Robert Titus - page 26

The glaciers got there first
The Catskill Geologists
Robert and Johanna Titus

Have you been to the Walkway across the Hudson at Poughkeepsie? It’s a pedestrian bridge that, high up in the sky, crosses the river; We promise you, it’s quite the experience. But, opening next week, is something just as good and a lot closer. That’s the Hudson River Skywalk. The Skywalk also spans the Hudson, this time across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. In so doing, it links two important historic sites: Frederic Church’s onetime home, Olana, and Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole Historic Site. The new trail extends from Cedar Grove, across the bridge. and then it ascends the hill to Olana. Can there be a “theme’ to a walkway? If so, with this one it’s the Hudson River School of Art. Cole and Church were that “School’s” two leading lights.
We said that the Skywalk was just as good as the Walkway, but maybe we can write about something that makes it even better. If you get a chance and you head out over the Hudson, we would like you to look and see how steep the slopes are on either side. We are talking about the slope just beneath the western end of the bridge and the other slope just beneath Olana. That steepness is something that is not always easy to take notice of, but it is important. Shouldn’t there be a floodplain? Rivers are supposed to flow across broad, flat floodplains, aren’t they? So, why not here?

The Skywalk – 

We got to thinking about that and came up with an answer, a good geological answer. Halfway across the bridge we looked east and west and then north. In our mind’s eyes we saw a glacier. It was perhaps 14,000 years ago and, for the most recent time, an ice age glacier was advancing down the Hudson Valley. That glacier rubbed up against the slopes on both sides of the river. Glaciers can be very erosive and this one was no exception. It cut into Church Hill where Olana is perched. That would greatly improve the view that Frederic Church would eventually paint. It also cut into the western side of the river. All this erosion left no room for any kind of floodplain. Instead, it formed a rather boxy valley with a sizable river flowing down a surprisingly narrow pathway. You probably never noticed this, did you? Well, go out onto the Skyway and take a look.
The official opening is set for June 1st. People will congregate at Olana and at Cedar Grove. Each group will set out on a “parade” to the Skywalk Trail. If all goes well, they will all meet at the middle of the bridge. There will be a ribbon cutting at the park near the bridge’s toll plaza at noon. We don’t think there will be a golden spike, but it should be a fun event.
Plans may change so before going, you should contact Cedar Grove at thomascole.org or Olana at olana.org. Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net.

Go to the Olana or Cedar Grove websites for details. 

A red sunset
Windows Through Time
Register Star
Johanna and Robert Titus
June 4, 2014

We are guessing you have seen an image of “The Scream,” a very famous and much stolen painting by Norwegian impressionist artist Edvard Munch. There were actually four versions, painted between 1893 and 1910. Our favorite is the 1895 one. It’s the contorted face that catches everyone’s attention. Right behind this unhappy figure is a dock jutting out into a Norwegian fjord with a sailing ship in the distance. But, if you have an alert eye, there is the background; it’s the sky that’s interesting. Munch paints a striking vision of horizons of orange sky, mixed with thinner levels of blue and yellow. Once you take note of it, the sky is just as alarming as the rest of the painting. It’s truly great impressionist art.

We have been frequently guilty of slipping art into our columns, but how on earth have we managed to get Munch’s painting in here? The answer involves some of the professional debate that has swirled for decades over the colorful sky in the scream paintings. Many art historians have argued that Munch had experienced the orange sunsets that occurred all around the world for months after the eruption of the south Pacific volcano Krakatoa in 1883. Volcanic ash erupted from the volcano, drifted high into the sky and circulated around the world. Sunsets were a brilliant orange for quite some time and any number of landscape artists painted them.
That gets us back to some work done by famed artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church. Cole was the master painter of the Hudson River School of landscape art. Frederic Church became his student in 1844 and 1845. He would follow in Cole’s footsteps and ascend to be the most successful member of the Hudson River School.
The Thomas Cole house mounts an art exhibit every summer; we never miss one This year’s (2014) paintings were almost all done during, or soon after, the two years of Church’s residency in Catskill. But we noticed something about the paintings done from 1847 to 1849. Those images were far more likely to have bright red sunsets (or sunrises) than others done earlier or later. Church found inspiration in the rising and falling sun. Sometimes it shined right up onto the undersides of the clouds. At other times descending lobes of clouds could be painted in fiery reds while other parts of those same clouds, hidden from the sunlight, would be painted in a variety of dark grays. Interspersed, would be occasional horizons of blue. This gave Church an interesting visual theme to explore. This play of light and color in landscape art is called luminism.
We are including several paintings from the exhibit. First, we ask you to take a good look at Morning, Looking East over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains, 1848. It has the rich play of colors we are talking about. Also, take a good look at Scene on Catskill Creek, 1847. Although not as red, it shows a brilliant setting sun. Now, look at Church’s Above the clouds at sunrise, 1849. We see, once again, the same play of colors.

