Manhattan Before Manhattan: Ontario in New York? A Rocky Question.

Most images of Manhattan focus on its world class skyline and numerous commercial and cultural attractions.  Broader shots of the island as a whole, usually taken from the Empire State Building, show a rather rectangular flat island crowded over in all but Central Park.  In reality, however, the New York area, even Manhattan island, is an incredibly beautiful natural landscape featuring everything from mountains and forests to prairies and lovely beaches.  Before the urban core of New York was paved over it featured a very attractive paradise which lured both First and Second Born alike to her shores.  Most of her natural features have long since been transformed; even where nature seems to persist (such as in Central Park) the world has been carefully groomed and altered to human tastes.  Some protected areas, such as Fire Island, contain remnants of what the early Dutch colonists found here.  Pine barrens persist in central Long Island, and the New Jersey Meadowlands have so far still largely eluded development.

Most enduring of all, however, would be the geological features of the area.  While human development has generally preferred flat spaces for urban growth, the fact remains that the rocky Earth still manages to defy modern engineering when using its own weapon of economics against itself.  A cliff is too expensive to level, and large outcrops of granite, gabbro, and other fun ancient stuff is just too much of a pain in the ass to constantly dynamite.  One of the most impressive features to be seen from the big city, right in it in fact, would be the Palisades, sheer cliffs that confront many westward views across the Hudson River into New Jersey.

The lower deck, westbound, of the George Washington Bridge (I-95) looking toward New Jersey and those majestic Palisades.  You can see views like this from upper Manhattan northwards for some distance, until around the Tappan Zee Bridge.  

Perhaps I have always been focused enough on the natural world to notice the contours of the land and natural features even when surrounded by human grandeur, but one of the first things I noticed when emerging from Penn Station in my first ever trip to New York was the beginnings of those cliffs as I stared all the way down 33rd street and across the Hudson.  I always subconsciously imagined New York as being flat and nothing but buildings, even if my reading had told me otherwise.  When I left the city after that first visit, I took the Empire State line clear back to Buffalo and was able to see the entire length of the tidal Hudson north to Troy, including going underground past what looked remarkably like the rocks of the Canadian Shield so very far to the north.  The great city, riddled with sewer and subway tunnels, was carved into a very rocky heart that looked like it could have been pulled out of northern Ontario or Quebec.

The inspiration for this post, in fact, came from a very Shield looking outcrop that I passed along the Harlem River, not too far opposite from Yankee Stadium.  It even had quartz veins in it!  I could not snap a picture because I was focused on dealing with the insane traffic, but thankfully Google streetview helped me find again what really took me by surprise.

To find this and other outcrops, simply look anywhere along Harlem River Drive or the stretch of I-95 in Manhattan.  

I mean come on, the thing could very well be something one can find in Ontario!  The actual stuff is too young by far to hold a candle to that Shield rock, however.  What you see is probably only 500 million years old, even if it does have schist and gneiss in there, even a little bit of marble.  The ancient Shield can be found relatively close by, 150 miles away in the Adirondacks, a detached part of the Laurentian Mountains.  Billion year old granite, which not part of the geological core of the continent, can be found even closer in the strip of Appalachians which the Hudson forces through in between West Point and Sing Sing Prison.

Forgive the fuzziness, it was dusk.  This is along I-87 southbound, pretty close to where New York's suburbs start.  

That's right, the mountains of the east come within a mere twenty miles of the concrete jungle.  The Appalachian trail passes through here on a pedestrian bridge over I-87, and is among the lowest elevation (and most urban) of stretches of the otherwise wilderness oriented trail.  It can be amusing to think that some tourists are camping out and even sleeping under the stars even as others are posting photos of Time's Square from their mobile devices not a few dozen miles away.  Even in New York we can find ourselves still trying to interact with our wild world which is never truly far away.

