March Roars In
by Wild Thing
Title
March Roars In
Artist
Wild Thing
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Sugar Loaf (Winona, Minnesota)
Sugar Loaf is a bluff on the Mississippi River topped by a rock pinnacle, overlooking the city of Winona, Minnesota, United States. The name "Sugar Loaf" is sometimes taken to mean just the rock pinnacle, which was created by quarrying in the 19th century. The bluff stands above the junction of U.S. Route 61 and State Highway 43. It towers 500 feet (150 m) over Lake Winona (a former part of the Mississippi River's main channel), and the pinnacle rises more than 85 feet (26 m) above the remainder of the bluff.
Sugar Loaf was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 for having local significance in the theme of entertainment/recreation. It was nominated for being one of Minnesota's most famous landmarks to early travelers and tourists; a popular subject for stereopticon images, travel literature, and folklore.
Rock pinnacle
Sugar Loaf's distinctive pinnacle resulted from quarrying the bluff's limestone cap layer through most of the 1880s, which was then used for Winona�s sidewalks and stone buildings. The mining was done by two brothers, John and Stephen O'Dea. The use of limestone (Oneota dolomite�a sedimentary limestone composed mainly of calcium carbonate and magnesium) began with the need to improve city sidewalks, most of which were made of wood and burned in the 1862 fire that destroyed 90 percent of the downtown district. Many miles of this limestone were installed before the turn of the 20th century and met with such success that a city ordinance was passed in late 1890 specifying stone-only for sidewalks. Buildings in the area also began to utilize the stone because of its texture. Quarry operations were shut down in 1887.
A rare event occurred in March 2004. Tons of limestone sheared off the northwest face of the pinnacle, leaving a dark trail of rock rubble in the snow, down a lower cliff face, and onto the tree-covered slope below. The cascade stopped about 100 yards (91 m) short of the nearest house. The layers of stone came loose and fell because of the freezing and thawing action of water over time, especially from the unusually wet winter.
History
In its original configuration as a rounded dome with a fringe of evergreen on the crown, the bluff was well known to early explorers, traders, tourists, and river boat pilots. Native American legend has it that the mountain represented the cap of Chief Wapasha I transformed into stone. Another legend refers to a mythological dispute at the site of Red Wing, Minnesota, upriver from Winona in which a single bluff split into Barn Bluff (which remained at Red Wing) and Sugar Loaf, which was moved downriver to its present site. The name "Sugar Loaf" refers to the former formation's resemblance to the conical loaves that sugar used to be packaged and sold in. There are many hills and mountains named "Sugar Loaf" in the United States. At least three other hills or bluffs bearing the name "Sugar Loaf" are located in or near the Mississippi River Valley in proximity to Winona.
More than a few local businesses that incorporate Sugar Loaf into their names have been built at the base of the bluff. The Sugar Loaf name is also given to a neighborhood (which shows as a city on some maps) south and east of the hill.
The former Sugar Loaf Brewery (Peter Bub's Brewery) building is nestled into the northeastern slope. The brewery complex, which extended caves into Sugar Loaf, is separately listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Pines are conifer trees in the genus Pinus /ˈpiːnuːs/, in the family Pinaceae. They are the only genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. The Plant List compiled by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Missouri Botanical Garden accepts 126 species names of pines as current, together with 35 unresolved species and many more synonyms.
The modern English name pine derives from Latin pinus which some have traced to the Indo-European base *pīt- �resin� (source of English pituitary). In the past (pre-19th century) they were often known as fir, from Old Norse fura, by way of Middle English firre. The Old Norse name is still used for pines in some modern north European languages, in Danish fyr, in Norwegian fura/fure/furu, Swedish fura/furu, Dutch vuren, and German F�hre, but in modern English, fir is now restricted to fir (Abies) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga).
