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On Tuesday, April 19, Primary Day in New York State, the Old Men of the Mountain met at the Your Way Café in Schoharie, and the OMOTM thought maybe this would be the end of the circus in New York, or maybe (as one OF mentioned) just the beginning. Ah, we shall see.

If only it weren’t so important.  Either way, there is a lot of fodder for the comedians but ain’t funny, Magee.

Then, as another OF said, we should look at the primary with some humor and then realize we have been through this many times and generally it all comes out in the wash. One added none of the candidates have done all they say they have done, or can they do everything they say they are going to do.

“Yeah,” one OF said, “all of them have graduated from the same school that teaches them how to fib and make it sound like the truth.”

“Well,” another OF said, “I learned that in kindergarten along with learning that I learned it is not nice to pick your nose, but I still do both.”

Fat wallets, small watches

The OFs next had a brief discussion on wallets and watches. Now everyone knows that to follow all the current fashion trends all one has to do is stand at the door of the restaurants the OMOTM frequent and notice how patrons are dressed, then go and do likewise.

The OFs have a variety of wallets.  Some are thin, and some are fat. The thin ones belong to the OFs who don’t have any money, and the fat ones belong to the OFs who are loaded

Either fat or thin, the OFs say that the wallet is the best place to put things that they can’t find later on. The reason some of the wallets are so fat is they contain gift cards the OFs forget they have, and notes and phone numbers that the OFs don’t know who they are from or who they are for.

One OF still has the picture in his wallet that came with the wallet and people think it is a relative. Some have an appointment cards in their wallets to remind the OFs of an appointment, only the appointment has come and gone.

We still haven’t found the money yet — only credit cards. One OF said his wallet is so fat that he leans to one side to carry it. He also said, if a pickpocket grabbed his fat wallet thinking he had hit the mother lode, he would really be ticked off.  Money is the one thing that is not in there.

Watches are another thing; most of the OFs, if not all of them, have not caught up to the latest fad of wearing Big Ben on your wrist. The wrist watches today are so large the OFs expect to see a pendulum and hear it chime the hour and half hour, or at least a miniature bird pop out and chirp coo-coo.

“Wine is like duct tape”

“There’s a Tear in my Beer” by Hank Williams Jr. may become the newest rebirth of a song along with the lack of beer because of the lack of hops. Craft beer, which is booming in popularity now, is using between four and 10 times the amount of hops that industrial-scale brewing uses and this is causing a major hop shortage to develop.

One of the OFs, as we have reported before, is a hop farmer. The hop-house may be coming back on many farms; also, growing barley may make a comeback. It would be great to see some of the land that has grown up to brush be put back to use again and some of the small farms be able to produce a product they can sell

Drinking and driving may be the next farmer mantra, corn for gas, hops and barley for beer, grapes for wine. Help your local farmer; please drink and drive will be the next bumper sticker.

One OF said that will not only help the farmer, but also your local undertaker, and body shop. The OFs really know how to stimulate the economy while stemming the population growth.

It is not only beer that may help the farmer but also wine. With the new interest in wine, especially New York State wine, grapes are now in demand.

“There ya go,” one OF said. “After a tough day, a bottle of beer, or a glass of wine sure takes the edge off.”

Then another OF noted that he saw a very true sign (for him anyway): “Wine is like duct tape; it fixes everything.”

Fishing without bait

This spring has been a spring of contrast. The peepers chirped at night, the birds sang in the morning; as one OF said: Then came the cold. Real cold. Then the sounds of spring became just like winter silence.

One OF said, “Did you ever notice how quiet winter can be?” Not the spring and summer where this OF lives — it is like living inside a bird sanctuary that can be akin to a factory.

He went on to say, “Those feathered fowl can make an awful racket. Then add the peepers (thank goodness they only peep for a short while) and, when those nickel-sized frogs stop their peeping, then the singing insects start wailing their songs, or strumming their legs, and others do whatever they do to make a noise all of which adds to the evening’s din and I am trying to sleep. Oh the silence of winter, I miss that,” the OF mused.

One OF was all tanned up from fishing on the river all weekend. This OF said he fished, and he fished, yet caught only one fish.

Another OF said he thought that is what fishing is all about, just being out and away from it all. Who cares if you catch anything?

Still another OF chimed in to say that, when he goes out fishing, that is what it is all about, just being out, away from it all with a few beers. “Heck,” he said, “When I go fishing, heck, I don’t even bring bait.” Now that is what he calls fishing.

Those OFs who made it to Your Way Café in Schoharie, after telling the wife they’re going out to breakfast with guys and then going fishing, were: Bill Lichliter, Chuck Aelesio, Robie Osterman, Roger Chapman, Dave Williams, John Rossmann, Mark Traver, Glenn Patterson, Harold Guest, Otis Lawyer, Roger Shafer (all tanned up), Henry Witt, Lou Schenck, Gerry Irwin, Jack Norray, Wayne Gaul, Bob Fink, Bob Benninger, Jim Rissacher, Ted Willsey, Elwood Vanderbilt, Mike Willsey, Harold Grippen, and me.   