     
We were familiar with the debate about The Scream and we began to wonder about Frederic Church’s paintings. Why did he paint such vivid skies from 1847 to 1849? Was it just his artistic imagination at work or was there something else? We are not art historians; we are practicing geologists. As such, could we find interesting scientific insights to help understand these paintings? We went to work. Scientists follow the scientific method. First, we find problems that need solving; then we develop hypotheses that might offer solutions to these problems. Let’s call our hypothesis “the scream hypothesis;” we argue that bright orange and red landscape paintings are associated with great volcanic eruptions. Scientists “test” their hypotheses by making observations, finding the facts behind them. We looked at history.
We found that there were five eruptions during 1846, four of them in November alone. In May the volcano Tangkuban Perahu, in Java, erupted. Then, in November, there were eruptions in Chile and Japan, then two more in the Cascade Mountains of our Pacific Northwest: Mt. Baker and Mt St. Helens.
All in all, it appears that as the year 1847 began, there must have been a lot of volcanic ash in the skies and they were likely spreading all over the globe. So, our hypothesis is that Frederic Church was influenced by volcanic ash in the skies when he was painting at that time. That hypothesis looks very plausible.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.:

Devil’s Advocate
On the Rocks
Woodstock Times
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Plattekill Clove is one of those out of the way Catskill canyons. The land is mostly open to the public now and there are few private residences. Take the West Saugerties Road to West Saugerties itself. Turn left onto Platte Clove Road which is also Rte. 16. This is the one road that ascends the clove. It is a narrow one and it isn’t open in the winter. Even in the warm months, however, you can hike up the road and not worry about too much traffic bothering you. There are several nice scenic viewpoints along the way and it’s well worth the effort to get to know this lovely location.
To us, it is the top of the clove that is most interesting. There is a remarkable stream pattern to be seen there. Plattekill Creek forms itself up there. Several small tributary streams descend the slopes of the eastern Catskills and combine to create the creek. None of them is of particular note, they’re just run-of-the-mill mountain streams. But even if these streams are of little note, what happens to them is
.
Plattekill Creek is a young stream. It probably dates back no further than the ice age. Before the glaciers flowed down the Hudson Valley there probably was no Plattekill Creek. But when the ice came it seems to have sheared off the eastern ledges of rock and created the great, steep “Wall of Manitou” that towers above the Hudson. The steep slope was, quite naturally enough, attacked by newly formed streams. Rivers flow rapidly down steep slopes and they cut deeply into them. That’s what produces cloves such as the Plattekill.
The best part of the clove is near its top, a location known as the “Devil’s Kitchen.” The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development has acquired much of the land here, and the public is welcome to visit this site. The center owns a tiny red cabin at the top of the clove. Those two streams we mentioned reach a confluence just above the cabin. The confluence is of no particular note, but just downstream the combined flow drops off a fine waterfall. Here the erosion of Plattekill Creek has reached up into the mountain and cut the falls.