Mineral Wonders: On Display in Sarnia

Much of the grandeur of the continent lies out of sight and usually out of mind beneath our feet.  For eastern North Americans, the local geology is often visible only in gravel pits or road cuts, and most people barely pay it any attention.  Rocks are rocks, after all, and just things that make up our foundation, no?

Yep, that would be an amethyst.  

Not exactly!

Seen above is a rather impressive giant amethyst cluster mined from the area around Thunder Bay, Ontario.  The Canadian Shield is among the most mineralized localities in the world, with the lake floor of Lake Superior supposedly holding untold riches in precious metals and gems of all sorts.  The Keweenaw peninsula which juts out into the lake from Michigan is one of the most mineralogically diverse places on the planet, to be sure.  The first born of North America knew it, and were mining for copper and other riches ever since the last ice sheets retreated northwards.

This cluster is on display at the welcome center for Ontario tourists just off the international bridge in Sarnia, Ontario.  In keeping with an appreciation for the geological beauty of Ontario, several large Canadian Shield masses of granite, basalt, gabbro, and gneiss veined with quartz, rhyolite, and other fun minerals, are situated in a lovely rock garden outside of the main entrance.

The outcrops of these wonderful rocks start popping up only two hours travel north of Toronto, or in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Adirondack mountains of New York for those travelers wanting a piece of the action but not willing to brave the Canadian frontier.  Here in Sarnia, as well as in other entrance points such as Niagara Falls, a little piece of our very ancient (a billion years plus) heritage is a little bit closer at hand.

American Voyages is back in action after a brief respite due to personal losses.

Algonquin's Natural History: The Canadian Shield and Wisconsonian Glaciation

Most working scientific theories of the age of the earth suggest that the planet was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, though we have no conclusive evidence of anything on this planet to demonstrate that she is older than 4.2 billion years of age.  The oldest rocks we have are from one of the most stable and large masses of continental core of anywhere on the planet, the Canadian Shield.  Radiometric dating has been used to determine that some gneiss near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada is close to 4.2 billion years old, pre-dating the creation of life itself on our planet.  Billions of years of erosion have mostly knocked away any great heights that would have covered what now juts up through the earth.

Come back in September for some pictures!

The portions that are exposed today are incredibly tough stuff, having endured travels over the globe, a lot of weather, multiple ice ages, and even being under oceans at certain points in time.  While they are hardly as grand as the Rockies or other such mountain ranges, what does remain of the Canadian Shield mountains, such as the Laurentians and Adirondacks, are far from unimpressive, considering as how they are often taller and more rugged than much younger mountains in the Appalachians and Ozarks, which have been worn down to the same size in a much smaller time scale.  In Algonquin, the mountains often have a prominence of about 700 feet, resting on a base of about 1,000 feet, enough to give a hefty hiker heart problems and enough to change weather patterns in the area, complete with a lusher western region and a drier rainshadow to the east.  We can only imagine what these would have looked like over a billion years ago, when they might have well exceeded 40,000 feet in height.

Come back in September for some more pictures.

Much more can be said about the Canadian Shield, but that is content best left for future posts.  The important thing to leave here is that Algonquin has very old rocks, young as far as the shield goes (between a billion and two billion years old, but there are probably much older rocks that have yet to be found in her depths), rocks that are often exposed and make the landscape very rugged, akin to much more vertical terrain like the Sierras or Rockies.  That said, Algonquin also has very grand forests, and most trees require at least a little bit of soil on top of the bedrock in order to survive.  So, what lies on top of the bedrock?

More rock!  Here and there are ancient traces of limestone from hundreds of millions of years ago.  Young by Shield standards, but remnants of a very different undersea tropical era for Algonquin.

Thanks again to the McElroys, who have a wonderful article on this little limestone peninsula on Cedar Lake at  http://www.mcelroy.ca/notes/brent_limestone_cliff.shtml.

Here we see some rock that looks out of place in Algonquin, but would very much be at home, say, in the Niagara Escarpment or in the Allegheny Mountains.  While the glaciers of several ice ages did a pretty good job of liberating the Shield rocks by scraping the ground bare, some areas managed to survive the onslaught.