Barton Hill looms above Route 146 as it descends to the village of Gallupville and extends north as a series of impressive limestone cliffs along Route 443 to its intersection with Route 30.  From there it stretches to the east with long, gentle slopes and is capped by flat stretches and some of the glacial hills above Routes 7 and I-88.

The name “hill” here is generic, for it is in fact a plateau, an isolated segment of the Appalachian Plateau, cut off millions of years ago from Terrace Mountain (also a plateau), Vroman’s Nose (a mesa), and the Cobleskill Plateau by the respective creeks known as the Fox, the Schoharie, and the Cobleskill.

In addition to the craggy cliffs, its landscape features include broad, fertile farmlands and thick forests — and it also contains numerous karst features: sinkholes, underground streams, and extensive cave systems, not all of which can be entered but which betray their existence through cold springs that burst from the base of the lofty cliffs.  Caboose Cave, Schoharie Caverns, Single X cave, and Gage Caverns (historically and again today known as Ball’s Cave) are some of the caves known to geologists and sport cavers, and enormous occluded sinkholes such as the oddly named Joober Hole indicate there are many more.

Until recently, just two of these caves — Gage and Schoharie caverns — have been accessible to sport cavers with the proper credentials because they are owned and managed by the National Speleological Society, an international society devoted to the science and sport of cave exploration. But recently, through a generous donation, another organization known as the Northeast Cave Conservancy has acquired Spider Cave on the south side of Barton Hill, making it available for both student study groups and exploration.

The Northeast Cave Conservancy is a not-for-profit organization that has been managing and acquiring through purchase or donation a number of caves in this part of the country.  The NCC has thus been able to keep open a number of caves that might otherwise have been declared off-limits by their owners for fear of liability or for other personal reasons.   

For many years, Spider Cave was off-limits to cavers, but the cave with its beautiful entranceway, easily visible from a road, was described in old guide books as having a “storybook entrance but a short story!”  To enter the cave, one must first climb a trail up a precarious slope that borders a stream gushing from the entrance.

The stream tumbles over rocks that are rich with Devonian Period fossils and brilliantly green with mosses and algae.  The picturesque entrance is a shadowy opening in the Manlius Limestone and it leads to a narrow, twisting passageway that can be traversed on foot through the stream for some distance, though squeamish cavers may find themselves contorting their bodies to avoid disturbing the residents of the eponymously-named cave: dozens (sometimes scores) of large black spiders sequestered in nooks and crannies or openly displaying themselves on the cave walls.

But then the walls of the cave begin to pinch inward, the floor rises, and most visitors turn around as it becomes increasingly difficult to move without having one’s clothing caught and torn by the hard fossils and sharp erosional features on the passage walls.  The extent of the cave remains unknown but cavers’ anecdotes tell of intrepid explorers crawling painfully on their sides through pools of icy water, their necessary wetsuits being shredded by the sharp projections from the walls, and turning back after 1,200 feet — or perhaps 1,500 feet — or possibly more, but leaving a small rock cairn to indicate their turnaround point.

Caves with small dimensions can suddenly and without warning open up into caverns of vast proportions — but Spider seems simply to plunge onward into the plateau, guarding well whatever secrets it holds.

The puzzle

And therein lies the puzzle that is Barton Hill.  A topographical map featuring the underground passages shows that the known caves run parallel to each other — following what geologists call the “dip” of the rock layers; the “dip” is nothing more than the angle and direction at which rock layers (called “strata”) are tilted.

In this region, the dip of the strata of Barton Hill is gentle and to the southwest.  For some of the caves, the insurgences — that is, the points at which water enters the caves from the surface, usually through sinkholes and fissures — is known.  For others, the insurgence points have not been identified

This is not unusual, especially in a place like Barton Hill that in many places is covered with layers of glacial deposits, which may obscure features such as sinkholes.  But finding the insurgence point for the water in Spider Cave would give an indication of its length, and might provide a way into the cave’s larger sections — if larger sections exist — through a sinkhole or an enlarged fissure.

And particularly odd are the physics and the chemistry of the water emerging from the springs — or “resurgence points” — along the base of the cliffs.  During times of normal rainfall, some of the springs above Route 146 may be releasing water — and yet others, sometimes only a couple of hundred feet away — may be dry, though during spring snowmelt or following times of excessively heavy precipitation all of the streams may be gushing.  Clearly, something odd is going on underground regarding the flow cycles of the subterranean streams.

Complex questions

The chemistry of these streams also raises complex questions.  Cave waters are often saturated with calcium carbonate, and so a cave’s ceilings, walls, and floors may exhibit stalactites, flowstone, stalagmites, and curious dam-like structures in the streambeds themselves called “rimstone pools.”