To see the waterfall, you can follow the trail that starts next to the cabin and descends a short distance down the clove, curves back and brings you to the base of the falls. From the base of the falls you can turn around and look down the valley. This is real good youthful stream morphology. The canyon is narrow and deep. It is the product of very rapid and very recent erosion. The Catskill Center welcomes you, but they would like it very much if you would stay on the marked trail.
A quarter mile farther down the road another small mountain stream descends from the north and enters the Plattekill Creek. This erosive stream has been a very active itself. It has cut the most remarkably narrow and deep chasm into the bedrock. The work “defile” is sometimes used for a landscape feature of this sort, and it’s just the right word. This cut in the slopes is on private property, but you will have no trouble seeing it from the side of the road.

The falls at the upper Plattekill Clove is one of the most graphic demonstrations of the erosive power of a mountain stream that we know of in the area. This kind of creek devotes itself to what is called downcutting. Erosion is focused on the removal of rock beneath the stream bed. Virtually no widening of the valley has yet occurred. It is the earliest stage in the development of a mountain creek’s valley. The flow of water exploits the fracture patterns that are here and removes blocks of rock from between the fractures, one at a time. Eventually the defile is produced. Spring is the time of the year to see this process in action. The Devil’s Kitchen won’t last for long (in terms of geological time), a couple of hundred centuries pass by and bingo – the canyon is gone! So, enjoy it now, while you still can.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

A Line Drawn in the Sand
The Cooperstown Geologist
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus
March 2007

A geologist is privileged to see the world differently from other people. That’s not arrogance; that’s just the product of a lot of experience in our science. We would like to prove this by taking you up a road you have probably traveled many times. On our trip I would like to show you what I see; it may change your perceptions.
Head south from Cooperstown on Rte. 28 until you reach County Rte. 26 and turn right (west). Drive to the top of the hill and park (safely; it is a busy highway). Across the road on the south side is a wonderful panoramic view of the upper Susquehanna. It is also a panoramic view of the Ice Age.

Right in front of you is a series of pretty little rolling hillocks. They rise and fall like waves upon a roiling ocean, but these “waves” are much more smoothed out than those of an ocean. Use the words sinuous or sinuosity to describe this land. Is this view just something pretty, or is there more?
There’s more. We geologists look at these forms and call them kames and kettles. The kames are the sinuous rises while the kettles are the sinuous depressions. How did they get there and what do they have to do with the Ice Age? Turn around and look.
North of the road today is a farmstead, but in our mind’s eye we look and we see a glacier. A big dirty, wet pile of glacial ice lies right where the farm should be. It is melting and melting rapidly. Boulders, cobbles and earth are tumbling out of the dirty ice. Thundering flows of turbid water are cascading off the glacier and streams of agitated meltwater are flowing to the south.
Turn around again and look south. The turning may make you dizzy but the travel through time makes it worse. We are now in the year 12,356 BC and before us is another, more barren vision of an ice age Cooperstown. In the distance, just east of and across today’s Rte. 28, lies a glistening plain of soggy wet sediment. It’s the freshly deposited sediment that was washed out by those meltwater streams. Those creeks have broken up into a braiding of crisscrossing rivulets and it is these that have been spreading the sediment across that flat plain.
But now gaze immediately to our front. We see those sinuous hillocks again, but now stripped of their modern grasses; it is a freshly formed kame and kettle landscape. The kames are wet heaps of sand and gravel. There are a lot of boulders in them and some of them are enormous. It’s the kettles that tell much of the story. At the bottom of each is a mass of dirty ice. Those are “the tips of ice bergs.” It seems that each kettle formed where a large broken chunk of glacier had gotten itself buried. The climate has been warming and those masses of buried ice have been slowly melting. As they have done so the land above them has collapsed into those pretty sinuosities we call kettles.
We slowly become aware of what has taken place here. From behind us a great glacier has advanced down the Susquehanna Valley. It reached today’s Rte. 26 and there it came to a halt. Briefly the forces that drive the glacier forward were exactly balanced by the processes of melting. Boulders, cobbles and sandy gravel were brought to the front of the ice and dumped just south of today’s Rte. 26. It’s something geologists call a glacial moraine. The melting glacier provided the streams of water that carried much of the sediment beyond the moraine and deposited it on that plain we see across Rte. 28. Geologists call this an outwash deposit; it is a good name.
The whole assemblage of landforms is called a “moraine-outwash complex” and in our mind’s eye it provides a fascinating vision of the past. But don’t just read about it, bring this column to Rte. 26 and stand atop the hill and read it again with the landscape right in front of you. We told you, we geologists see the landscape differently from others and here is the place to learn that.

