Everyone remembers the first time they see the Grand Canyon.

Mine came over half a century ago when I was 14 and it is still burned into my memory along with my first sight of the Giza pyramids; my first close-up look at an erupting volcano; and my first view — from a hillside fragrant with pine resin called The Pnyx — of the Parthenon at night glowing in subdued flood lamps above the noisy, twinkling streets of Athens like a vision from myth.

My family was on a cross-country trip and we had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona that day. The first half of the drive had been blisteringly hot.

Cars did not have air-conditioning in those days and my mother and father had shared the driving, but even today it is a tiring trip, passing first through forests of giant saguaro cactuses, then ascending through cool mountain meadows where elk wander and, skirting Flagstaff, heading into high desert where the apparently endless flat terrain gives no hint of the awe-inducing landscape that lies just to the north.

We arrived around 10 at night at the venerable Bright Angel Lodge where my parents had reserved a cabin that was close to the South Rim of the canyon. They were both looking forward to getting a shower and a good night’s sleep but I remember being appalled that they did not first want to see the canyon.  Assured by the hotel clerk that there was a safe viewing deck right behind the main lodge, I took off on my own, promising to join the family at our cabin in 15 minutes.

The clerk directed me to a doorway that led out onto the deck and it took a few moments for my eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. The bright first-quarter moon had risen in the eastern sky and slowly there emerged from the dark vastness the silhouettes of great craggy pinnacles and towers and though in the dark it was impossible to gauge size or distance, I could tell what lay before me were massive structures stretching to the horizon.

Far, far below was what appeared to be a thin, meandering line drawn in softly luminous ink — my first glimpse of the far-away Colorado River. A mild breeze was rising from the depths, carrying with it the fragrance of sage and other desert plants, an odor I have heard described as “desert incense.”

An eerie howl was the only sound that broke the overwhelming stillness — perhaps somebody’s dog, though at 14 I was sure I was hearing a coyote. However — I have since spent enough time in the Southwest to realize that it probably was a coyote as these critters are ubiquitous in the deserts.

At any rate, with that unearthly sound, I suddenly became aware that a dark, precipitous abyss lay before me and for a moment I steadied myself against the retaining wall that surrounded the deck as I was overcome with the vertiginous sensation that I was about to be pulled over the side. I remember withdrawing into the light of the lobby of the lodge where everything was on a more human scale and running to our cabin.

The next morning, my father took my sister and me on a short hike down the iconic Bright Angel Trail that leads down to the Colorado River. We were on a tight schedule and had to meet relatives in Los Angeles in two days but Dad wanted us to have the experience of being down in the canyon instead of just seeing it from the top.

My mother declined and opted for a walk on one of the paths that run along the canyon rim, meandering through desert plants and offering dizzying views of the spectacularly colorful rock formations below.

My recollection is that we walked not more than a half-mile down the steep, dusty trail and foolishly had not brought any water. The South Rim is at 7,000 feet and tends to be fairly cool even in summer, but one of the great misconceptions novice hikers entertain — and we were definitely novices! — is that temperatures down in the Canyon are cooler than at the rim. (Fact: Temperatures tend to decrease with increasing elevation, and increase with decreasing elevation, a lesson I certainly knew many years later but did not appreciate until I hiked with a friend all the way to the bottom.)

I had been a rock collector since I was around 5 years of age but at 14 I knew very little about geology though I had read in a guidebook that the canyon had been cut by the Colorado River over millions of years. I was fascinated by the fact that the rocks were in layers of many different colors even if I had no idea why — Dad probably tried to explain that to me, but who remembers lessons from when you are 14?

We probably descended 500 feet or so below the canyon rim — following, as it turns out, a route first used by the ancestral pueblo people long known to history as the Anasazi. Beautiful as the scenery was, I remember being surrounded by the massive stone forms and experiencing again the feeling of vertigo as we gazed off into the immense gulfs of the canyon.

It was with some relief that my father told us that we had to head back up to meet Mom and take a drive along the rim to see more of the awesome scenery before we left on the next leg of our drive west. In all, we spent less than 24 hours at the canyon — fairly typical for the average tourist even today.

