September 2021

Cabin Tales #Five: The Gullies

On the Rocks; The Woodstock Times; July 14, 2011

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

We have been exploring the vicinity of the little red cabin, property of the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. That land is at the top of Plattekill Clove, and it lies on the slopes of Plattekill Mountain. The best way to hike up into the mountains here is to take the Green Trail, that’s part of the “Long Path” which extends 347 miles from Ft. Lee, New Jersey to Altamont, New York. Watch for the local trailhead along County Rte. 16; cross the bridge there and begin your ascent into the Catskills. Along the lower reaches of the Green Trail is some very prominent evidence of bad land management.

Today’s hiking trail was once a highway and a busy one at that. We have to imagine what it was like to be here during the late 19^th Century. Back then Plattekill Mountain was the heart of the then very active bluestone industry. Dozens of quarries were being worked at that time and an enormous amount of bluestone was being transported off the mountain. Most of it probably traveled south, down the Meads Mountain Road and on through Woodstock for eventual shipping, by boat, down the Hudson. The rest traveled north, down the Green Trail.

Today’s Green Trail would have been a primary road back then, and it probably saw a fair amount of traffic. And the evidence is that it saw enough to cause real problems. You start your modern day hike up the trail and very soon you encounter deeply rutted gulley’s close to the modern trail.

These ruts have a history, and it is one of environmental abuse. They, no doubt, date back to the late 19thCentury; they are contemporary to the times when this was a real highway. You have to remember that this “real highway” was a dirt road back in those days and that horse drawn vehicles were driven up and down its lengths. The wheels of such wagons had a deeply rutting effect upon the paths. When it rained those ruts would have been widened and deepened. We don’t know how much care went into maintaining these roads and it is easy to guess that they were left to get worse and worse.

In fact, that is what the evidence suggests. There are not just one set of ruts, but at least two. It appears that the original highway came to be so badly rutted that it was abandoned. A new road, near to the first, came into use.  With time, and years of more use and abuse, that second pathway became unusable, and it too was abandoned.

Somewhere along the way, history saw the end of this, the Overlook Mountain Road. Most likely the bluestone industry came to be abandoned as the quarries gave out. There was still a small tourist industry up there with some boarding houses, but eventually that ended too. There were fewer reasons for people to live up there and they moved on. The road simply fell into disuse, and it evolved into today’s hiking trail.

Human feet can be quite erosive, but they are not the match to horse hooves and wagon wheels.  Our hiking trails, like the roads of old, have to be abandoned or occasionally rerouted in order to minimize the damage. In my years we have seen a number of hiking trails blocked off and moved to a new direction. It is something that just has to be done.

But we are just a little more enlightened nowadays. We purposely reroute our trails, usually long before the damage gets out of hand.

It is not as if Nature is all that careful about what she does to the landscape. In exploring Plattekill Mountain, we had no trouble finding naturally rutted creek beds. Plattekill has very steep slopes and when natural creeks descend them, the tendency is to damage the landscape not much less than horses and wagons. Such creeks are very erosive when they descend steep slopes. If you do a little exploring along the Green Trail, you will see these too; watch for vertical bedrock walls one either side of these creeks. When we were there in the summer of 2010 it had been dry for quite a spell. Those erosive creeks should have had a lot of water flowing through them, but they were dry as a bone.

The good news comes with time. Nature heals man’s wounds.WeI saw little or no signs that any of this erosion had been recent. In fact, these ruts seem to be a century or so in age with no evidence that they will ever be active again. Nature does her healing by allowing plants to grow over the damage and by overseeing the return of soil profiles. These old ruts have a soft, rounded shape to them. It will take a lot of time to complete the healing. But, in the meantime, the great ruts that can be seen here form a somber testimony to what happens with poor land use.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook pagre thecatskillgeologist.com.

Nosey Neighbors

The Woodstock Times; On the Rocks

Oct. 8, 1998

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Autumn is much too important to miss. The Hudson Valley, with its many scenic roads and bulging farm markets, is a lovely place to spend the autumn of the year. But as far as we are concerned, the place to be in this season is up in the mountains. Our Catskills are certainly at their best from the middle of September to the middle of October. They’re not all that crowded in this season either, especially if you are among those fortunate enough to be able to get out on a weekday.

One of our favorite locations in this season is Vroman’s Nose. “Nose” seems to be one of those peculiar local words. You see it used in the northern Catskills and Mohawk River valley. It refers to a small, but steep, mountain. Most of the noses that we have heard of are in the Mohawk Valley, but Vroman’s Nose is a fine one. It’s located in the Schoharie Creek Valley a few miles south of Middleburgh, close to Rt. 30.

