Interesting Lake Huron Rock - Update - I cut it.

Awesome! I think I found pudding stone once but threw it away because people kept telling me it was concrete....I didn't know about pudding stone then, wish I would of kept it although its possible they were right and it could have been concrete

Looks like a great day afield Rob! So the ice is finally melting, yea.

The ice has been gone here for about a month. Lake Superior isn't faring so well.

Chuck, I showed the good side of the pudding stone. I will probably only get a slab or two of the good stuff. The rest is pretty plain, at least on the outside.

That first one reminds me a little of petrified palm wood. But I believe that's typically something found in the southern states, not Michigan. Maybe it's some other variety of pet wood/root?

Hmm, well I know Michigan isn't usually the first place people associate with pet wood, but in theory petrifaction of organic material can occur anywhere with trees and plant life and with some basic environmental/geological conditions in place. A quick Google search gave me an interesting article pertaining to an ancient petrified forest in Lake Huron, so I guess its possible!

www.michigan-sportsman.com/forum/showthread.php?t=165040

Nice finds. Good to see that you are ice free. You have me stumped on the first find. I'm wondering if it is glacial debris from cambrian bedrock in the UP. Possibly fossilized algea. Some nice petoskeys and looks like cladopora (SP).  In SE MI, i just saw our last snow pile disappear last week. I'm expecting that Michigan, Huron and Superior are all going to be colder than usual this year.

Ok, I lied before. I have heard of petrified wood in Alpena. I read on the fossil forum that palm wood can be found on the Squaw Bay side of Partridge Point. I've been to Partridge Point a lot, but I haven't really been on that side. I assume that the wood is limestone, and therefore not much good for lapidary purposes. My stone is definitely not limestone, so I ruled out the Squaw Bay pet wood.

Sulphur Island is about a mile off of Partridge Point. A friend and I kayaked out to it in about two or three foot waves last fall. I was a little nervous because you can't even really see many houses from there. I had no idea there was petrified wood out there, but we saw some other really cool rocks. The wood is from the Devonian period, like all the other fossils around here, so they must be limestone too. The cool rocks we saw were probably concretions. Along the beach there were what looked like giant fossilized bubbles. Some were a couple feet across. They were almost always in clumps of several bubbles. They're kind of hard to describe, but I'm going back this summer with a camera. On the other side of the island, we came around a corner, and at first I thought someone had hauled in a whole lot of wood chips and covered the beach with them. It turned out to be small pieces of tan colored shale all over the beach. It crunched underfoot as we walked on it. We circled the whole island in less than an hour. I can't wait to go back.

I'm intrigued by the petrified forest that Washington Rocks linked to. I think that article refers to the Alpena-Amberly Ridge (it's not mentioned by name) that runs from Alpena to Canada and used to be a land bridge. The petrified forest is only about 7,000 years old, so it wouldn't be the same limestone that most fossils around here are made of, which would be much older. I'm curious what kind of rock those trees would be.

I'm going to Lake Michigan all day on Saturday. Bay Harbor is on the list as well as the bike path near Magnus Park that you told me about. I'm excited!

I'm not sure how concretions form, so I'm not sure that's what they are. LaFarge has some large concretions in their parking lot and there are some in other spots around town. All of those are complete spheres. The bubbles I'm talking about are clumped together, so that they couldn't be whole spheres. The bubbles are actually overlapping. You can only see the top 20% or so. I'll post some pictures when I get out there again.

I've read that homeowners get really upset if you dig in the small cliffs in front of their houses, so I haven't gone anywhere near them. I know someone who lives in one of the houses and I've been tempted to ask to look there, but I don't know them that well, so i haven't yet. I'm not sure what boat launch you're talking about. They blocked all the roads to the point last summer, so you can't drive to the water. There were trails all over the beach, but I can't think of where there was an actual boat launch. If you come to Alpena, let me know and I can show you around the places I've found. We could even risk our lives in Kayaks going to the island.

The upper left of the rock is just dirty. I think the veins are part of the rock. I'll find out when I hack it in half so it fits in my saw.