Blue Mounds State Park
Blue Mounds State Park is a state park of Minnesota, USA, in Rock County, Minnesota, Rock County near the town of Luverne, Minnesota, Luverne. It protects an American Bison, American bison herd which grazes on one of the state's largest prairie remnants. The state park is named after a linear escarpment of Precambrian Sioux Quartzite bedrock which, although pink in color, is said to have appeared blueish in the distance to early settlers. Parts of the cliff are up to high. Unusual in the surrounding prairie landscape, they are a popular site for rock climbing. The park also preserves a line of rocks aligned by Plains Indians which marks where the sun rises and sets on the spring and fall equinoxes. It also has a small reservoir (water), reservoir for swimming, the only lake in Rock County. The park's interpretive center was once the home of the author Frederick Manfred. Four structures and one building in the park, built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, ...
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Sioux Quartzite
The Sioux Quartzite is a Proterozoic quartzite that is found in the region around the intersection of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa, and correlates with other rock units throughout the upper midwestern and southwestern United States. It was formed by braided river deposits, and its correlative units are thought to possibly define a large sedimentary wedge that once covered the passive margin on the then-southern side of the North American craton. In human history, it provided the catlinite, or pipestone, that was used by the Plains Indians to carve ceremonial pipes. With the arrival of Europeans, it was heavily quarried for building stone, and was used in many prominent structures in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and shipped to construction sites around the Midwest. Sioux Quartzite has been and continues to be quarried in Jasper, Minnesota at the Jasper Stone Company and Quarry, which itself was posted to the National Register of Historic Places on January 5, 1978. Jasper, Min ...
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