Vroman’s Nose is isolated from the rest of the hills in the region. This steep hill is sometimes referred to as the “sky island of the Schoharie.” Its morphology is the product of glaciation. Its peak was overrun by a glacier. The passing ice yanked loose large blocks of rock which left behind a south facing cliff. Above that is a beautiful glacially polished ledge called locally the “dance floor.” From the dance floor is a spectacular view of the lower Schoharie Creek valley. You can see for miles up the valley from up there.

Vroman’s Nose is almost entirely undeveloped and covered with forest. That might not have been. We have heard that some time ago there were plans to either sell the land for building lots or even to construct a motel up there. Talk about a room with a view! At any rate, the thought of developing the site alarmed many in the local population, especially the still abundant descendants of the Vroman family. One thing led to another and soon there was a Vroman’s Nose Association. This group of good neighbors was able to raise enough money to purchase the site. Now Vroman’s Nose is a community park, open and free to all.

Drive north along Rte. 30. You won’t have much trouble identifying the sky island; you’ll spot it miles away. Across the highway from the nose, if you watch carefully, there is a home with a box marked maps. Wally Van Houten, a retired earth science teacher, lives there and takes care of the mountain. The map shows three trails to the summit of the nose. The green trail is the best for family hiking. It’s the long way, but the slope is gentle. The red trail ascends straight up the steep front of the mountain, and it can be a very difficult climb. The blue trail is the “Goldilocks” trail, it’s just right.

On your way up you will pass a number of exposures of dark, fine-grained sandstones. These belong to the Devonian Hamilton group, and they run about 375 or so million years old. These sediments made up the floor of the Hamilton Sea that was once here. It was a relatively shallow water, mud bottomed ocean. The dark color tells us that, unfortunately, there was relatively little oxygen in the quiet sea floor. That means that few animals could survive and indeed there are not many fossils to be found on Vroman’s Nose. We have found a few shellfish, brachiopods mostly, and there are some worm burrows as well. Not much of a haul.

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

Katrina’s Floods: Here?

The Daily Star, 2007

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

The enormous destruction inflicted upon New Orleans back in 2005 fulfilled warnings that many geologists had been making for years. The city lies below sea level, hiding behind man-made levees, and it was only a matter of time before river flooding or hurricane storm surges would overwhelm it.

At the heart of the problem is that New Orleans and all of the Mississippi Delta has been sinking. It’s the weight of the sediment that the river has carried onto the delta that has pressed down and caused the subsidence. Ironically sedimentation builds and maintains the delta, but at the same time, causes it to sink. In recent centuries, however, man has disrupted this process. We have built levees to prevent floods and they have mostly done that, but they have also kept those floods from carrying sediment to pile up onto the delta plain. Without those sediments the entire delta is doomed to continue its sinking, probably into the sea.

It used to be a lot like that in Oneonta.

Take Main Street south to Rte. 28. Turn right and begin the ascent up Franklin Mountain. Travel exactly two miles and you will see a sequence of red shales and sandstones along the left side of the road. You have entered the realm of the great Catskill Delta. A bit less than 400 million years ago a sizable ocean, the Catskill Sea covered all of central and western New York. Large rivers flowed out from New England and into that sea. Those rivers deposited a delta that easily matched the one in Louisiana. The sediments of that ancient delta are still around; they have hardened into the rock that we call the Catskill Mountains. Our mountains are a fossil delta. Those roadside red shales and thin red sandstones are the deposits of the Catskill delta plain. Much of that material is the product of the many floods that occur in such a setting. These are exactly the deposits that levees have kept from forming in Louisiana. What you need to know is that these sediments always accumulate at just about sea level.

Continue a very short distance up the road and pull off at the dirt lot. Look downhill and you will see some thick gray sandstone ledges. Look uphill and you will see some more red shales and then another gray sandstone ledge. Those two sandstone ledges are petrified rivers of the Catskill Delta. Both of them, in their own times, were also formed at exactly sea level. The red shales are floodplain deposits, essentially floodplain soils.

   Gray sandstone, above, is river channel deposit. Red shale below formed on floodplain.

We have traveled about 50 feet uphill from our first sea level outcropping. We have probably also traveled through thousands of years of sedimentation, but we are still looking at deposits that formed at sea level. What gives? What happened long ago is that the Catskill Delta subsided slowly and, as it subsided, sedimentation filled in behind so that the net effect was no change in elevation at all; sea level was maintained.

