Please enter using the trailhead provided to get the full impact of this Earthcache. Plenty of street parking available near the trailhead.
To log a find on this cache...
Please take some time and make some observations about the rocks that make up this quarry. You can get close to the rock wall just to the west of the trail before it heads out over the water in the quarry.
1) Take a look at the micro scale (get up close and personal) and in your email tell me what you see and what you think the rocks might be made of.
2) Step back and look at the quarry wall as a whole. Why do you think this type of rock might of been good as a building material.
3) Once at the posted coordinates, estimate the height of the rock wall and guesstimate the depth of the pond. Take a stroll around the quarry at street level, measuring the length and width. Calculate the cubic feet of rock removed from the quarry.
Email me the answers.
Some information for your educational pleasure... :)
Stearns Quarry opened sometime in the late 1830s and supplied lime and crushed stone for concrete, fertilizer, and roads until it closed in 1970. The City of Chicago bought the giant hole in 1970 for 9 million dollars to use as a dump for construction and demolition debris and for ash from the Northwest incinerator on the West Side which burned Chicago’s garbage for 26 years. Incinerator ash stopped being accepted in 1987, but construction and demolition debris continued to come in, much of it made, of course, of lime and crushed stone, in shapes.
From the city's beginnings through much of the twentieth century, the production of stone and brick was a major economic activity in the Chicago area. Millions of tons of limestone quarried from local sites have been used to create the area's built environment.
After the stone was quarried, it still had to be processed and marketed. In the nineteenth century, stone-processing companies were among the largest of all Chicago-area enterprises. Just after the fire of 1871, there were at least six stone works in the city that employed more than 200 men each. Among the largest of these companies were Singer & Talcott and Wenthe & Messinger, both of which were established during the 1850s. In the 1880s and 1890s, several local firms merged into larger organizations such as the Western Stone Company and the American Stone Company. By the 1890s local limestone had been displaced for building purposes by better-quality Bedford limestone from Indiana. Local quarries increasingly concentrated on supplying crushed stone for road construction and cement and lime production.
By the latter part of the twentieth century, the relative importance of quarrying in the local economy had declined. As the pace of the city's growth slowed, and as technological advances drove down the cost of stone and the numbers of workers needed to produce them, this commodities no longer served as the foundation for many of the region's largest business enterprises and workplaces. But stone continued to be produced in the Chicago area, and the walls of thousands of local buildings and homes stood as evidence of the past vitality of the industry.
The Chicago Water Tower
Limestone helped it survive the Chicago Fire
The Niagara Escarpment
Put simply The Niagara Escarpment is the edge of a large bowl formed by and ancient lake that now contains Lakes Michigan, Huron and Erie. The edge of this bowl is quite prominent in Wisconsin, New York State and Ontario. While mostly covered with glacial till, outcroppings can be seen also in Michigan, Illinois and New York.
The Niagara Escarpment (in red) is a long escarpment, or cuesta, in the United States and Canada that runs westward from New York State, through Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. It is composed of the Lockport geological formation of Silurian age, and is similar to the Onondaga geological formation, which runs parallel to it and just to the south, through the western portion of New York and southern Ontario. The escarpment is most famous as the cliff over which the Niagara River plunges to form Niagara Falls, for which it is named.
The Niagara Escarpment is the most prominent of several escarpments formed in the bedrock of the Great Lakes. It is traceable from its easternmost point in New York State, starting well east of the Genesee River Valley near Rochester, creating one small and two large waterfalls on the Genesee River in that city, thence running westward to the Niagara River forming a deep gorge north of Niagara Falls, which itself cascades over the escarpment. In Southern Ontario it stretches along the Niagara Peninsula hugging close to the Lake Ontario shore near the cities of St. Catharines, Hamilton and Milton where it takes a sharp turn north in the town of Dundas toward Georgian Bay. It then follows the Georgian Bay shore northwestwards to form the spine of the Bruce Peninsula, Manitoulin, St. Joseph Island and other islands located in northern Lake Huron where it turns westwards into the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan, south of Sault Ste. Marie. It then extends southwards into Wisconsin following the Door Peninsula and then more inland from the western coast of Lake Michigan nd Milwaukee ending northwest of Chicago near the Wisconsin-Illinois border.
