water and follow a narrow trail through thorny branches down to a small lake where a swan rests white on the water.  A ridge of rocks leads up the other side of the lake, and a short climb brings us past brittle prickly pear cactus growing in rock cracks and plains prickly pear cactus sprawled across ledges. One way cactus survives our Minnesota winters is to lose water, shrinking into shriveled pads until spring when those pads swell again, and these cactuses are definitely shrinking.  

It’s amazing what color you can find, even when most of the flowers have died back or gone to seed–lichen dappling rock, a few goldenrods still blooming, deep red sumac leaves and berries, flecks  of quartz sparkling, little bluestem glowing red in the sunlight, trees along the road turning golden. And amazing what you might find if you just push on and even thrash a little through the undergrowth and trees–even a lake with cactuses growing on the rocks and a swan resting on the water.