Pipestone National Monument Week 13

I made a scientific discovery this week when I noticed a flower called maiden pink, or dianthus deltoides, along the trail. After polling the resource management office, we discovered that the flower had never been officially observed in the park!

Dianthus deltoides, maiden pink

The flowers have continued to put on a show, though they have been tough to catch on camera because the weather has been gray and rainy or else very windy.

Sunflowers

Blazing star

Monarch caterpillar

Just as visitation begins to slow down slightly as summer nears its end, the activity in the quarries is picking up. More perennial quarriers are beginning to arrive and work in their pits in addition to the many local quarriers who are here more frequently.

Quarriers like Lee Taylor are some of the local, frequent quarriers. Lee is a wellspring of information about quarrying today and yesterday. He is quick to describe "the old way," or a traditional method that has fallen by the wayside. For quarrying the rock, by heating it with fire and throwing cold water on it. For making pipe stems, hollowing it out by using motivated carpenter ants.

Lee Taylor in his quarry pit

Lee was hard at work when I stopped to talk to him in his pit on Thursday. He was wearing tall rubber boots to deal with several inches of water in the bottom of the pit, the result of some exciting thunderstorms we've recently had. Lee has a very vertical pit, but the loose quartzite he has removed has been stacked carefully to prevent a rockslide that could crush him. I asked him if he ever considered reshaping the rubble pile to make it less steep, but he said he got lazy at some point and just started stacking it and not to worry because it wasn't going anywhere.

Just down the quarry line, I talked to Mark Pederson, who also quarries for pipestone regularly. He has a much more open and broad quarry pit that looks neater because much of the quartzite has been meticulously wheelbarrowed away from the pit. His issue today is that there is a big hunk of quartzite, far too big to lift, that is looming at the edge of the top of his pit. He is currently trying to remove the quartzite and pipestone below it, believe it or not, because he does not want to damage the pipestone when he rolls the big rock into the pit. It sounds scarier than it is; the quarry really goes down in a couple steps from the troublesome boulder to where he is actively working. Learn more about the process of quarrying pipestone.

Pederson's pit and the rock that will roll onto him and crush him like the Wicked Witch of the West. Note the wheelbarrow for scale.

Previously, I have neglected to show one of the culturally significant features of Pipestone. The Three Maidens, giant boulders of granite dropped here by glaciers in the last ice age. One of the legends related to the place says that three women entered into a fiery pit and became the red pipestone, and the boulders represent them. Traditionally, quarriers leave an offering of food or tobacco at the Three Maidens before coming to the quarry. Today, the entrance road passes by the Three Maidens and most people drive by without noticing them, despite the big sign.

The Three Maidens

This week, I became able to administrate the Pipestone website. It was just fine to begin with, but I have begun adding some of the highlight buttons and cleaned up a little information here and there. The big addition, though, was adding a Photo Gallery. View the Pipestone Photo Gallery. Regular blog readers will recognize a few of the photos.