WIDE WEDNESDAY

The Challenge for this Wide Wednesday is "Texture."
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Clearly, this is a layer of gravel......what you don't know is the history of this gravel.  It started out as BED ROCK that was, perhaps millions of years old. Then 20,000 years or so ago, a third wave of glacial activity covered the bulk of Wisconsin with ice that ground the bed rock into tiny bits; more bits were added from the Canadian Shield as the glacier moved inexorably southward and mixed it with the local bed rock bits.
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About 10,000 years ago, the glaciers began to melt exposing countless amounts of ground up rock bits, etc. which pretty much stayed put and was the playground for mastodons, mammoths and saber toothed tigers until plant life invaded the area and established forests over much of Wisconsin.
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As humans moved into the area, forests were cut down for fuel and building materials exposing much of the gravel layers underneath.  Man saw a use for this gravel when he found he could mix it with cement (as a binder) and use the cement for building material.  Similarly, this same gravel, when mixed with tar could be used to make asphalt (bitumen for those of you in other parts of the world) and this material proved useful as paving material after Henry Ford popularized the automobile....much easier and less muddy than driving on dirt.
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When man bought into Ford's dream, he decided that racing automobiles was just as much fun as racing horses. Then man invented race tracks because racing on city streets was not a very good idea....pedestrians and all, you understand.
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This particular gravel has been raced over by many of the world's finest race car drivers....minus the bitumen asphalt layers over it.  Road America is in the process of a complete repaving and today they were working on a new layer in the grid area.  This is grid gravel....over which an asphalt layer will be laid once they get around to this area.
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The next time you visit Road America (America's National Park of Speed), or any other race track for that matter,  you'll know some history about what's underneath the racing surface. It's good to think out of the box.
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Best viewed in Large.   BTW...wouldn't this make a KILLER JIGSAW PUZZLE?