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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Hegman’s rock

Colored rocks, pictographs, ice formations and the vast silence of the North in winter

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 4/6/22

Silence is the first thing. A slight fog and a fine fall of snow sit like a heavy blanket as I ski across the ice to reacquaint myself with the impressive rock face on North Hegman Lake, keeping all …

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Hegman’s rock

Colored rocks, pictographs, ice formations and the vast silence of the North in winter

Posted

Silence is the first thing. A slight fog and a fine fall of snow sit like a heavy blanket as I ski across the ice to reacquaint myself with the impressive rock face on North Hegman Lake, keeping all sounds at a hush. There’s no discernible wind and the light shushing of my skis and rhythmic soft tick of my ski poles are the only sounds I hear.
I’m headed toward the well-known pictographs, but I know they’ll get only a moment’s glance before I turn my attention to the multi-colored palisade that has been home to the drawings for who knows how many generations. Multi-colored granites, scores of different lichens, and the inevitable ice formations, made all the more spectacular this year after our unusual mid-December rain event, always seem to draw me in.
It’s Monday morning, April 4, and I’m not in the office as I typically would be this time of the week. Yet, it seems there has to be at least one benefit from carrying the responsibility of assembling the Timberjay’s Outdoors section week after week, and it’s hard to write about the outdoors if you’re stuck in the office. I normally do my gallivanting on the weekends, but the maple sap is running and I’ve been stuck close to home tending the boiling fires.
So here I am on a Monday and it seems I have the Boundary Waters to myself, which is how I like it. April is considered a shoulder season in the wilderness, but it usually offers some of the best skiing of the entire season, especially when the crusted snow is hard and fast.
I’ve been to the Hegman lakes many times, in both summer and winter. They’re quintessential Boundary Waters lakes, ringed with big pine and the same kind of black-jack forest (black spruce and jack pine) that stretches north from here until the forest fades to tundra. It’s the rock that always stands out for me on these lakes. On South Hegman, it’s the lake’s eastern bay that holds the surprises, the picturesque water fall that drops over a ledge when the water is high enough, creating a burbling seasonal brook that spills down a jumble of boulders, destination unknown. On the bay’s opposite shore, there’s the gigantic slab of granite that sheared off the ledgerock and slipped down, creating a slot cavern that usually has signs of use by the local wildlife.
On North Hegman, the rocks almost demand your attention. On the western shore, just south of the lake’s palisade, there’s a maze of giant boulders. Their origins have always been unclear to me, but I stop to marvel each time nonetheless at the rocks and the trees that seem to twist their way around them. That any trees survive here, much less grow tall, is equally a mystery, given that so much of the surrounding terrain appears to be little more than lichen-covered bedrock.
Then there’s the rock face itself, a 150-foot-long palisade located just south of the narrows into Trease Lake. It’s a destination for hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors a year, and I can only imagine as much for the overhanging monolith as the famous drawings of man-god, moose, and wolf. On this trip, it was the dangling ice formations that drew me in, step by step. Impressive from a distance, they became more so as I moved closer and closer, finding new detail with each step.
And everywhere, there were snow fleas, those tiny springtails that claw their way to the snow’s surface this time of year to feed on a winter’s worth of snow mold and other detritus. I came to the conclusion that there were more snow fleas on the icy surface of either of the Hegman lakes than there are humans on Earth. The snowfleas were everywhere, on the snow, on the exposed rocks, on the trees, even on the ice formations hanging from the palisade.
That’s one of the things about taking a trip in the Boundary Waters, even if it’s just a two-hour ski on a Monday morning break from the office. The experiences, images, and memories come flooding, whether from the grandeur of a giant rock face to the tiniest specks bouncing on top of the snow. Profound silences. Mystery rocks. Ancient drawings. Ice formations. And trillions of snow fleas. Monday’s not so bad, after all.