Let’s drive up the road to the top. There, near the garage with all the hub caps is still another gray sandstone ledge. Again, we are looking at another delta river. And, of course, this one too was deposited at sea level. Now we have risen 200 feet and now, of course, the crust beneath us has subsided an equal amount.

Our journey illustrates the inevitability of what is happening to New Orleans; someday it too will sink 200 feet and by then it will be totally buried, a fossil city completely forgotten. Man can fight this with levees; man will lose.

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

Birth of a gorge

On the Rocks the Woodstock Times, Sept 2011

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

We are the mind’s eye, the human imagination and we are located about where Stoll Road is today. The date, however, is Jan. 15, 18,608 BC. This, it will turn out, will be the coldest day in the history of Woodstock. Tonight, the temperature will plummet to 63 degrees below zero. This is the peak of the Ice Age but, even so, that sort of temperature is extreme.

We look around and, even though it is late afternoon, all is very dark. We are at the bottom of the Hudson Valley Glacier and a few thousand feet of ice lie above us; no sunlight will be seen here today.

If there is no light, there are at least a few sounds to be heard. From time to time there is a low groaning. Then too, there are occasional loud snaps that echo through the ice. These are the sounds of ice under intense strains. The glacier is frozen solid, and it should not be moving, but there is a constant pressure from the north. Back in Labrador the glacier has been slowly accumulating new ice and the weight of that ice, here in the Hudson Valley, is being translated into a southward shove.

We, the mind’s eye, rise up through all of the ice and ascend into the Arctic sky. Below us and all around we see nothing but the flat white of a great ice sheet. We climb higher into the sky and then disappear into the vastness of time. The mind’s eye can do that . . .

When we reappear, we are back in the Stoll Road vicinity. It is August 8^th, 14,387 BC. All around us, it is still black; the Hudson Valley glacier still covers all of our region. But that will not last. Today, above the ice, the temperature will climb to 63 degrees above zero, the hottest it has been here in about 9.000 years. Up above, the ice is melting and melting quickly.

That is why it is so noisy all about us. Again, the glacier is groaning and popping; the ice is now very unstable, sinking here and there and lurching to the south as well. But there is more: now there is a low roaring sound in the distance. Nearby there are gurgling noises as well and these are pretty loud. The glacier is melting, and enormous volumes of water are draining through the ice. We cannot tell it from down here, but the ice is thinning. Once again, we disappear into the ether of time.

Now it is 600 years later; the date is July 14, 13,787 BC and during these 600 years most of the Hudson Valley ice has melted away. The climate has continued its warmup. Now, all around us, is the very loud roar of flowing water. We find ourselves in a powerful current of water. We are within a sub-glacial stream. It’s a raging torrent of ice water which has originated from the melting glacier, drained through the ice and formed into this stream. The current would kill mortal humans, but we are the mind’s eye and cannot be harmed. We can stand still in the flow, if we want, or we can drift along with it, if that is preferred.

We stand in the current for a short period of time and feel the pressure of the passing ice water. Not infrequently, large blocks of ice pass by. It is clear that we are watching the very disintegration of a great glacier. Suddenly, and with a loud crash and violent splash the icy roof of this stream caves in. Now sunlight shines where it has not been for thousands of years

Over a period of days we watch as more and more of our stream’s roof caves in. We soon observe that this flow is something that one day in the distant future will be called Sloan Gorge. We are privileged to be there at its birth. The current is so powerful that it transports great blocks of rock. We can watch boulders as they bounce by, buoyed by the pressure of the flow.

The river we see here today is a raging, foaming, angry torrent. Its powerful flow is enormously erosive; it is carving the canyon that today’s inhabitants of Woodstock are familiar with. The flow is dense with sand and that exerts a powerful abrading force on the bedrock. Sloan Gorge is having its violent birth. We, once again, disappear into time.

We reappear and it is August 24, 2008. Sloan Gorge is its modern self. It is not a torrent; in the late summer it is a place with little water at all. Sloan gorge is what geologists call a “paleoform.” That’s a landscape that is an anachronism; it belongs to that other time: the time at the end of the Ice Age. But, we are the mind’s eye and it has been our privilege to see the Gorge as it was.

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

Cabin Tales #5: Noah’s Flood?