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

Pillow Talk
On the Rocks
The Woodstock Times
June 3, 1999
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

There is something naturally mysterious about the bottom of the sea. Sea floors are dark, hidden and nearly impossible to get to, so of course they are shrouded in a captivating sort of mystery. But if the bottom of the sea is a puzzle, what about under the bottom of the sea? Who can even guess what goes on beneath the surface of masses of soft sediment lying buried at the bottom of the sea? Nobody, we suppose, and you would wonder who would even care. But things do happen down there and sometimes we geologists get to see the results, left as impressions in the sedimentary rocks. The rocks show deformations which occurred while they were still soft, wet sediments. What caused these deformations? That’s the job of a sedimentologist to figure out. Mind you, we are not trying to build up some great, enormous mystery here. Nothing supernatural lurks down there. In fact, nothing even all that interesting goes on within the sediments. We are just suggesting that, under the pressure of great weight, things happen to soft wet sediment and it’s the nature of we geologists to try to understand what it is.
The problem comes to light where weathering and erosion have cut into sedimentary rock. Road building also does a fine job of slicing cross sections into outcrops and exposing their interesting structures, including the results of deformational processes. We found a good example recently along Rte. 212 at its intersection with Centerville Church Road. Here, long ago, road building cut a number of excellent outcrops, exposing fine cross-sectional views of sedimentary rocks. The rocks belong to the Hamilton Group. They are strata of marine sandstones and shales that were deposited at the bottom of the Catskill Sea during the Devonian time period, nearly 400 million years ago. At the time of deposition these sediments were nothing special, just sands and muds. Today they are still nothing all that special. We looked to see if there were any fossils but found none. There were no special sedimentary structures either, no channel forms, no ripple marks or even the cross bedding of strong currents. It was, for the most part, just a routine outcrop.
  Typical ball and pillar structure

But then something caught our eyes: immediately across the road from a yellow right turn sign we found something called a ball and pillow structure. It’s a mass of sandstone that had become very dramatically deformed while it was still wet. The wet sand had somehow become disturbed and sunk, or foundered into softer muds below, forming a large round-bottomed mass. Because of its rounded structure it has earned its ball and pillow name. Naming something like this is easy, but how did it get here? We can look at these structures all we want to, but we will never figure out exactly how they formed. Rock is sediment “frozen” solid and we cannot replicate the original dynamics. Some sedimentologists, however, have tried to deal with this problem by experimenting with masses of sediment in laboratory tanks and they have duplicated this structure by passing shock waves through them. In nature the best way to induce shock waves in sediments is to have an earthquake. So, are these “fossil earthquakes?” we don’t think anyone knows. But, that’s the way we are betting.

Ball and pillow structures are quite common throughout the Hamilton sandstones. We have seen many of them in many locations. But most of them are rather small; the diameters of the pillows are only a foot or so across. But some are very large and the one on Rte. 212 is about as big as we have ever seen, being three feet, or so, across.

So, once again, we encounter one of those oddities of the rock record, by itself nothing all that special. Some days a geologist finds wonderful things; other days are far more mundane: This is pretty so-so stuff. But spotting ball and pillow structures is all part of that art we like to call “rockcraft.” Maybe ball and pillow structures aren’t all that important, but it is better to know about them than not to.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