That said, when the glaciers did retreat they left some stuff behind, sometimes ground up into a nice till and even dragged north from areas further to the south that they also did a number on.  Glacial till, as we mentioned a few posts back, makes for lovely forests and terrible crop field.  It is gray, sandy feeling, and often quite cold even in the summer and under full sun.  The glaciers left a bit more than till around, however, namely sand and water.  So what's the deal with those glaciers, anyway?

Source: USGS, at  http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/info/eolian/task2.html.

The last major ice sheet that covered North America is known as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and was over 5,000 feet thick in some interior portions of its range.  For a long time, it would slowly advance southwards, melting a little in the summer, growing back bigger and better in the winter.  Whenever it melted it sent A LOT of water towards the ocean, normally either right into big blue or down the primordial versions of the Columbia and Mississippi rivers.  Along with immense volumes of water would rush small-grained silt, clay, and lovely, lovely sand.  The loess areas seen on the map below are the results of this material blowing around in the dry winters when the floods diminished.

Eventually, about 8,000 years ago, the Laurentide sheet kept melting north as the planet warmed up closer to where we sit today.  While the Mississippi continued to take quite a load of melt with it (you can find many rocks from Lake Superior almost all the way down the Mississippi on her banks), new outlets opened up, namely various predecessors of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed.  One of these outlets was through the north of Algonquin, and it cut all sorts of interesting lakes, canyons, and such in its path.  It also left behind sand, sand that is without a doubt the best in the universe.  It has such a lovely consistency and softness that it became the sand of choice at the recent Olympic games in London.  Britain might not have the sand for volleyball, but Ontario came through for them.

Come back for pictures of this amazing sand.  I will have lots of them.

Then the glaciers left... and were followed by conifers, birches, willows, and... cacti?

What's the Deal with Capitol Reef?

There are over 390 units in the National Park system.  Many parks are places of great natural beauty, while others are preserved historical landmarks or the sites of important points in history.  Most parks make sense, meaning that their preservation needs little in the way of explanation to convince people of why they have been set aside.  Sometimes parks require a bit more explanation, if only out of wonder as to why they are so important.  Cuyahoga Valley National Park, for example, does not immediately come to mind when "National Park" is mentioned.  The place lacks the obvious grandeur of the western parks or the more scaled down eastern ones such as Shenandoah or Acadia.  Even out west, though, sheer cliffs and interesting geological formations can get commonplace, and one can wonder, for example, why a place like Capitol Reef National Park could get such a lofty designation.

The defining feature of the park is a 100 mile long escarpment type geologic formation known as a monocline, named the Waterpocket Fold.  In several places, water has carved canyons through the fold, the largest of which is the canyon cut by the Fremont River.  Now, as in the past, the monocline served as a transportation barrier, a difficult ridge between areas of relatively smooth terrain.  To the first Mormon settlers in the area, such an obstacle was reminiscent of a reef.  A dome shaped formation within the ridge reminded them of a capitol dome, hence the combined name.

Not a bad description, really.  From a distance in the west the dome looks a bit more spherical, but the strong morning sun disagreed with my getting any decent shots of the thing from such a perspective.  As the park was somewhat of a "see this on the way" sort of thing, I did not get a good shot of the line of the ridge which would illustrate the reef aspect; that had been passed under darkness the previous night and there was not enough time to backtrack far enough for a good shot.  A definite planned excuse to return!

Anyway, where is this thing?  Well, it is a bit out of the way of "civilization" in general, which is probably why it does not receive the same level of attention or visitors as nearby parks such as Arches or Bryce Canyon.  I only went myself because it was it was on a route that would also go to Bryce, and, well, because it has the national park designation.

Looking at things a bit closer, one can see what an obvious "reef" this does make.

You can easily make out the ridges within the teal circle.  Just to the north lies a similar formation, which I have circled in red, called the San Rafael Swell.