Pines are gymnosperms. The genus is divided into three subgenera, which can be distinguished by cone, seed, and leaf characters:
� Pinus subg. Pinus, the yellow, or hard pine group, generally with harder wood and two or three needles per fascicle[4]
� Pinus subg. Ducampopinus, the foxtail or pinyon group
� Pinus subg. Strobus, the white, or soft pine group, generally with softer wood and five needles per fascicle
Most regions of the Northern Hemisphere (see List of pines by region) host some native species of pines. One species (Sumatran pine) crosses the equator in Sumatra to 2�S. In North America, various species occur in regions at latitudes from as far north as 66�N to as far south as 12�N.
Various species have been introduced to temperate and subtropical regions of both hemispheres, where they are grown as timber or cultivated as ornamental plants in parks and gardens. A number of such introduced species have become invasive and threaten native ecosystems.
Description
Pine trees are evergreen, coniferous resinous trees (or, rarely, shrubs) growing 3�80 m (10�260 ft) tall, with the majority of species reaching 15�45 m (50�150 ft) tall. The smallest are Siberian dwarf pine and Potosi pinyon, and the tallest is a 81.79 m (268.35 ft) tall ponderosa pine located in southern Oregon's Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.
Bark chips
The bark of most pines is thick and scaly, but some species have thin, flaky bark. The branches are produced in regular "pseudo whorls", actually a very tight spiral but appearing like a ring of branches arising from the same point. Many pines are uninodal, producing just one such whorl of branches each year, from buds at the tip of the year's new shoot, but others are multinodal, producing two or more whorls of branches per year. The spiral growth of branches, needles, and cone scales are arranged in Fibonacci number ratios.[citation needed] The new spring shoots are sometimes called "candles"; they are covered in brown or whitish bud scales and point upward at first, then later turn green and spread outward. These "candles" offer foresters a means to evaluate fertility of the soil and vigour of the trees.
Pines are long-lived, typically reaching ages of 100�1,000 years, some even more. The longest-lived is the Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva. One individual of this species, dubbed "Methuselah", is one of the world's oldest living organisms at around 4,600 years old. This tree can be found in the White Mountains of California. An older tree, now cut down, was dated at 4,900 years old. It was discovered in a grove beneath Wheeler Peak and it is now known as "Prometheus" after the Greek immortal.
Foliage
Pines have four types of leaf:
� Seed leaves (cotyledons) on seedlings, born in a whorl of 4�24.
� Juvenile leaves, which follow immediately on seedlings and young plants, 2�6 cm long, single, green or often blue-green, and arranged spirally on the shoot. These are produced for six months to five years, rarely longer.
� Scale leaves, similar to bud scales, small, brown and non-photosynthetic, and arranged spirally like the juvenile leaves.
� Needles, the adult leaves, which are green (photosynthetic), bundled in clusters (fascicles) of 1�6, commonly 2�5, needles together, each fascicle produced from a small bud on a dwarf shoot in the axil of a scale leaf. These bud scales often remain on the fascicle as a basal sheath. The needles persist for 1.5�40 years, depending on species. If a shoot is damaged (e.g. eaten by an animal), the needle fascicles just below the damage will generate a bud which can then replace the lost leaves.
Cones
Pines are mostly monoecious, having the male and female cones on the same tree, though a few species are sub-dioecious with individuals predominantly, but not wholly, single-sex. The male cones are small, typically 1�5 cm long, and only present for a short period (usually in spring, though autumn in a few pines), falling as soon as they have shed their pollen. The female cones take 1.5�3 years (depending on species) to mature after pollination, with actual fertilization delayed one year. At maturity the female cones are 3�60 cm long. Each cone has numerous spirally arranged scales, with two seeds on each fertile scale; the scales at the base and tip of the cone are small and sterile, without seeds. The seeds are mostly small and winged, and are anemophilous (wind-dispersed), but some are larger and have only a vestigial wing, and are bird-dispersed (see below). At maturity, the cones usually open to release the seeds, but in some of the bird-dispersed species (e.g. whitebark pine), the seeds are only released by the bird breaking the cones open. In others, the seeds are stored in closed ("serotinous") cones for many years until an environmental cue triggers the cones to open, releasing the seeds. The most common form of serotiny is pyriscence, in which a resin binds the cones shut until melted by a forest fire.
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March 6th, 2017
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