The Woodstock Times; On the Rocks June 16, 2011

Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

We would like to resume some columns in a series that we have called “Cabin Tales.” We have spent a lot of time at the little red cabin at the top of Plattekill Clove, owned and loaned out by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. As something of an experiment, we have been writing about geological topics that we discovered within a mile of the cabin. We wondered just how many we could find. How rich is the geology there? The answer is very rich. Here is another episode.

We headed east from the cabin, down the highway, early one morning with nothing particular in mind. But we didn’t get very far before we made a discovery. There, at the absolutely highest crest of the hill, and alongside the road, was a beautifully rounded, fist sized cobble. We looked around and soon found another. Then, in the course of a few minutes, we found several more. We knew what these were; they were stream washed cobbles. Long ago they had traveled down some rugged whitewater creek and over a period of time Nature had done her lapidary work; the cobbles, once angular, came to be sculpted into the sinuous roundness we were admiring. None of these were perfect spheres, but all displayed, to one extent or another, a good deal of rounding.

But what were stream-rounded cobbles doing at the very top of the highest level of the highway, far from, and above any stream? There never could have been a stream up here. Well, we knew the answer to that question too and we will reveal it later on, but we had the good sense to appreciate that we had just experienced one of the great geological questions of the early 19^th Century. We had, intellectually, been transported back to the boundaries of science as they were before the 1820’s!

Way back then, geology was on the front lines of science; this science was making many of its greatest breakthroughs; it was becoming modern. Our forebears were a sharp eyed lot. They looked, and they noticed, and they saw the same sorts of things that we do today, but they were doing it for the first times – including seeing stream rounded cobbles away from any streams. But they often were quite different from modern geologists; they made their observations from the point of view of a very different mindset. Many, probably most, were devout Christians.

If you are a very religious scientist, before 1820, and you are looking at stream rounded cobbles, lying where they should not be, then there is a very appealing interpretation – these could be cobbles left over from Noah’s Flood!

Ou find, at the top of Plattekill Clove, is not an uncommon one. If you are careful and watchful, you will likely find rounded cobbles all over the place, including many found very great distances from any stream. Lots of geologists were finding these back in the early 19^th Century and they eagerly made the Noah’s Flood interpretation. And this included some of the most respected geologists of the time. The one we think of first was Benjamin Silliman, a professor of geology at Yale. Silliman enthusiastically argued for the Noah’s Flood hypothesis all during the 1810’s. Such geologists thought that their views and, in fact, the views of science in general would and should confirm Christian theologies. They certainly did not see science as a servant of religion; it just never occurred to them that there ever should be a conflict. Science would reveal the mind of God, just as the Bible had. The science of nature was thought to be a second testament. There had been a Noah’s Flood; most did not doubt that. If God had revealed the flood in the Bible, then surely, he would have revealed it in the geology. So surely there was a global geological record of that flood. You can imagine how thrilled they must have been to see the rounded cobbles such as we have been speaking of.

But slowly an alternative hypothesis was being developed. During the 1820’s the climate was warming up as the world emerged from something called the Little Ice Age. In Switzerland glaciers were actively melting and the landscapes revealed by the retreating ice showed features that, without any doubt, were the product of those glaciers. And those features included a lot of stream rounded cobbles.

Evidence of a great Ice Age began to emerge, and it was soon clear that almost all of northern Europe and northern North America had been glaciated. As the glaciers advanced and retreated there was a lot of meltwater streams, all producing rounded cobbles. Renewed cycles of glaciation saw glaciers picking up those cobbles and transporting them all over the place. Now there was a perfectly logical explanation for the widespread distribution of stream rounded cobbles, and it had nothing to do with Noah’s Flood.

Acceptance of the glacial hypothesis came quickly as geologist saw how much evidence there was for it. The glacial hypothesis came to be promoted to the glacial theory, and it has been, since then, one of the foundations of modern geology.

There are several morals to our story. First, science has always been careful to avoid the supernatural. Science cannot explain the supernatural; we cannot formulate hypotheses about the supernatural, nor can we test such hypotheses. We study the natural world, not some hypothetical supernatural one.

Ou second moral has to do with “intelligent design” advocates who argue that there should be a place for the supernatural in science, specifically that we should find a place for God in science. The answer to that is that there was a chapter in the history of science when we did exactly that; we searched for the works of God in the science we were uncovering.  But when we did so, it just did not work very well. We do so much better when we search for and find natural explanations for the natural phenomenon we study.

Ou walk down the canyon at Plattekill Clove had carried us through some important moments in the very history of science, a remarkable traverse.

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