A First Journey Through Time and Space
The Cooperstown Geologist
The Freeman
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Today let’s wander Cooperstown and visit some of its past. You and we are now the mind’s eye, the human imagination. We are not stuck in one time or place. We can go to any place or any time we desire.
Let’s begin along the shores of Lake Otsego at Lakefront Park. It’s 8:32 AM on the morning of Oct. 12, 21,618 BC. The climate has been very cold for centuries and the landscape of Lake Otsego shows the effects. All along the slopes, east and west of the forests, are dead. Only bare branches are seen where there should be a colorful autumn foliage. The forests are silent. All the birds have flown away, nearly all the insects have died. All fur bearing animals have long ago disappeared. There is no wind this morning and it is so quiet. At the north end of the lake we see the reason for all this. All along the horizon is the image of a great wall of ice. It is the advancing Laurentide Ice Sheet. It rises a few hundred feet above our horizon, but back to the north it is a mile or so in thickness. It extends all the way back to Labrador. At its front two much smaller tongues of ice descend left and right around the hill known as the Sleeping Lion. The sky is gray and very cold.

We are the mind’s eye; we wander away from the ice age scene and head over to where Rtes. 80 and 28 head west, out of town. As the highway ascends the hill, it passes through a canyon. “Sandstone walls rise above the road. The rock is stratified; each horizon was once a bed of sand at the bottom of an ocean called the Catskill Sea. We are the mind’s eye; we travel back in time and visit the floor of that ocean.
It is high noon on August 9, 371,493,628 BC. Just enough light reaches the bottom of the sea to look around. There are shellfish down here, but not very many. Some are familiar to us; we know them as clams. Other shellfish are not clams; the symmetry of their shells marks them as something different. These are called brachiopods and they are the most abundant living sea creatures of this, the Devonian time period. Swimming slowly past us are a few clumsy looking fish. They have a heavy armor of bone and are quite unlike modern scale-bearing fish. Above us a small sea monster passes by. It has a coiled shell, fine eyes and a large number of tentacles. Its descendents will include the squid and the octopus but this is the Devonian, and this creature is called a nautiloid; it is the most intelligent animal of the Catskill Sea. The afternoon advances and the sea floor fades into darkness.
Now it is April 3rd, 13,289 BC. Warm climates have returned, and the ice age is ending. In the hills above Cooperstown the remaining glaciers are melting, and a vast rush of water is thundering down the Rte. 80 canyon. So powerful is the flow that it is actually carving the canyon. The currents wash out onto a growing plain of gravel that will eventually make up the whole western half of Cooperstown. The ice age is actually forming this town.
We are the mind’s eye and we return to a Cooperstown in the late autumn of the year 2006 AD. We have only just begun our journeys through time and space.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net, Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

Burroughing into Natural History
The Woodstock Times
May 15, 1997
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Throughout our Hudson-Catskill landscapes there are many secluded hollows. All of them have a geological story, but some of them are far more important in other ways. John Burroughs knew many of these Hudson hideaways and he chose one of the best for his own. He built himself a small cabin in one of those hidden hollows. It’s still there, called “Slabsides,” it’s a monument to Burroughs himself.
Burroughs didn’t need Slabsides for shelter, he just wanted a small, personal retreat. He already had a fine family home, called “Riverby.” Riverby was situated nearby in West Park, on the banks of a far more bucolic Hudson than the one we know today. Burroughs even grew grapes on this small Hudson estate.
But it wasn’t grapes that was the primary Burroughs family harvest; it was literature. John was one of 19th century America’s foremost writers. He was a man of letters, the literary critic who virtually discovered Walt Whitman. Burroughs also wrote of philosophy and religion. But it was as a natural history writer that he gained his greatest lasting fame, and as such he is still most fondly remembered.
Burroughs and several late 19th/early 20th century colleagues, made up a literary wing of the turn of the century conservation movement. But the old “Sage of Slabsides” was not an environmental activist. He was well-known to avoid all strife, political and otherwise. To two generations of readers he was the benign figure of America’s grandfather. Not so, many of his close friends. Teddy Roosevelt was never known to have avoided trouble, he thrived on it. And the crusading John Muir’s views on the environment were decidedly activist. Nevertheless, both valued their friendship with John Burroughs and each greatly appreciated his soft, philosophical approach to nature. Both were visitors to Slabsides.
The hollow is a great one for the likes of us. Wherever we look, we can see the images of a particularly rich geologic past. First there are the fine bedrock exposures, sedimentary rocks from the depths of the Silurian sea that was once here. The strata belong to a unit of rock called the Quassaic Group. These well-cemented, brittle old sandstones formed way down at the bottom of that old Silurian age sea. That was more than 400 million years ago. Then there are the scars of glaciation that the jagged rocks reveal. we can easily imagine the flow of ice coming out of the northeast. As glaciers overwhelmed the old hollow, they hacked away at the bedrock and carved the ruggedness into the hollow. Finally, there are the moist, dark earths of the hollow floor. Burroughs grew asparagus here, but there is a much older story to the soils. They accumulated in a poorly-drained swamp that formed here after the ice melted away. Who knows what form of fossil plants and animals may be buried in the fertile black muck that Burroughs prized so greatly.
But it’s hardly the geology that draws people here, it’s Burroughs old cabin and its legacy. Slabsides is in very good condition for an old house, but it’s not likely to ever be featured on “America’s Castles” or in Victorian Homes magazine. It’s not much, just a tiny handmade cabin. Its only real architectural distinctions are the rough bark covered planks that give the house its name. We preserve the great mansions of the Hudson Valley and we should. But many people, a century ago, lived in very modest homes like this one, and very few of those are left. Slabsides is a reminder of the kinds of homes that existed before the invention of row houses, trailer parks or gated communities.