But that brief descent of the Bright Angel Trail remained lodged in my memory as one of the highlights — albeit a bit scary — of our California trip. And the sight of the far-away bottom of the canyon and that narrow-seeming Colorado River surely fired my determination to come back someday and hike all the way down.

Return to the canyon

It was many years later that I returned to the Grand Canyon (rather more than fully grown!) but this time with several friends: a fellow hiker named Steve with whom I planned to hike to the bottom and tent overnight in the Bright Angel Campground near legendary Phantom Ranch, and an old high school buddy named Rich and his wife who were going to do the mule ride down to the bottom and stay in one of the rustic (but air-conditioned) cabins at the Ranch.

We arrived on a deceptively cool August evening after a long drive from New Mexico and spent the night before our trek in the park campground. This turned out to be a mistake, because the rule most campgrounds state about “quiet hours” after 10 p.m. are routinely ignored, and I remember spending an uncomfortable night trying to sleep while boomboxes near and far broke the stillness with rock, rap, and mariachi music.

I recall waking from what little sleep I had gotten with a sore back and thinking how nice it would be to find a quiet hotel room somewhere and sleep for a dozen or so hours instead of embarking on what might be the most epic hike I had ever made.

But around 8 a.m., backpacks on, we parted from our friends, planning to join them at Phantom Ranch at the bottom and began our descent of the Bright Angel Trail, one of several maintained trails that descend into the canyon. It follows a prehistoric fault line that slices through the rock layers and which subsequently became a channel for flowing water — rare in these times — which eroded a pathway affording the ancient Anasazi people and modern hikers access to the bottom of the Canyon.

Layers reveal history

The layers of rock into which the Grand Canyon has been incised by the Colorado River can be thought of as a stack of books revealing segments of Earth’s history, with the most recent events in the “book” on top. From a distance, the strata (layers) may look thin, but hiking down through them makes one realize their immense breadth. Individual strata may be hundreds of feet thick, each one representing a dramatic change in the environment in which it formed.

Three of the broader layers are limestone, known in order of age from youngest to oldest as the Kaibab (Permian Period), the Redwall (Mississippian Period), and the Muav (Cambrian Period), making them between 250 and 530 million years old. These layers formed in warm, shallow seas and contain characteristic fossils such as trilobites and crinoids — also called “sea lilies,” but which in spite of their flower-like appearance are actually animals.

Yet they are interspersed with layers of sandstone called the Coconino, the Esplanade, and the Tapeats and major shale layers known as the Hermit and Bright Angel. The sandstone formed at times when the ancient seas receded and this part of the Southwest, like today, was desert characterized by vast fields of windswept dunes. Some of the outcrops exhibit the ancient tracks of lizards and other reptiles that scampered over the dunes.

But the shale layers formed when the area was under very deep waters and is often dark, indicating an environment that was oxygen-poor and mostly hostile to life, showing occasional worm tubes but few other signs of living creatures.

At the very bottom of the Canyon at the level of the Colorado River is a near-quarter-mile thick layer consisting of the Vishnu Schist, which is metamorphic, infused with fingers of the igneous Zoroaster Granite. These rocks are well over 2 billion years old and are indicative of a whole different range of formation processes: a veritable library of the region’s changing geologic history.

The strata weather and erode in different ways and at different rates, and this fact is responsible for the stunning sculptured appearance of the canyon’s landscape. Very hard rocks — such as the limestone, sandstone, and schist — tend to weather into huge vertical slabs that spall off in massive vertical slabs producing steep, precipitous slopes with enormous angular boulders at their bases.

Shale layers, on the other hand, are far less resistant to agents of weathering and erosion and result in gentler slopes, often littered with small pebbles and gravel. These processes can be observed in our own Thacher Park where the limestone rock layers of the Indian Ladder Trail have formed steep cliffs, but the long, gentler talus slopes beneath them are composed of dark shale and brittle sandstone layers, stretching down from the Helderberg plateau toward Altamont and New Salem.

At the canyon, the thickness of the strata and the varying steepness of the slopes result in the frequently scary exposure but always spectacular views offered by the various trails that descend to the Colorado River. It is not unusual to be hiking on a trail that is less than five feet wide with a sheer drop of several hundred feet off one side, and it takes us a couple of hours of hiking before we even begin to get used to the exposure, made worse by the fact that, when a mule train passes, hikers are required to stand on the outside until the last mule has gone by.

