A Playground of Billion-Year-Old Boulders & Ancient Life | Ann Arbor, Michigan
There is a corner of Ann Arbor I simultaneously wish everyone knew about, and no one. It’s a land that was once a mile beneath the ice, and it’s full of fossilized life from ancient seas, an ecosystem just starting to get its roots, and boulders literally older than complex life itself. It’s called the Fox Science Preserve, and if you ever find yourself there… consider me a bit jealous.
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I learned about the preserve, weirdly enough, through an old newspaper article about glacial kames in Ann Arbor. Kames are enormous, often semi-conical hills of material dropped by glaciers, and I had a grand idea of making a YouTube video where I would travel to Ann Arbor’s kames (and its glacial lakes, one of which is now a pit outside a frat house) and document the years gone by. That video never happened, but I did end up visiting Fox Science Preserve multiple times before our move to the Upper Peninsula, and quickly fell in love with it.
The preserve is a few miles west of town, at 2228 Peters Road. It has limited parking and even more limited shade, and there’s a semi-steep, grassy incline taking you in and out — but it has character. And those things aren’t random: Everything from the hill to the lack of big trees is rooted in this place’s history.
Fox Science Preserve marks the site of an old kame. 11,000 years or so ago, the area was beneath a glacier, covered in at least a mile-thick layer of ice. As that glacier retreated, it dropped a massive pile of gravel, boulders, and other small rocks — the kame. And well, it turns out a pile of gravel is an excellent thing to stumble across when you’re building a highway, so in the 1970s, the kame was largely dug up to build the foundation for I-94, leaving behind… a bit of a barren wasteland, actually. (I wish I had a picture for you.)
Fox Science Preserve Today (August 2020)
The landscape is lovely, but the beauty is really in the details, and the stories they tell.
Eventually, the land was bought by the Fox family, who let it grow and transform over the years — watching it go from a stretch of nothingness into a sort of meadow, with ponds and rolling hills, then lichens and grasses, and now, a few hearty trees. And in 2007, it was purchased by the local cities and townships, and is now operated by the Washtenaw County Parks & Rec Department.
Now, the recent history is one thing. The ancient history, however, is the much more interesting story — at least, to me.
If you visit Fox Science Preserve today, you’ll find what’s more or less an open meadow, populated by shrubs and grasses and juniper — the plants that first colonize once-barren landscapes like this. But you will also find boulders. They’re everywhere — some grouped together in organized piles with clear signs telling you what they are and how they formed, others scattered throughout the grass waiting to be inspected. And many of them have something incredible in store.
Fossils. Shells from animals that lived in Michigan 350 million years ago, when the land was covered in a warm, shallow, inland sea, and humans weren’t even a blip on the planet’s radar.
They’re everywhere, tucked away in the limestone boulders — boulders dropped by that glacier only 11,000 years ago as it slunk back north. They’re small, but easy to find if you look for them. Pieces of history you can touch, and poke, and run your fingers over, if you’re so inclined.
And somehow, they’re not even the oldest rocks in the park.
Further in, if you follow the main, half-mile trail, you’ll come across a black slab big enough to use as a slide. And this rock… well, it’s older than all complex, multi-cellular life on this planet.
This boulder clocks in at 2.4 billion years old. A glacier likely dragged it down from Canada, and eventually deposited it in Ann Arbor when it left the area. There are no fossils in this one, largely because at the time it formed, all life on Earth was made of one cell each and was nowhere near big enough or hard enough to fossilize. But that in and of itself is mind-blowing, if you let it sit with you for long enough… and it also made me feel kind of cheeky for using this ancient giant as my new favorite playground slide.
That said, if geology isn’t quite your thing, never fear. The park makes a great place for a walk or a day out with kids (I say, as someone who has only observed other people taking kids here), and the odds are good that you’ll see a hawk or three swooping overhead in the summer, on the hunt for the little things that slither and scurry through the grass. And if nothing else… it is often a place of deep, peaceful quiet. Which I think many of us could use a little more of these days.
Overall, Fox Science Preserve is a delight. Whether you’re interested in geology, or are just in the market for an open green space that’s quiet and not heavily-trafficked, I highly recommend stopping by.
It isn’t the most accessible park in Ann Arbor — there aren’t paved sidewalks, and that hill in and out can be a bit much. But if you’re able to make it down, consider it one of Ann Arbor’s often-overlooked secrets.