Most of the time the hollow is quiet, but twice a year the John Burroughs Association meets for “Slabsides Day.” Lisa Breslof, secretary of the group, told us that their main goal was to keep the name of John Burroughs alive and to keep his literature in the public eye. More prosaic goals included maintaining Slabsides and the many Burroughs memorabilia within it.
We have been members for many years now. In his later years, Burroughs was a pretty good geologist as well as naturalist. He wrote quite a bit on geological topics and hence much of our interest. Learn more at johnburroughsassociation.org.

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

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

A Big Geology Fan
The Woodstock Times
July 17, 1997
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Striebel Road is one of the those out of the way lanes that you tend not to notice. It’s near Woodstock, but you hardly ever travel upon it. It doesn’t go anywhere in particular and, if you don’t happen to be visiting anyone there, you are not likely to use it. Unless you are a geologist; you see, we like to prowl around everywhere. We look for things. Recently we turned off of the Glasco Pike and onto Striebel Road, and, indeed, we found something.
We rode south on Striebel directly above Rt. 212, which itself runs immediately above the Saw Kill. we found that the landscape to our left was a nondescript plateau, flat and undistinguished. But, to our right, came quite a surprise. Just beyond the road the landscape dropped off a real, no-kidding-around, parachute-type cliff. We had been along Rt. 212, many a time, but we had never realized how steep the slope was here. It’s heavily forested and nearly invisible.
Cliffs aren’t all that unusual, but this one bothered us. A steep cliff is normally composed of bedrock, usually only rock can hold a vertical slope. But this one wasn’t a bedrock cliff; it was composed of a boulder-rich, sandy gravel. It was very likely a glacial deposit, but we wondered what kind of glacial debris would form a cliff along the upper Saw Kill. We knew that there was an interesting glacial story here, but what was it?
As we continued along Striebel Road, it gradually began a descent. The slope steepened and soon we had dropped down into Bearsville. We crossed Rte. 212 and turned onto Cooper Lake Road. As we ascended this other out of the way road, we found ourselves repeating what we had just done on the other road, only in reverse. At first our ascent was steep, then it leveled off higher up the road. So, we knew that the valley of the Saw Kill had once had a large glacial deposit in it. The deposit was composed of course-grained materials, largely boulders, cobbles and gravel. The smooth curved surface of the deposit was relatively flat at its top and then steepened down slope. Long after it had formed, the Saw Kill had gone to work on the deposit. The steep narrow valley of the Saw Kill here was eroded through this mysterious deposit. But, again, what was it?