Believe me, it is a memorable experience to be perched on the edge of a cliff with a 500-foot, almost-vertical drop behind you while an odoriferous mule carrying a terrified-looking passenger lumbers by you with only inches to spare.

Indian Gardens

After about three hours, we arrived at the area known as Indian Gardens, a popular resting and watering place for hikers. Often thought of as the halfway point on the descent, it is actually about two-thirds of the way down from the South Rim in terms of elevation loss.

It is located at the interface between two important rock layers — the Muav Limestone and below it the Bright Angel Shale — part of what is known as the Tonto Group (no relation to the Lone Ranger’s companion). Here the Bright Angel Shale has weathered out into a broad plateau known as the Tonto Platform and offers respite (briefly!) from the steepness of the trail.

The Muav Limestone is somewhat permeable and can function as an aquifer, allowing the development of caves and small conduits carrying water. But the Bright Angel Shale is an aquiclude, meaning that water cannot pass through it and so the contact between the two layers features numerous springs, some with potable water.

Long ago, the ancient Anasazi people had descended the trail through the Bright Angel fault and built a series of small pueblos and kivas — underground religious structures — from the endless supply of rocks spilled down from higher up and farmed the Tonto Platform — hence the name “Indian Gardens.”

Dusty and dilapidated, the ruins of the pueblos are still visible and leave one to wonder about the mysterious people who passed their lives in this hauntingly isolated spot.

It is a gorgeous place, featuring some shade-offering cottonwood trees, and it is surrounded by towering buttes and pinnacles of varicolored rock. Their tones change from moment to moment with the movement of the sun and they cast deep, mysterious-looking shadows across the rocky wilderness.

The platform itself consists of gently rolling hills incised by steep valleys that in wet weather transport water to the Colorado River. The relative moistness of the plateau has allowed an array of desert plants to flourish there, such as cactuses and wild sage.

It was while I was following a small side trail that leads to a spring where I planned to fill my canteens that I encountered one of the canyon’s more interesting wild residents. I came upon what appeared to be a yard-long strip of pinkish leather draped over a scraggly-looking shrub and the absurd thought briefly passed through my mind that someone has lost a belt.

All at once, its nether end went vertical and an electric-sounding buzzing broke the stillness of the canyon. I froze in my tracks and realized it was a specimen of the Grand Canyon Rattler that lives nowhere else.

We regarded each other suspiciously for a few moments and then, staying well out of its private space, I made a wide arc and continue on my way, carefully watching it as I went. After a long moment, the buzzing stopped and its tail dropped. It had vanished when I returned with my full canteen so the encounter ended well for both of us, but, suitably alerted, I watched every step I took before I returned to the main trail.

As we were enjoying the leafy shade and a long cool drink of water along with some salty snacks — it’s important to maintain one’s electrolyte balance when hiking in heat — a line of mules and riders approached. The mule team leader known as the Wrangler urged all of the riders to drink plenty of water and a couple of them showing signs of overheating were hosed down with cold water from a spring.

We chatted briefly with our friends, Rich and Teresa, whose clothes were covered with dust and who admitted to looking forward to their air-conditioned cabin and a cool shower. They reported a few anxious moments on their ride as the mules apparently love to walk right on the outside edge of the trail where one misstep would send both mule and rider tumbling into the abyss. We planned to meet that evening in Phantom Ranch’s canteen for dinner.

Great Unconformity

Leaving Indian Gardens, hikers get a bit of a shock for they are soon at the top of The Devil’s Corkscrew, a dizzying series of very tight switchbacks that descend over 1,300 feet in approximately 3.5 miles. The Corkscrew offered virtually no shade and the temperature was rising steeply.

The sense of exposure is extreme and with every step hikers become aware of the fact that they are being engulfed by the lower depths of the canyon. One advances with a mixture of awe and trepidation with each dusty step.

As the trail begins its descent, a National Park sign alerts hikers to the fact that they are now passing through what geologists call the Great Unconformity. In simple terms, a geologic unconformity is the boundary between two rock or sediment layers that differ widely in age and often in composition.

