February 2021

The Devil’s Tombstone

On the Rocks

Robert and Johanna Titus

Have you ever been to the Devil’s Tombstone? That’s a very sizable boulder at the Devil’s Tombstone Campground in the eastern Catskills. Make your way to Rte. 214 and head north until you reach Stony Clove Gap, a great canyon that cuts through the mountain there. You can park right in front of the boulder. It’s a lot of rock; it does look like a giant tombstone with its nearly rectangular shape and almost, but not perfectly, upright positioning. It’s certainly worth visiting and there are good hiking trails in the vicinity – come warmer weather.

Devil’s Tombstone

But the Devil’s tombstone may be more than just an oddity. It forms a striking image, begging for some sort of explanation. There has been widespread hypothesizing that it is a stone monolith, somehow manipulated into its present state by a long-ago prehistoric culture. We heard that story decades ago and never gave it much thought. It is claimed that the Tombstone lies near the northwestern end of something called the Hammonasset Line. That is a geographic line that points to Council Rock on Long Island, a similarly large boulder. Furthermore, it is said that its compass direction matches the alignments of both the winter and summer solstices.

Patterns such as these call for attention. A scientist seeks to find a solution using the famed, but not widely understood, “scientific method.” The first step (of five) in the scientific method is to define the problem that needs solving. Ours is simple: what is the Devil’s Tombstone and how did it get to be what it is? The second step in the method is to study the problem and gather as much knowledge about it as possible. The third step is to describe hypotheses that offer potential solutions to the problem. It is always better to have as many hypotheses as possible; it is not always likely that the first one to come to mind will turn out to be the “winning” solution.  After that comes step four, perhaps the most important: falsification. One by one the available hypotheses are tested. Each one should generate if/then statements. If the hypothesis is correct, then it follows that something else should be true. One by one the hypotheses are tested and, one by one, many of them fail the testing process and are falsified. If all goes well, in the end only one hypothesis will remain and may well come to be seen as the solution: something scientists formally call a scientific theory. The theory is regarded as the highest level of explanation in science; it is thought to have been proven, as thoroughly as humans can prove anything.

The stone monolith idea for the Devil’s Tombstone is a compelling hypothesis but it deserves to be joined by others; if it can survive competing challenges then if may well rise to the lofty level of scientific theory. Finding other hypotheses is our intent in this column. We have spent some time exploring the Devil’s Tombstone vicinity and we have been combing the geologic literature for the Stony Clove area as well. That has taken us through step two of the method.

Let’s go to step three – hypothesizing. We have developed two more of them. The first is that the Devil’s Tombstone may have formed as the result of it having fallen downhill from the steep slope rising above it. That may sound unlikely, but any hypothesis, no matter how unlikely should be tested. We, in fact, had no trouble finding at least one good very nearly vertical boulder up the road a bit. It was surrounded by a large jumble of other nearby boulders, all in various inclinations, all of which were equally unlikely. These had clearly all tumbled downhill to where they are today. Our gravity hypothesis has passed a test–sort of. Gravity could have, similarly, produced the Devil’s Tombstone, but we were just not happy with this notion. This hypothesis predicts that there should be a lot of other gravity-slide materials very near Devil’s Tombstone. The Tombstone is isolated and that is troubling.

Steeply inclined boulder up the highway from the Devil’s Tombstone

We went back to step two of the method. We studied ice age geology maps of the area, published by the New York State Museum in 1935 and 1983 and soon had another hypothesis. Glacial geologists have long understood that, at the very end of the Ice Age, one final advance of the ice had thrust its way through Stony Clove, heading south. It was very possible that such advancing ice had carried the Tombstone along with it and deposited it where we see it today. When the ice melted away, the Tombstone was left in its unlikely steep slope. The Tombstone would be what is called a glacial erratic. This is an interesting and appealing hypothesis but, still, its curious inclination and isolation remained as problems.

So, how do you test this hypothesis? The ice age erratic hypothesis, in fact, does generate at least one good prediction. If the Devil’s Tombstone was glacial in origin, then we should be able to find similar boulders elsewhere, especially in similar ice age settings. We went looking and we found a good one. The town of Windham is known to have had had a glacier passing, east-to-west, through it exactly at the same time the Stony Clove ice was active. And, there, at the west end of Windham, just past the Fire Department, was something we have heard is called “Cabin Rock.” It even has its own historical highway marker. And, like Devil’s Tombstone, it is very nearly vertical. But there is something else; it is still partially buried in glacial sediments; Thus, it could not have been erected by a prehistoric culture. It must be a true glacial erratic.

Cabin Rock. Photo by Deb Allen

Our glacial erratic hypothesis seems to be just as good as the monolith one. But, is it a better hypothesis? There are few, if any, doubts about our Cabin Rock interpretations, and they should work equally well for Devil’s Tombstone. How do we decide about the Tombstone? The monolith hypothesis generates a very strong prediction. If this was an important location on the Hammonasset Line and if the Hammonasset Line was, indeed, an important cultural institution, then there should be some archeology there, and perhaps a lot of it. If there is sufficient archeology then the monolith hypothesis looks good; if not, then it would seem to be falsified.