  Bearsville fan is dotted

The next thing to do was to study the literature, and that’s where we found our solution. A 1930’s New York State Museum Bulletin mentioned the deposit, and the story, as we had guessed, was a good one. It takes us back about 16,000 years to the time when much of the upper Saw Kill still had a glacier within it. Earlier that glacier had descended Overlook Mountain and flowed down the Beaver Kill valley to Mount Tremper. But now it was melting rapidly; only a small portion of the ice remained. The landscape was just starting to recover from its glaciation and there probably were few, if any, trees in the area. Erosion rates, on the bare soils, were very great. The flow of the Saw Kill, brown or gray with sediment, gushed out of the steep mountains and descended to the valley flats at Bearsville. There the rushing flow slowed down, and enormous heaps of sediment were deposited. We call the deposit an alluvial fan. The Saw Kill flowed across this, probably breaking up into a large number of criss-crossing streams which descended the fan. At the bottom there likely were some substantial ponds. Off to the east, where Woodstock is today, the Saw Kill probably reformed and flowed onwards.
This was a big fan, a mile and a half wide, stretching from Byrdcliffe, in the east, to Bearsville in the south, and then halfway back to Cooper Lake. It originally had the form of a partial hemisphere. It would have been relatively flat on top and then sloped downward, maybe steepening. It must have pretty much filled the valley here; the sediments are about 200 feet deep.
Bearsville must have been a bleak sight at this time with its terrible rush of dirty waters in a barren post-glacial landscape. But this time was limited. As forests returned, they stabilized the earth, the rates of erosion slowed, and the glut of sediment ended. That’s when a more sedate Saw Kill began to erode that alluvial fan and it carved the narrow valley with the steep slopes that caught our attention. It is a good story and just another glimpse into the ancient history of our region.

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

Bash Bish Falls
The Columbia County Independent
April 16, 2004
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Taconic Park is one of the leading scenic areas of Columbia County and Bash Bish Falls is the centerpiece of the park. It’s certainly a fine place just to go and enjoy the outdoors, but of course, people like us can’t just enjoy themselves like that. We are compelled to look at the rocks and there is much to see at this location.
When we visited the falls, we went up to the parking lot at the top of the road and descended the stairs down towards the falls. It didn’t take long to start seeing rocks and to start seeing a geological past. We have talked about mountain building events that affected our area hundreds of millions of years ago. These rocks seem to have gone through two episodes of uplift and they wear the scars of those events. The rocks here are called metamorphic rocks. They once lay many thousands of feet (perhaps miles) beneath the surface of the rising mountain range. It’s very hot that deep into the crust and, not surprisingly, these rocks came to be baked. They were subject to very high pressures as well; imagine just how hot it is and how high the pressure is that far down within the earth’s crust.

That’s why these rocks are metamorphosed. The term means, literally, to alter the rock from its original state. You can see what happened. These rocks are layered; we geologist prefer to say that they are foliated. If you look at them, you can see the layering. If you had a high-powered magnifying glass, you could see that the metamorphism had resulted and large numbers of crystals growing into this layered fabric. The rock is called a schist and within it are many crystals of a pale mica called muscovite. These give the rock its layering. You may know muscovite as the “glass” of old pot belied stove windows. The morphology of the rock reflects its metamorphic history. This sort of thing doesn’t just happen, there had to be a lot of heat and pressure back then. And “back then” was probably in the Devonian Time Period, almost 400 million years ago
Back then a land mass, that today we would probably call Europe, was colliding with New England. This is going on today where India has been colliding with Asia. Today, the result is the Himalaya Range, back then it was the Acadian Mountains of New England. You can imagine the pressures on our rocks at this time. But you don’t have to imagine them at all. Take another look at the rocks. Many of them are intensely folded. We hadn’t gone much farther than the bottom of the first staircase before we saw very intensely folded schists in a knob of rock just left of the stairs.
There was more, we saw folded, (contorted is actually a better word for it) horizons of white quartz. These seem to have formed when fractures opened up within the schist. As the fractures widened, the quartz crystals formed and filled up the space. This is simply another testimony to how dynamic rocks can become when they are buried that deeply within the earth.
We kept going down the staircase and we noticed that there was something else in the silvery schists. We saw speckles of a Coca Cola colored mineral which we recognized as garnet. Garnet is a gemstone, but these were too small to be of any value. They did indicate to us that this had been a relatively low grade of metamorphism. Our Bash Bish Falls rocks had not been all that deeply buried, and the amount of metamorphism could have been a lot worse.
The staircase and trail continued downward and twisted back and forth until, at last, we arrived at the base of Bash Bish Falls itself. This had been our goal, so we were happy to be there. The falls tumble over a massive outcrop of schist, https://www.facebook.com/?ref=logobut they spoke of a different moment in geological time. We suspect that Bash Bish Falls formed as a glacial spillway. Most falls in our area have an ice age origin and we bet these falls do as well. We gazed at the thunderous flow and imagined a time, about 14,000 years ago when even more water rushed out of the mountains above. This was when the ice age glaciers had only partly melted. Up in the hills above there would still have been a lot of ice and it was melting quickly. Most of the valley in front of the falls was still filled with ice. The flow of meltwater quite likely dwarfed today’s Bash Bish Falls. This must have been a glorious sight in its time.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”

