Salolampi weekend 2015

After missing a year due to scheduling issues, Minnesotan Suomi-koulu returned to Salolampi, Concordia Language Village's Finnish village, for a relaxing family weekend!

Last time we visited, which was two years ago, there was tons of snow on the ground. This year, the weather was more cooperative - it was in the 60s and sunny during the day, and not too cold even at night. It was perfect!

We arrived on Friday evening and got situated in our cabin, Savo.

Maisie was excited that this was where we'd be staying, because it was one of the boys' cabins last summer when she was a Salolampi camper!

She was also excited in general to be returning. She took a lot of pride in showing us around - this was my cabin, this was where we hung up our swimsuits to dry, this is where I had class. It was great to see how excited she was about Salolampi!

Friday night was pretty laid back - we just hung out and played games in the main dining hall as we waited for the families to arrive. There was fresh-baked pulla and lots of coffee and tea, so the adults chatted and snacked, and the kids played outside.

Saturday morning was sunny and warm! After breakfast, some of us decided to check out the hiking trails.

The trails are well-maintained, nice and flat, and made for a beautiful walk through the woods - even for little legs! Ella and I were joined on our hike by her B.F.F. Lillian, Lillian's little brother Oliver, their mom and dad Tonya and Reid, and Reid's mom Roxy.

Roxy is a member of the Minnesota Mycological society, and a naturalist, so she knew a lot about all the different things we were seeing in the woods! Ella especially enjoyed learning about some of the different kinds of mushrooms that were growing out there.

Roxy found a lot of a kind called "chaga" that grows on birch trees. It looks like it's charred on the outside, but when you break it off it's orangey-yellow. She said you use it to make a very healthful tea - just pour hot water over it. We all learned a lot from her!

There was time for a few photo ops...

And then we were back at camp. Time for some Finnish schoolyard games!

Maisie, it turns out, is aces at kyykkä!

Check out the arm on her!

While Maisie and I played, Ella and her friends (with parental guidance) went down to the beach.

They found all kinds of cool shells, and generally had a good time until someone threw a rock at someone else, which put an end to the beachy fun. Lunch, naps, and sauna followed.

Later in the evening, Maisie and I headed down to the beach with some of the older kids.

We found shells, driftwood, and even some bleached bones that we thought might be from a deer. When it started to get dark, we headed back up to the main dining hall for dessert, tea, and silly selfies.

Soon the little ones went to bed, while the older kids stayed up and watched movies.

Sunday morning it was time to hit the road and head back to real life. Sad! We had a wonderful, relaxing weekend at Salolampi. Maisie's more excited than ever for her next summer session (two weeks!) and Ella wants to go now, too!

We can't wait to go back!

Fossil hunters

Aaron and Maisie have been getting interested in geology lately. They pick up rocks when they're out on walks and try to identify them when they get home. I'm always happy to encourage an interest in science, so on Sunday morning I suggested a field trip to go hunt for fossils!

We went to a St. Paul city park on the Mississippi called Shadow Falls that's known as a good place in the cities to search for fossils. If you want to go, it's right at the western end of Summit Ave., by the WW1 monument. There's free off-street parking, yay!

Once you get down off the main monument area onto the trails, there's also some pretty spectacular geology! This is taken right below the monument's safety rail. You can see layers and layers of limestone:

Here's the reason for the safety rail:

I'm not sure how high up we were there at the top of the bluff, but it was pretty dang high.

At this point we hadn't gone far at all, but we had already found our first fossils!

This is a hunk of limestone with some fossils that are pretty typical of what you find in the area. They date from the Ordovician time, 505-438 million years ago, when the area that's now Minnesota was covered by a shallow inland sea and 10-40 degrees south of the equator. So you end up with a lot of fossils from small marine organisms. The round thing you see in the limestone is part of a stem from a crinoid, a family of sea lilies that are related to sea urchins and sea stars. There are other little fossils in there too but they're hard to see in the picture!

Aaron scouted out some trails to get down to the riverside, north of the falls. I don't have pictures from the hiking part because the trails were a little narrow and steep, so not exactly good picture-taking! But we all made it down to the river.

Yes, bunny ears. It was Easter after all!

From the riverside you could see the different rock layers that make up the area. There's the limestone on the top, followed by shale (which holds most of the fossils). The white on the bottom is a huge layer of sandstone - it's extremely soft, so the graffiti here is carved in instead of written on the rock.

At the riverside, we searched for fossils. Aaron was an AWESOME fossil hunter and made some excellent finds! Maisie took notes in her field journal, drawing pictures of animals we saw and the different shapes of shells we found.

She did a great job of documenting all our finds.

We also poked around a little bit up and down the shore, looking at the different rock formations. One area had these HUGE slabs that were clearly sliding down towards the river. They were really fun for the girls to climb up and around.

HUGE!

Eventually it was time to head back up. So up up up we went...

back up to the monument. We checked out our finds, had a snack, and compared field journal notes.

So here's a representative sample of what we found!

Going clockwise - the top rock is that big piece of limestone with embedded fossils. Next is a piece of shale that Maisie thought looked like a dinosaur tooth. Then another smaller piece of limestone with fossils, followed by a big piece of black something or other... very smooth and shiny! Then you can see some of the shells that we found.

We weren't able to identify everything, so that afternoon the girls and I took our finds to the science museum, to get some identification help.

At 9:00 in the picture is what we initially thought was a fossilized shell. If you look closely, it has lines on it that look like those on the kind of shell a scallop would have, if that makes sense - radiating out from a point. We took it to the science museum, though, and the scientist there identified it as actually a trace fossil! It's a piece of stone that used to be sand that had a shell on top of it. Cool, hey? Then there are the two little things that look almost like vertabrae. They are fossilized bryozoans - a colonial organism very similar to coral. If you looked closely you could see that they're covered in tiny pores, each of which was the home to one tiny animal.

At the end of the day Maisie said, "We learned so much today!!" Both girls really had a lot of fun. They loved hiking, seeing the animals, and talking about the rocks. Today my legs are sore, sore, sore. But it was a lot of fun and an experience we will definitely repeat.