Now, about those canyons that made passage through the area possible... Within the Fremont river canyon conditions are rather lush compared to the rest of the lower elevations in the region.  First, take a look at the otherwise lovely desert landscape just outside of the canyon.

And then inside.  If not for the context of this post, you could not imagine this being in a desert canyon.  Even in person, the riparian forest is dense enough to obscure the canyon walls in some places.

And yet the walls retain their grand imposing scale.  In a North American version of the contrast seen between the Nile and the Sahara, one can see the lovely green of Fremont Cottonwoods standing out against brilliantly patterned canyon rock.

To Paiutes and their ancestors, the vegetated canyon floor was an oasis of water and game. The earliest inhabitants of the area even left us a record of their life in some well-preserved petroglyphs:

For Mormon and other Euro-American settlers of the region, it was a pleasant and convenient place to pass through the reef.  Some of them even stayed, and what remains of the tiny settlement of Fruita, Utah, is one of the showcased features of this park.

Then there are the orchards, which gave Fruita its name.  As fellow nature blogger Steven Mullen points out,  a fruit orchard with cliffs in the background is not something you see every day.

Now of course, no one is actually looking at that lovely orchard in front of the cliffs.  I agree, that is a rather nice sign, even if it did spoil the view.  Oh, yes, and there is that mule deer running across Utah 24, sure.  Needless to say, where there is water, shade, and plenty of green to feast upon, there will be plenty of animals around as well.  There were tons of mule deer.

OK, so I took a shot of that one twice (very photogenic deer), but there were about four or five different deer in various points throughout the canyon.  There were also a lot of lizards, like this one here:

Try looking in the middle of the picture if it eludes you.  Amazing what camera zooms can do to keep animals safely to themselves, but allow us to get wonderful shots of them at the same time.

Historical and biological sights aside, there are also those absolutely wonderful sheer cliffs and walls that contain this whole drama.

Even in the darkness, these walls made the scale of their presence clear, and driving Utah 24 at night is perhaps almost as incredible as it is during the day.  Amazingly, it was the little Fremont river that carved out this canyon.

I am told that in times of spring rains and melts (the rim is over 1,000 feet above the floor in some places, so there tends to be snow in the winter), water descends in lovely waterfalls all over the place.  By mid June, however, there was only one trickle.

Water has an amazing power to shape the earth, and this canyon is a monument to the potential of a river.

And the amazing geological features this park has do not stop there.  As is the case of much of the arid west, the rock is bare and exposed, not hidden by soils, vegetation, or worn down by the more frequent rains of the east.  Layers of rock sit upon one another, thrust up from below.

So what?  There are other more significant historical sites out there.  There are plenty of far more dramatic canyons around.  Mule deer and Fremont Cottonwoods range throughout the west.  "Naked geology" is plentiful, especially in grander locales like Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.  There are other rivers that flow through the arid west to make an abundant oasis.  True.  Here, however, they are all together and the variety is further enhanced by the contrasting scale of minute and grand elements all merged into a lovely whole.

The park is a delightful surprise, to say the least.  Even if one comes here only for the park proper, and just the canyon drive at that, the immediately neighboring scenery does not disappoint either.  The land to the west of the fold is open, rugged, and colorful.

I noted that the land was something of a desert, which is only a half truth.  While it shares much in common with the nearby high desert of the rest of the Colorado Plateau, the land also rests at just about 5,000 feet above sea level, where the pinyons and junipers start to show up.  In areas of barren red rock where sagebrush will not grow so thickly, they stand out rather well.

Not a bad place at all.  Shameless endorsement: Just west of the park on Utah 24 is Torrey, a small town.  There is a rather convenient Best Western hotel there, and if you pay an extra 10 dollars for your room, you get a lovely view of the red rocks on the western edge of the Waterpocket Fold.

All in all, a different sort of area and a lesser known park that combines the best of many features of the west.

And that was only from the small park drive, and half of it at that...