We argue for the erratic hypothesis. But we are not archeologists, so we can only await archeological evidence. It’s spring and right now flints should be easy to spot.

==================================================================

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist,” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”

On the Rocks – Literally!

On the Rocks – The Woodstock Times

June 22, 1999

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Rustic Adirondack furniture has been popular for generations. People find austere looking bent trees and fashion all sorts of pieces from it. The style is perfect for the interiors of mountain cabins and for exteriors anywhere. You don’t actually have to be in the Adirondacks, the style can be seen all over the east, including the Catskills.

You will see Adirondack furniture hereabouts, called that even though it’s made from local wood. But there is also something that, we think, should be called “Catskill furniture.” You won’t see it inside or even outside of homes, however. You will have to go hiking if you want to see it at all. It’s made from local materials but not wood. Catskill furniture is made of bluestone and can only be seen in old quarries.

All the old bluestone quarries have enormous piles of waste rock. These are the irregular slabs of sandstone that were not suitable for sidewalks or any other use. Quarrymen just left them in heaps. Hikers, apparently, have not been able to resist taking these slabs and piling them up into “furniture.” If you spend much time on the mountain trails you will see many of these bits of folk art. The most popular are the thrones, great seats of stone. Sometimes there are just single thrones, perhaps for a bachelor king. Then there are paired seats and even thrones for three.

But there are more than just thrones for the mountain kings. There are tables and obelisk-like columns. There are walled rooms and, sometimes when there is water in the quarry, spring houses. We have seen whole complexes of rooms with tables and chairs and all manner of comforts. Naturally one gets hungry building all that furniture and of course there are barbecues. We expect that hikers camp out in these complexes and have made them quite comfortable. All this reminds us of some of the complex cliff dweller Indian sites of the American southwest.

One question we have is “how old are they?” It’s not obvious from just looking at them. After all a throne of stone could have been stacked up last week or a century ago, how can you tell? The stone doesn’t develop the patina of age that we see in wood. But, we are guessing that few of them are all that antique. We have not seen much in the way of lichen growth on these stones. If a rock is left exposed for a long enough period of time it will develop an encrustation of lichens. The longer it lays there, the better the growth. Our stone villages apparently have not been there long enough to grow many lichens.

Where can you go and see some of these? The Overlook Mountain trail will take you north to Plattekill Mountain where there are quite a few old bluestone quarries. You can explore these and find a number of the neo-neolithic sites. The very best we have seen so far are on the lower slopes of Sugarloaf Mountain. Take the blue trail toward Pecoy Notch and you will pass through a heavily quarried section. There we saw some very fine Catskill furniture, including what amounted to a small village.

There are some obvious problems with Catskill furniture. None of it is very comfortable. It’s hard to rearrange the furniture and impossible to order some for delivery. But so what; all of this is just for fun. It’s a rough sort of folk art, but it does reflect a basic human characteristic. We all seem to like to leave monuments behind, be we ancient Druids or modern Catskill hikers. So, hail to the mountain kings, and enjoy a fine hike in the Catskills.

Contact the authors at randjitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

Coming out of a shell

On the Rocks – The Woodstock Times

Nov. 19, 1999

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and who can exactly define such a thing as that? Do female porcupines look beautiful to males? The same for female Aardvarks or Armadillos. We hope so, but none of them look beautiful to us. Even if it should be wholly subjective matter, we think that there just are some creatures that are beautiful while others are ugly. The swan would be on most people’s list of beautiful. So too the thoroughbred horse. We think that most people would regard the Walrus as ugly. There’s no offence intended here, after all, animals cannot be offended, or complimented for that matter; they don’t care. In the struggle for existence, it doesn’t often matter how pretty a creature is. And, in Nature, the struggle for existence is what counts.

Nevertheless, we would like to talk of beauty in the animal kingdom today. And we are not thinking of soft furry animals. The invertebrates include more than their share of ugly animals, creepy crawlers that repel us. But there is also beauty among these cold-blooded, dim-witted creatures, and that can be the case even hundreds of millions of years after death.

We are thinking about a fossil shellfish named Mucrospirifer, a member of a group called the brachiopods. A brachiopod, like a clam, has two shells, or valves. But brachiopods are not clams; their anatomy does not even place them among the mollusks. Their shells are entirely different. Among the clams, symmetry planes pass between the valves, in the brachiopods, symmetry is down the middle of each one. In lifestyles however, the clams and brachiopods do have much in common. Both lie on the sea floor and draw sea water into their interiors. Both filter the water and find microscopic bits and pieces of food in it. But both have complex and differing filtering mechanisms. All this is important, it tells us that the two groups evolved separately.

Having different evolutionary histories, it is not odd how different their geological histories have been. Brachiopods were among the dominant seafloor dwellers up until the end of the Permian time period, about a quarter of a billion years ago. They nearly disappeared in the great worldwide extinction that occurred at the end of the Permian. Clams had been around as long as the brachiopods, but they have flourished since that awful extinction. The brachiopods have survived but are just barely limping along.

