Other stories in "Beaches & rock-picking"

• 10 great beaches
  In land of lakes, it's not hard to find a place to play.
• How to find an agate
  Beaches are pretty, but pits are better.
• Grand sand
  Along Lake Michigan, the Sleeping Bear Dunes are a giant playground for all ages.
• Agate Central
  In Moose Lake State Park, an interpretive center caters to rockhounds.
• Agate stampede
  Every year, Moose Lake introduces budding rockhounds to the thrill of the hunt.

Beaches of the North Shore

Agate-hunters, storm-watchers, picnickers — they all want to be close to the edge.

Big, bad Lake Superior.

It’s big as in vast, with a surface area equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

It’s bad as in lethal, able to swallow ore boats or pulverize them against the hard volcanic rock that lines its shore. And it’s treacherous — like an enraged bull, its crushing waves can turn on a dime.

Oh, how we love this lake.

Bill and JoAnne Palmer of Tucson, Ariz., like it best at its worst, when waves are gunmetal gray and skies filled with thunderclouds.

“This is great,’’ said Pill Palmer, watching a storm approach Duluth’s Kitchi-Gammi Park one August. “It could snow, and I’d be happy as a clam. We love the weather. In Tucson, we have sunshine 300 days a year, and our visitors say, ‘Oh, isn’t this beautiful.’ ’’ He made a face.

A cold rain began, and thunder boomed overhead. Wearing blissful smiles, the Palmers finally left.

A North Shore beach is the place to find weather, all right — often, several kinds in a single day. Stony Point is known as the place to watch giant waves crash against shore. Other beaches attract agate-hunters and stone-skippers, birders and sunbathers , even swimmers in rare instances.

One August, I went on a North Shore beach safari with my son Peter, who’s loved rocks since he learned to walk. From Kitchi-Gammi Park, we drove through drizzle until we got to the lodge at Lutsen Resort.

The pebble cove in front of this 1952 lodge is one of the prettiest and most beloved spots in Minnesota. A covered bridge spans the mouth of the Poplar River, which splits the beach in two and joins the lake in flecks of rootbeer-colored froth. From the bridge, a footpath leads to the boulder-strewn base of a cliff and either around or down to a spit of sand frequented by ducks and gulls.

Beach stretches below the lodge, too, and that’s where we found the most treasures: oddly shaped driftwood, bits of quartz, greenstone as smoothly creased as a palm. And there were chunks of black basalt with holes in them, formed by gas bubbles when this shore was a seething mass of lava.

These rocks tell a billion-year-old story. The jagged basalt and granite boulders along the shore once were lava, in which escaping steam formed cavities as it cooled. Dissolved minerals of different colors flowed into the cavities, layer by layer, and hardened; over time, they were freed from surrounding rock by fracturing and erosion, and eventually picked up and spread by glaciers.

Now they’re prized as Lake Superior agates, the Minnesota state gemstone, and they’re found all along the North Shore. The best ones actually are found in inland gravel pits, but it’s so much more fun to look on a beach. Besides, other nifty rocks tend to turn up, too.

“There are lots of cool rocks on the North Shore, but agates are what everyone’s focused on,’’ says Rick Kollrath, a Duluth rock-climber and kayaker. “They’re crazy about ’em.’’

Kollrath and naturalist Mark “Sparky’’ Stensaas are the illustrator and author of “Rock Picker’s Guide to Lake Superior’s North Shore,’’ which, to their amazement, became a hit when published it in 1999.

“Sparky got the idea when he was a ranger at Gooseberry Falls State Park, and every other kid came up and said, ‘Mister, is this an agate?’ ’’ he said.

Taking a tip from their guide, we went to Good Harbor Bay south of Grand Marais to look for Thomsonite, a semiprecious gemstone with bands of pink and green that formed out of a single lava flow and is found only along this six-mile stretch. To my surprise, I actually found one, looking like a small, cracked tooth with two bands of pink, and Peter was thrilled by an arrowhead-shaped piece of sandstone.

We were joined by Jennifer Nelson of Grand Forks, N.D., and her mother, LaVonne Nelson of Mankato, Minn., who had been backpacking along the Superior Hiking Trail.

“I find this really relaxing,’’ LaVonne Nelson said. “All the rocks are cool. We even like the basalt; it can be all thin and polished.’’

Then we saw something odd: Thirteen young people stripping to their skivvies, running into the 40-degree lake and actually staying in it for a few minutes. They were members of the Duluth Biathlon Club and had worked up a sweat on a two-hour training run on the Superior Hiking Trail.

The sport, explained coach Grant Ernhart, resplendent in black Calvin Kleins, requires the stamina to ski long distances and the coordination to shoot a rifle accurately when winded.

“Think of having to run up 10 flights of stairs, then being handled 10 needles you have to thread,’’ he said.

From the bay’s Cutface Creek Wayside, we drove into downtown Grand Marais and made a beeline for the beach, whose flat, smooth red stones are perfect for skipping. No one was skipping, but two people were kayaking, one was flying a rainbow-colored box kite and 8-year-old Brittney Farrow of Minneapolis was feeding bread to seagulls.