These form as the water flowing through the cave or entering through cracks in the ceiling “de-gasses” —   that is, it loses its carbon dioxide that makes the water acidic and causes the dissolved calcium carbonate to be deposited on ceiling, wall, or floor.

But Barton Hill has some springs known as “tufa” springs: These occur when for some reason the cave water retains its carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate as it flows underground, perhaps in a very small aquifer without any air space, preventing the saturated water from “de-gasing.”

In these situations, as the stream resurges from the cliff base into the open air, the sudden pressure release will cause the water to “de-gas” much as a carbonated beverage de-gases when its bottle cap is removed.  Now the dissolved calcium carbonate will be deposited on whatever is in the path of the stream: rocks, twigs, or masses of moss or plant fragments, making the materials appear to be coated with light-colored paint or forming a spongy-appearing rock known as “tufa.”

Calcium carbonate can also form a natural cement and bind together enormous quantities of what geologists call “glacial till,” the mixture of rock fragments and soil left by the retreating glaciers.  An extensive area of the hill slope between Gallupville and Shutter’s Corners has been cemented together into a kind of conglomerate by this process;  here mineral-saturated water from ancient springs in the cliff far above the slope deposited so much of their dissolved calcium carbonate that they eventually sealed themselves up.  This particular outcrop is heavily fractured and appears poised at some point to slump down the hillside onto Route 443.

The stretch of Route 146 approaching Gallupville has several other springs besides Spider Cave, but only one is easily recognizable as a tufa spring and at various times of the year when there is heavy precipitation or snowmelt, the underground stream feeding the spring produces great quantities of tufa that end up tumbling down the stream bed as cobbles or boulders.

Yet, oddly enough, the stream cascading down from Spider Cave also has a mass of algae-and-moss covered tufa in a small area its bed, but not in the stretch above or below it. Clearly, there is something unusual occurring in the chemistry of the stream flowing through Spider Cave that is seasonally altering the acidity of the stream — what chemists call “pH.”

Finding the stream’s insurgence point and examining the terrain under which the water flows on its way through Spider Cave might help to explain its curious behavior.

Numerous studies have been done of the geology and the known caves on Barton Hill; perhaps the best known among cavers and professional geologists is contained in Prof. John Mylroie’s doctoral thesis, “Speleogenesis and Karst Geomorphology of the Helderberg Plateau, Schoharie County, New York,” published in 1977.

But the occluded sinkholes, the shadowy fissures, the numerous bubbling springs, and the still-unexplored stretches of caves both known and unknown tell us that the beautiful forested plateau yet holds many secrets.

When Doctor Frederick Crounse's old barn was still up, curious people stopped by to visit it a lot!

Old barns are filled with belongings of all sorts of things, especially things that the house owner or new house owner want to get rid of: cutlery, old papers, magazines, books, household furniture, old crock pitchers, old pictures, and more.

This historian has been recently given a plastic bag filled with old pictures presumably once owned by a past owner of the Crounse house. (The house, which is in disrepair, is currently owned jointly by the town of Guilderland and the village of Altamont.)

An Altamont resident told me she had visited the barn just before it was destroyed, and that a group of old pictures were scattered all over the barn floor.  She started picking them up and realized that they could be important to the history of the house.  She took them home, put them in a bag, and stored them in a closet.

A few years later, they were still in her closet! So the historian of the town was called, and I am hoping the pictures are who I think they might be.

Most of the shots were taken in downtown Albany photography studios. No one had cameras then as we do now.  Brown's Photography; Pearsall's Photography of 69 South Pearl Street; MacDonald’s Photography; and Robinau Photography and C.C. Schoonmaker Photograph,y both of North Pearl Street were all named on the pictures.

Five tintypes were included along with five postcards of the State Normal School, the Washington Park lakehouse, Thompson's Lake, West Point, and a "Glimpse of Western Avenue in Albany."   

A picture of a young man in what looked like a War of 1812 uniform, and a hard-covered 3-by-5-inch child's book titled  "Anna and the Kittens" by Mrs. L.M. Childs were included in the treasures.

The front inside page of the book is dated August 3, 1883. It says “Prize 4” and the following poem is written in pencil:

   "Among the green bushes and blooming on bushes

    Hi O! Hi O!  Hi O!

    I'll find me a treasure

    To give me much pleasure

    Hi O   Hi O   Hi O

All of these articles are in very good shape.

I  took  several of the tintypes to Jim Gardner at the Enterprise Print & Photo shop for development.  One of them is included with this story.  The beautiful dress worn by the woman identifies the financial status of the family.

None of the photos are identified.  Perhaps readers can do that. I plan to meet with Marijo Dougherty of the Altamont Museum & Archives  to deliver the wonderful findings there.