The brachiopods were at their peak during the middle Devonian when Woodstock was at the bottom of something called the Hamilton Sea. And Mucrospirifer was one of the most abundant inhabitants of Woodstock at that time. Mucrospirifer is a genus name and there were many species within this genus. All are attractive but some were of a truly beautiful form. The ones we are illustrating are among our personnel favorites. They have long delicate and graceful left and right points and fine sculpturing. This morphology adapted them for life on a quiet and muddy-bottomed sea floor. Their lives were simple; they just opened their valves when they were hungry and filtered sea water. When not hungry, or if they were disturbed, they would close their shells and remain protected within them. Not very exciting but that doesn’t matter. Believe us, brachiopods are never bored. we doubt that they even know that they are alive.

Mucrospirifer was a big success during the Devonian and for that long time it flourished in abundance. Eventually its success faded and it numbers diminished. Sometime and somewhere, there was a last Mucrospirifer. We don’t know where or when. When it died the group was extinct. It’s sad, but that is the fate of all species including, someday, our own.

But even in extinction, they are still beautiful creatures, and they deserve to be remembered. We always enjoy finding a good specimen. You can look for them in some of the fine-grained sandstones and shales of the Hudson Valley. Try the strata along John Carle Road which is off of the eastern end of the Glasco Pike. Better still, journey up to the Greenville vicinity. The stone walls west of that town yield many of them. If you do go hunting, please limit yourself to just one good specimen and leave the rest for others to see. After all, the form has already gone extinct once.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

The Hudson River School of Rocks

On the Rocks – The Woodstock Times

Dec. 2, 1999

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Some years ago, Robert attended the national meeting of the Geological Society of America and was surprised to see an agenda with three papers that were devoted to the Hudson River School of Art. Getting papers accepted at the national meeting is a very competitive process so he was surprised that the meeting’s organizers would devote so much time to art. What did not surprise him was that it was this particular sort of art. But we bet that this is a bit of a surprise in an artistic community such as Woodstock so let us try to explain.

Thomas Cole, one of the founders of the Hudson Valley School, got his start here in the Catskills. It was 1825 and he was probably the first painter to get up to the newly opened Catskill Mountain House Hotel. Before him, up there, lay nearly all of the Hudson Valley and behind him were all of the Catskills. It was the Catskill landscape that attracted him the most. This great landscape was still largely wilderness and the young artist would be the first to explore its scenic opportunities.

Our mountains would bring Cole quick success, but he did have one problem: back then the great traditions of landscape art came from Europe, and it was the custom of European artists to use the ruins of Classical cultures as emblems of antiquity. They liked to stick in the remnants of a Roman temple or two in order to communicate that their landscapes were truly old. Obviously, Cole could not do this, after all very few Romans ever got to North America during Classical times.

Then again, and this is where we geologists come in, Cole was working at a time when geologists were revolutionizing the very concept of time itself. In 18th or early 19th Century Europe, a Classical ruin was seen as dating back to near the beginning of time, especially if you accepted a biblical age of 6,000 years for the age of the Earth. But by the 1820’s geologists had come to understand that the Earth was probably many millions of years old and, indeed, very likely much more than that (billions, in fact). A two-thousand-year-old ruin didn’t look very old given the new framework of time!

Without ancient monuments, Cole struggled to find native emblems of antiquity. He tried the figure of an Indian in his famous painting of Kaaterskill Falls, and that sort of worked. Cole used the tangled chaos of the American wilderness as another approach. Our wilds had a venerable, tangled and mossy look to them when compared to the tamed, park-like landscapes of Europe. But it wasn’t until the 1830’s that Cole found another solution: the very rocks themselves.

It’s in his “Course of Empire” that we find Cole using this solution. Course of Empire is his famous series of five landscapes each showing a stage in the history of a mythological Classical empire. The first painting showed that culture’s roots in a primitive tribal culture. Later (second painting), it passed into a stone-monolith- building second stage, and from there blossomed into a Rome-like empire (third painting). Sadly, Cole’s Empire disintegrated in war (fourth painting) and fell into ruin in the last scene. Throughout the five canvases a great somber mountaintop of rock loomed above the community. And throughout the long history that mountaintop never changed one bit, it was permanent while all below eventually disintegrated. In this way Cole turned the tables on European painters: Classical cultures were recent and ephemeral while the rocks beneath were the true emblems of time.

That was a pretty heady theme in the 1830’s and 40’s, when Cole was most active. And that same heady theme was central to the geological community of the very same age. We geologists were looking at rocks exactly the same way as Cole and his colleagues; for a moment of time Art and Geology explored the same literal and intellectual landscapes.

Art is ever-changing, and of course, it has moved on. But the notion of great antiquity remains fundamental to geology and geologists integrate it into all of our thinking. Thus, it really is no surprise at all that we geologists still venerate the great Hudson Valley School of Art. Those paintings speak to us in a very personal way.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”