A simple example can be found outside the door of anyone living on the Helderberg Plateau or in the towns that snuggle at its base. The surface sediments here are Pleistoscene — rocks and soil left behind 10,000 or so years ago when the glaciers retreated. But the sediments sit upon rock strata that come from the Devonian Period — 400 million years ago — or even earlier. That time gap between them represents an unconformity of hundreds of millions of years.

The Great Unconformity is in no way attention-grabbing, and without the sign no one lacking an extensive knowledge of geology would be likely to take a second look at it. Layered 550-million-year-old Tapeats Sandstone rests tightly on the quarter-mile-thick Vishnu Schist — a metamorphic rock — containing intrusions of the igneous rock granite.

The schist represents very ancient shale layers pressed and folded and cooked in a mountain-forming episode called an orogeny. It is all that remains of what was once a range of near-Himalayan heights that rose around 2 billion years ago — close to half of the age of the Earth — and was then ground down steadily over hundreds of millions of years by the agents of erosion.

In other words — in a space too thin to place one’s fingers in, something close to 1.8 billion years of Earth’s history has been wiped away. We know this because, in many other places in the United States and in the world, rocks of the intervening eons have been discovered.

The Great Unconformity can be seen in other parts of the Southwest, but nowhere is it visible in a setting more dramatic than this. And given the hardness of this inner canyon rock, the Devil’s Corkscrew features drop-offs between its tight switchbacks that are vertigo-inducing and we found ourselves grateful that we were not on mule-back.

Reaching the river

It was now near noon, and as the sun had ascended into the cloudless Arizona sky, its light being concentrated in the confines of this canyon-within-the-canyon, the temperature soared. Descending the meanders of the Corkscrew is numbing: left turn, right turn, left turn, right turn again down a rock-strewn trail, kicking up dust with every step and trying hard to avoid deposits of mule-poop.

The gradient was so steep we had to force ourselves to hold back from a trot — unthinkable in this heat and with such unstable footing. In the stark sunlight, the varying colors of the rock layers seemed to be bleaching to dull shades of tan and everywhere there were dusty cactuses of several kinds, constant reminders that we are in the desert — as if we needed such reminders.

In less than an hour, we reached the banks of the Colorado River, and what appeared from the South Rim to be a narrow, lazily-moving muddy stream was revealed as a roaring flood, its waters faded brick-red from the rust-colored sediments it carries.

Perched on the bank was a small shady shelter where hikers could fill their canteens with fresh water and there is usually a park ranger to offer aid and answer questions. Everyone entering the cool interior remarked on the oppressive dry heat and to our astonishment the ranger told the assembled group, “You folks are lucky — it’s only 107 today.  Yesterday at this time it was 123!”

Whatever good news that represented, the fact is that we were still 2.3 miles from the Bright Angel campground near Phantom Ranch. Before we started our trek, we had cut down what we were going to carry to the absolute minimum equipment we would need for a single-night stay — about 15 pounds each.  Descending the trail in the cooler morning, the packs had not seemed so much of a burden.

But as we commenced our hike along the river toward the campground they seemed to gain weight with each step and there was absolutely no shade. Moreover, the rock-littered, dusty trail along the river is not flat — it goes up over and down a series of hills and gulches formed from massive piles of talus that have spalled off from the higher elevations.

In the wilting heat and with the droning of the river’s rapids, the hike is punishing. The spectacular scenery rising above us offered little consolation for the ordeal and we realized that no matter how much water we guzzled from our canteens on the way down, it was not enough: We were feeling the effects of dehydration.

On to camp

After what seemed like hours — but was really only about one — we spotted the sturdy metal bridge across the Colorado that leads to Bright Angel Campground and we gratefully crossed it, only a few yards above the roiling waters of the Colorado River.

On the far side near some cottonwood trees are the remains of still another Anasazi pueblo and a kiva close to where the Bright Angel Creek spills down from the North Rim of the Canyon to join the Colorado — another green place in the desiccated wilderness of the canyon.

Beyond them is the campground, and after checking in we hit the snack bar and guzzled what must have been two quarts of cold lemonade each. We then proceeded to put on our bathing suits and go to join other exhausted hikers sitting in the creek and letting the cold stream spilling down from the North Rim of the canyon refresh us.

Later in the afternoon, Rich and Teresa arrived and showed us their cabin. It is Spartan — but its air-conditioner works; it has water for hot showers; and. though the beds look like they came from a college dormitory, we are assured that they are clean and comfortable.