Brittney loves gulls, said parent Jacquelyn Farrow, and was sure that one of them was “Sarah,’’ a gull she named three years ago in Duluth when it perched on her hotel balcony.

“So all she wanted to do this time was come up and see Sarah,’’ Farrow said with a laugh, “who we’ve seen about a million times.’’

At Artist’s Point, just beyond the Coast Guard station, we explored a beach of boulders, a Cubist landscape in which an artistic someone had stacked stones into tall cairns and arches.

“This is my idea of a perfect place to play,’’ Peter said.

It was drizzling again when we reached Paradise Beach, and we sat in the car until Peter said, “This rain will make the agates shine, right?’’ He was right, so we hunched under umbrellas and plunged our hands into the clean, glistening pebbles as if they were King Midas’ coins.

We did hit gold, a brown agate crowded with white eyes that looked already polished; Lake Superior acts as a giant tumbler. At the mouth of the Kadunce, we found a few more, and also a cleared spot on the beach where another artistic someone had arranged the flat cobblestones into a sunburst pattern, twisting like the tail of a comet.

But we found our most success at the curving, protected beach at the mouth of the Beaver River, just east of Beaver Bay, which the “Rock Picker’s Guide’’ calls the best agate beach on the North Shore. We turned up an orange and cream agate with faint bands, then another with a big yellow eye, and other rocks that made us marvel at their infinite variations. Other rock pickers were there, too, including Dave Hillman of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who was on a “rock vacation’’ with his sons Josh, 14, and Kai, 11.

“We worked all up the coast,’’ he said. “We went to Temperance, and Gooseberry, and this is the place.’’

Heading back down 61, we stopped at Gooseberry Falls State Park and right away found a small topaz agate at the mouth of the Gooseberry River. But we had even more fun climbing the cliff up to the adjoining point, where we sat amid the late-summer wildflowers, butterflies and buzzing crickets.

And we stopped at Burlington Bay in Two Harbors, which adjoins the municipal campground and has some real sand, a rarity on the shore. On Scenic 61, we turned off to Stony Point, passing the storm-watchers’ post on our way to a quiet meadow with an abandoned fish house, where the woman who lives across the road was reading an Isabel Allende book on the narrow, half-hidden beach.

We had one last rock hunt in the sun at Kitchi-Gammi Park, where local teens were stretched out on the smooth rocks, basking like sea lions. Dropping into the agate-hunter’s hunch, we joined Douglas Kvidera of Cambridge and his 7-year-old son Evan.

“My son has shoeboxes full of rocks,’’ Kvidera said. “One of these days, we’re going to have to say he has to organize them into one.’’

We turned up a few tiny agates for our modest collection. Of course, we could have bought bigger and better ones, already polished, for a dollar or two at the Agate Shop in Beaver Bay. But then we’d miss out on the thrill of the hunt.

“It’s frustrating,’’ Peter said. “But when you find an agate, it’s really fun.’’

Trip Tips: North Shore beaches

Getting there: It’s a 2½-hour drive from the Twin Cities to Duluth. From there, a blue guide called North Shore Drive of Lake Superior is handy because it lists all landmarks by milepost, from the Vista Fleet dock in Duluth at 0.0 to the Canadian border at 151.5. It’s available at all tourism bureaus.

Accommodations: If you’d like your very own beach, Cascade Vacation Rentals out of Lutsen rents privately owned houses and cabins between Lutsen and Grand Marais, (800) 950-4361, www.cascadevacationrentals.com.
Resorts with good beaches include:

Cove Point Lodge, just outside Beaver Bay, is on a secluded cove protected by an island-like point onto which guests can walk. It’s within 10 miles of Gooseberry, Split Rock and Tettegouche state parks. (800) 598-3221, www.covepointlodge.com

The lodge of Lutsen Resort is a classic, with picture windows overlooking the beach, (800) 258-8736, www.lutsenresort.com

Thomsonite Beach resort, between Lutsen and Grand Marais, has displays of gem-quality Thomsonite and is known for the Thomsonite on its beach, though owner Lee Bergstrom says she sends hunters to the Cutface Creek Wayside on Good Harbor Bay, (218) 387-1532, www.thomsonite.com

Rock-picking: “The Rock Picker’s Guide to Lake Superior’s North Shore’’ is very handy and well worth $9.95; it’s available at bookstores and gift shops or from the authors, (218) 727-1731.

Information: Duluth, (800) 438-5884, www.visitduluth.com. Two Harbors, (800) 777-7384, www.twoharbors.com. Lutsen-Tofte, (888) 616-6784, www.americasnorthcoast.org. Grand Marais, (800) 897-7669, www.grandmarais.com.

Best place to skip stones: Grand Marais Harbor

Best agate-hunting: Mouth of the Beaver River

Best sun-bathing: Kitchi-Gammi Park

Best storm-watching: Stony Point

Best picnic spot: The point next to Gooseberry’s Agate Beach

Best swimming: Duluth’s Park Point dunes

Last updated on April 6, 2008