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The listed coordinates are for the parking lot at Quarry Park and Nature Preserve, once known as “Hundred Acres Quarry.” It is a Stearns County (Minnesota) Park established in 1998. The park provides opportunities for enjoying the great outdoors.
Quarry Park and Nature Preserve is a 643 acre park including a Scientific and Natural Area. It is visited by nearly 60,000 people annually. Quarry Park has more than 20 granite quarries of various sizes and many scattered granite outcroppings. Throughout the park, where the granite is not exposed, the bedrock is rarely more than 20 inches below the surface.
Day Permit: $4.00
Annual Permit: $14.00
Hours: 8:00 am until ½ hour after sunset
Cross-country skiing on lit trails until 11:00 pm.
Granite is an igneous rock, which means it forms when hot liquid rock cools. You are probably familiar with volcanic rocks (rocks that exit volcanoes in a liquid state and cool to solidity at the Earth's surface). These rocks are extrusive; they come out of the earth, or are extruded.There is another kind of igneous rock called an intrusive rock (because it forms where liquid rock pushes its way in somewhere in the subsurface, or intrudes).
Granite is an intrusive rock: it forms far underground. If you have ever looked at a lava rock, you probably did not see any crystals. That is because the crystals are tiny; the rock cooled too quickly for the crystals to grow large. But the rock is made of nothing but crystals (or glass, which forms when even the tiniest crystals do not have time to
grow). Granite is made out of big crystals: you can easily see them with the naked eye. This is because the granite cooled slowly underground, shielded by the rock surrounding it so that its great heat could escape only slowly.
Granite is made out of feldspar and quartz, plus minor
amounts of other minerals. Feldspar and quartz are light minerals. They are light in color and they stay liquid until relatively low temperatures (less than 1,000 degrees!). Therefore, when hot molten rock is coming up from the mantle, some minerals grow crystals and then later other crystals form. This gives granite its characteristic texture.If the magma (liquid rock) keeps moving, those early crystals are left behind, until finally what's left is mostly the ingredients for feldspar and quartz. The result: granite.
If magma that could form granite cools EXTREMELY slowly, then the crystals get very large. Single crystals can be meters long. This kind of rock is called a pegmatite, and
it is a good place to collect beautiful mineral specimens.
Inside the park is the state of Minnesota’s largest population of the endangered tubercled rein-orchid. There are also nesting pairs of the red-shouldered hawk in the oak woodlands and forest.
Some of the quarries that the park is named for began operating in the late 1800’s. Early quarrying techniques made use of biological power. Men armed with hammers and chisels would painstakingly pound a row of holes into the rock. Dynamite was dropped into these holes to loosen the rock. The granite was then extracted on the backs of men and horses. Horse drawn wagons brought the granite to the rising cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis for building construction. Steamships on the Mississippi River distributed granite to the southern part of the country. Workers were constantly exposed to clouds of dust and smoke. As a result silicosis of the lungs was a common affliction of early miners.
All imperfect stone and waste rock had to be constantly cleared from the quarry. Scrap rock accumulates rapidly and at all the quarries there are still great mountains of imperfect stone. It is by these piles that you can most easily locate a quarry site.
Innovations in quarrying granite came with the industrial revolution and the use of steam power. Horse powered derricks gave way to the more powerful steam and electric derricks. These were capable of lifting heavier pieces of stone out of the quarries, faster, boosting the efficiency of the industry. The larger the piece of intact granite removed the greater the worth. Huge slabs were systematically quarried following the veins of stone. Shelves of stone reflected the common sized pieces that were successfully extracted.
Quarrying operations in the present park area ceased in the mid-1950s. Companies operating quarries on the site during this period were Holes Bros., Delano Granite, Melrose Granite Co., Empire Quarry Co., and C. L. Atwood.
Over the years, the land gradually reverted back to a more natural state. In 1992, Stearns County purchased this site from Cold Spring Granite Company and added the land to its County Park System. The park opened on January 1, 1998. The park provides residents with opportunities for hiking, cross-country skiing (lit trails), swimming, mountain-biking, rock-climbing, fishing, scuba diving, and other activities.
Granite is nearly always massive (lacking internal structures), hard and tough, and therefore it has gained widespread use as a construction stone. The average density of granite is 2.75 g/cm3. The word granite comes from the Latin granum, a grain, in reference to the coarse-grained structure of such a crystalline rock.
A worldwide average of the average proportion of the different chemical components in granites, in descending order by weight percent, is:
• SiO2 silicon dioxide — 72.04%
• Al2O3 aluminum oxide — 14.42%
• K2O potassium oxide — 4.12%
• Na2O sodium oxide — 3.69%
• CaO calcium oxide — 1.82%
• FeO ferrous oxide— 1.68%
• Fe2O3 ferric oxide (hematite or rust) — 1.22%
• MgO magnesium oxide — 0.71%
• TiO2 titanium dioxide — 0.30%
• P2O5 phosphorus pentoxide — 0.12%
• MnO manganese oxide — 0.05%
Granite is a normal, geological, source of radiation in the natural environment. Granite contains around 10 to 20 parts per million of uranium.
Despite being fairly common throughout the world, the areas with the most commercial granite quarries are located in Finland, Norway and Sweden (Bohuslän), northern Portugal in Chaves and Vila Pouca de Aguiar, Spain (mostly Galicia and Extremadura), Brazil, India and several countries in southern Africa, namely Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Other areas besides St. Cloud base their reputation on the granite in their locale. Some examples are:
• New Hampshire, which calls itself the "Granite State"
• Barre (town), Vermont calls itself "Granite Capital of the World", it is the home of the Rock of Ages Corporation
• Elberton, Georgia, also claims to be the "Granite Capital of the World"
• Aberdeen, Scotland's third largest city, nicknamed "The Granite City"
Please email the following information:
1) Estimate the elevation of the highest rock ledge at the Swimming Quarry (Melrose Deep7) from which a person could safely dive.
2) What are the collections of waste rock called?
3) According to information on the trail, what percentage of the rock quarried ended up on these piles?
4) Locate the mystery object (see photo).
a. what is it?
b. what was it used for?
c. what is the item’s approximate height?
d. what other granite industry items are in the vicinity?
e. what are the coordinates of the item?
Pictures are always welcome.
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