Excerpt
The most beautiful prospect that the imagination can form.” Thats how eighteenth-century explorer Jonathan Carver described the view from Barn Bluff. Rising 343 feet above the town of Red Wing, Barn Bluff still evokes similar feelings from many for whom it is a prospective climb. Henry David Thoreau probably agreed when he climbed it as a tourist. Stephen H. Long, the topographic engineer on an 1819 mapping expedition, no doubt found the prospect of the view from Barn Bluff alluring as well.
In the local Dakota tribal legends, the big bluff was the basis for a great tale. Two tribes fought over the ownership” of the big bluff to such an extent that the Great Spirit is said to have split the massive rock in two so each tribe could have part of it. The other half is said to be Sugar Loaf down in Winona, about 60 miles downstream. The French named it La Grange, which translates the barn.” Hence, its more common name: Barn Bluff.
The bluff stands as a natural demarcation of the local geologic strata in the area. Glaciers carved deep channels around some of the more resistant formations, leaving huge islands in the inland sea created when ice thawed and retreated. A stratified history of the deposits is clearly exposed in the layers that make up Barn Bluff: Franconia green sandstone only 68 feet above the river, St. Lawrence dolestone (blue shale) for the next 45 feet up, Jordan sandstone (layers of white-yellow stone) for another 120 feet. These combine to form Barn Bluffs Cambrian layer, dated between 500 and 540 million years ago. A layer 75 feet thick of Prairie du Chien sandstone from the Ordovician period500 to 440 million years agolies below the layer that caps the bluffa relic of the Pleistocene era a mere 1.8 to 11,000 years ago. Some of these layers are exposed via erosion nearer the start of the climb, and later come into view as you climb up the bluff at just a dozen yards (in elevation) above the river.