We assemble at dinner time in the Phantom Ranch canteen. Meals are served family-style at long tables — like at a church supper.  Steve and I have pre-ordered beef stew with chocolate cake for dessert, and perhaps it is the effect of our day’s ordeal or perhaps it is the spectacular setting but the humble stew tastes like the specialty of a five-star restaurant and the cake seems the equivalent of some gourmet French pastry.

In any case, we wash it all down with glass after glass of cold lemonade and, after dinner, Rich and Teresa head off to their air-conditioned cabin for a good night’s rest in a real bed. At dawn the next day, they will again mount up on their mules and head back up to the South Rim.

They will be following the South Kaibab Trail, which most guidebooks tell hikers ascending the canyon to avoid as it has almost no shade and is even steeper than the Bright Anger Trail. Steve and I head over to a small amphitheater located near the river for the evening ranger presentation.  

The temperature is still in the nineties, but what is a ranger presentation without a bonfire? So the woman ranger who is conducting the presentation has built a small fire that crackles and spits agreeably, but in this dry heat not one of the two dozen or so hikers gathered for her talk wants to be near it.

Before she starts, we have time to contemplate the setting: We are seated on primitive benches situated on some of the oldest rock on Earth’s surface, surrounded by towering mesas, buttes, and pinnacles slowly sinking into purple shadows in the approaching twilight. Far above us and several miles away, tiny lights from the hotels scattered along the South Rim glitter dimly like mirages and above them in the clear violet sky the planet Venus gleams.

The ranger takes the podium and says to the gathered crowd: “Congratulations everybody! You have hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, something very few people ever have the opportunity or the stamina to do!”

She points out the towering structures of stone and explains the origin of some of their names: Zoroaster Temple, Cheops Pyramid, Shiva Temple, Vulcan’s Throne, Isis Temple — names to conjure by if we were not all too tired to conjure. She talks about the geology of the rock strata and their mind-numbing age and explains how the flowing waters of the Colorado River and the thousands of small side canyons have carved this great abyss over millions of years. The crowd is silent — partly out of exhaustion but mostly in awe of her presentation

Then all at once she says, “Now I’m going to give you the bad news. You, ladies and gentlemen, have hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, one of the deepest water-cut gorges on Earth. And tomorrow morning, you are going to have to haul your butts up and out of it!”

The poetry of the moment disappears, and all at once it hits us: Today we hiked down into this spectacular place in the oppressive heat. Tomorrow we have to do it in reverse — and the Devil’s Corkscrew looms in our imaginations like the challenge of a lifetime.

The death of farmer and caver Floyd Collins and the subsequent grotesque events — including some legendary ghost stories — constitute a strange chapter in the annals of American folklore. The setting for the tales is the vast karst area of central Kentucky known as the Chester Upland under which the corridors of Mammoth Cave, the world’s longest, wander for over 500 miles beneath the forested plateaus.

Derided all too frequently as hillbillies and rednecks, its proud, hard-working people and their ancestors have struggled mightily to sustain a life farming the thin soils or doing service work. While those fortunate enough to live between Interstate 65 and Mammoth Cave National Park may enjoy some advantages derived from tourism, on a recent trip to the Park I found it sobering to see how many tourist shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues stand empty, even at a time when much of the rest of the country is enjoying a rising economy.

And the situation has long been the same. Early in the 20th Century, as the automobile created a boom in tourism, the wonders of Mammoth Cave became a magnet for the more adventurous visitors. But the Chester Upland is, as the saying goes, honeycombed with caves, many on private lands — some connected to Mammoth, some isolated from the great cave in discrete, thickly-wooded parts of the plateau known as Mammoth Cave Ridge, Flint Ridge, and Joppa Ridge, among others.

The cave entrances are surrounded by deep, densely-forested valleys populated by rattlesnakes, copperheads, and herds of deer, mysterious places where some of the hundreds of diminutive streams that flow through them are swallowed by gaping fissures in the bedrock or emerge in cascades from mossy, bubbling springs.

Many have entrances that challenge even modern explorers with high-tech gear: vertical pits requiring rope work or tiny entrances involving contortions through tortuous passages. But some have easy walk-in entrances that in ages past allowed visitors with hand-held lanterns to seek out their wonders.