Burroughs’ Boyhood Rock
Poughkeepsie Journal
Updated by Robert and Johanna Titus

Every rock has a story within it that can be read if you just know how to. As geologists, we know that this is so. Like so many of us we learned, long ago, how to read these tales of the distant past. So, it was no surprise that, upon visiting “Boyhood Rock,” we found a story worth repeating. This is certainly one of the Catskills best known rocks. It’s at Woodchuck Lodge, John Burroughs’ hideaway home in the western Catskills. Burroughs was the beloved turn of the 20th Century nature writer. His boulder is on his old family farm. He spent many an hour sitting upon it, gazing at its magnificent view and pondering the natural history all around him. Best known for his writing about birds, Burroughs, especially late in life, was an avid amateur geologist. He understood at least part of the story of Boyhood rock. He knew that the boulder was a glacial erratic. There is a photo of him, proudly pointing out to Charles Edison the nearby glacial striations.

The boulder is from the Oneonta Formation which makes up the local bedrock of the upper Pepacton Valley. The Oneonta sandstones are, for the most part, river deposits of the old Catskill Delta. The fossil delta is very well known within the geological community; it was an enormous complex of streams that originated in the Acadian Mountains in what is western now New England. From there these rivers flowed westward down into the Catskill Sea of today’s New York State.
There was a problem, however, that bothered us for a while. We were puzzled by the many small holes that littered the boulder’s surface. At first. we guessed that these were fossil animal burrows. Could these be the burrows of Burroughs rock? Alas the gods of nature writing would not be that kind to us. No, they just did not look right for burrows. Eventually, we found an especially well-preserved one and quickly recognized it as the cast of a fossil tree root. They were fossils of the Gilboa trees from one of the world’s oldest fossil forests. These were tropical plants, and so Boyhood Rock, a product of the ice age, must have had an older, equatorial ancestry.
Gilboa tree roots are common in the Catskills, but it was the first time we had ever seen them in a river sandstone. How could trees have been growing in the channel of a fossil river? In science, the solution of one problem often leads to another. A possible answer is that this stretch of the old channel had once been a great bend in the river. During an especially bad flood, the river carved a new route and the old bend was abandoned, leaving a large, curved lake called an oxbow. The lake gradually filled with sediment, and then trees began to grow, their roots penetrating the old river sands. That’s what we see today.
But there was another mystery that bothered us a lot. There are three boulders here, all of which match each other in terms of lithology, and all have fossil tree roots. This can’t be a coincidence as the odds are too great; the three rocks must once have been joined. Our guess is that there once was a much larger Boyhood Rock, transported not beneath a glacier but within it. As the ice melted this boulder was lowered toward the ground. Stresses generated at this time caused the original rock to break up into the three pieces, each of which “landed” near each other and remain as we see them today.
And, so it was that Boyhood Rock gave up its geological secrets. There is a great deal of satisfaction that comes from cracking a scientific problem, even if it is a problem of absolutely no practical significance.
___________________________________________________________________
Contact the authors at rndjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.”