Natural History
The park lies on a glacial moraine, scribed with deep ravines running down to the St. Croix River. Sandstone outcrops have been exposed in some of the ravines. The vertical drop from the blufftop to the water is 300 feet (91 m).
A few patches of remnant prairie survived the decades of farming that took place on the blufftop. Today the former fields are being restored to prairie and oak savanna. The ravines leading down to the riverbank are thickly wooded with oak, aspen, birch, and cherry.
Read more about this topic: Afton State Park
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or history:
“The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.”
—Lydia M. Child (18021880)
“If usually the present age is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (18551916)