The Cave Wars

And thus were precipitated the Cave Wars, in which a farmer known as Floyd Collins became the only known fatality. A relatively little-known part of American history, the Cave Wars came about as various private owners of central Kentucky caves competed to draw in tourists.

When the new-fangled automobiles came chugging down the stretch of gravel road between Cave City and the entrance to then-privately-owned Mammoth Cave, their drivers were confronted with a bewildering array of billboards promoting caves with confusing names like Colossal Cave, Mammoth Onyx Cave, Onyx Cave, Great Onyx Cave, New Entrance Mammoth Cave, and a host of others.

Promoters — some of them dressed to resemble state troopers or other enforcers of the law — would wave drivers over and present them with misleading information about the location of the actual entrance to Mammoth Cave. Sometimes they told outright lies to the effect that Mammoth was no longer accessible, its entrance having collapsed, or would tell travelers that their own caves offered collections of beautiful crystalline formations that far surpassed anything to be seen in Mammoth — and there was some truth to this claim.

But the fact was: For the adventurous tourist, caves were a big attraction and their dollars were a big attraction for the cave owners, and it seemed that no tactic was too extreme — some involving threats of violence or the vandalizing of a rival’s cave.

Blackness that beckoned

On remote Flint Ridge, far from the world of tourism, a family by the name of Collins had long raised tobacco, corn, and other crops. Flint Ridge is a beautiful place, lushly forested and dotted with old pioneering-family cemeteries and churches and formerly-farmed fields that have now returned to woodland since the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park in 1941.

The small farmhouse in which the family had lived for generations has been restored by the National Park Service and stands as a reminder of the spare lives of its inhabitants.

The Collins family members were surely aware of the money that could be made from exhibiting a privately-owned cave to the visitors who traveled to Kentucky from all over the country, and at least one of them, Floyd Collins, set off in his free time in search of a cave on their property.

Astoundingly, just a few hundred feet from the farmhouse, Floyd found a rocky fissure that was blowing cold air. Though the fissure and the passage beyond it were at first too small to admit anyone except on hands and knees, the cold wind blowing told him that something big lay in the blackness that beckoned.

Floyd and his brothers began clearing away rocks and soil to allow them to penetrate farther into the cave and — again, astoundingly — just a few hundred feet in, the floor dropped away and the cave opened into an immense passage subsequently named “the Grand Canyon.”

But this was just the beginning of what would, after many years of exploration, yield over 80 miles of passages. Floyd named the discovery “Great Crystal Cave” because of the spectacular gypsum formations found everywhere within it.

Often far more impressive than the usual stalactites and stalagmites characteristic of limestone caves, gypsum crystals can extrude from the bedrock like toothpaste from a tube and form intricate formations that may resemble flowers, vines, and tendrils.

During his free time, Floyd went off on his own to explore, using only a handheld lantern. Crawling, squeezing, and climbing, he spent days at a time in the cave, leaving caches of canned food to sustain him, which he would smash open with chunks of limestone.  Eerily, some of these food caches — rusted and disintegrating — are still visible in the cave today.

He found miles of spectacular passages in places no one had been before — and, should he have gotten injured or lost, no one would have had any idea about where to find him. The route to one vast, impressive section subsequently known as “Floyd’s Lost Passage” died with him; it was not rediscovered until long after his death by intrepid explorers who marveled that he had been so bold as to go so far from the cave’s entrance — a distance of nearly two miles through a confounding maze of passageways.

Long after Floyd’s time, in 1972, a stream passageway was explored that flowed under the deep Houchins Valley and connected the cave to Mammoth.

Seeking a back door

Floyd and his brothers cleared walkways and made other improvements to draw tourists. But, despite its huge, impressive passageways and its stunning formations, Floyd’s cave had one major drawback: It lay on a remote section of Flint Ridge, on a dirt road that led through dense forest and past the old Mammoth Cave Baptist Church, miles from roads frequented by tourists — and few of them found their ways to Crystal Cave.

But Floyd knew that caves often have more than one entrance, and he concluded that what Crystal Cave needed was an entranceway close to a major highway — a “back door” so to speak. So, on his own as usual, Floyd began ridge-walking the thick woods where the Flint Ridge Road comes close to an intersection of highways called Turley’s Corners, which even today is a tourist area, with its tacky souvenir shops and canoe outfitters.

What lured him was a small entrance known as Sand Cave. It was only a couple of miles from Crystal Cave’s entrance and close to a much-traveled highway and, if it should turn out to be the back door to Crystal Cave, the opportunity for tourists to visit would be vastly increased.

The cap rock of much of Flint Ridge and the ridge to the west under which Mammoth Cave lies is a layer of sandstone known as the Big Clifty formation. It is a very thick, dense layer with a hardness approaching that of quartzite, which is metamorphosed sandstone.

It is essentially impermeable to surface water and is in many ways responsible for the fact that Mammoth Cave is the world’s longest; over millennia, it has prevented the dissolving and erosion of much of the surface rock, preserving the vast stretches of cave passages that lie beneath.

A dark, gloomy recess in a low cliff above a streambed surrounded by shadowy deciduous forest and poisonous vines, Sand Cave is basically a shelter like those found at the base of the cliffs on the Indian Ladder Trail in Thacher Park.

But in some places, such as at the head of one of the valleys that cut through the plateaus of the Chester Upland, the thick limestone layer known as the Girkin Formation is exposed; the Girkin lies directly beneath the sandstone and dissolves in acidified groundwater, forming caves.

At Sand Cave, Floyd Collins found a small passage extending back under the Big Clifty and into the limestone and the passage was blowing air — a sure sign that there is real cave within. So on a chill, damp day, Jan. 30,1925, Floyd hung his denim jacket on a handy tree branch, lighted his hand-held kerosene lantern, and crawled into Sand Cave.

He had told no one where he was going.

Fateful journey

Cave explorers are used to crawling through small, tight passages that can form in limestone caverns, and the mere description of them is often enough to give non-cavers claustrophobia.

Knox Cave in the Helderbergs has a famous (or infamous!) passage known as The Gun Barrel, which is 47 feet long and averages 14 inches in diameter, and has been known to give even seasoned cavers some very uncomfortable moments.  But many such passages in limestone caves are stable — dissolved out of solid rock and not susceptible to sudden collapse.

The passage that Floyd crawled into that fateful day was essentially a squeeze hole through sediment:  piles of sandstone and limestone blocks and boulders mixed with pebbles and sand and other small debris washed in from the outside.

Precisely what Floyd found is not known — but on his way back out, while crawling through a particularly nasty, wet, unstable section of passage, a 26-pound rock dislodged from the ceiling and pinned his leg. So tight was the passage that he could not move his leg to remove it and he was unable to turn around to do it by hand.

The more he struggled, the more debris came down until shortly he was encased in sediment up to his chest. A tiny, muddy stream from a channel in the ceiling was dribbling across his face — slow and steady torture.

And no one could hear him scream for help.

The search begins

When word began to circulate that Floyd had not returned home from one of his ridge-walking excursions, friends and family went out looking for him.

As it happened, a young man named Jewell Estes, son of a family friend, was out searching with his father and another man and spotted Floyd’s denim jacket hanging from the tree. Jewell crawled in to the point at which he could talk to Floyd and where he learned the awful truth.

What happened next is legend and is recorded in minute detail in the book “Trapped!” by Robert K. Murray and Roger W. Brucker. News of Floyd’s plight spread first across the plateaus, then across Kentucky, then across the country, and finally across the world.

Rescue attempts from the outset were terribly disorganized as one attempt after another to free him ended in failure. The area around Sand Cave became the site of what has been called grimly a “carnival” as crowds arrived to watch; then hawkers arrived, selling food and grotesque souvenirs such as balloons with “Sand Cave” printed on them.

Arguments and sometimes violent fights broke out over the best strategy to free Floyd. One shining light in the whole sordid affair was a young reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal named William “Skeets” Miller.

A short, wiry, but powerful man, Miller made repeated trips down to comfort Floyd and bring him food;  a generator was set up on the surface to provide electricity for a lightbulb that was brought down to Floyd to provide some warmth to his chest and some light to hold back the terrifying darkness.

Miller eventually won a Pultizer Prize for his reporting.

Crushing end

But it was all to no avail. After several days, a rockfall cut off access to Floyd and he was left imprisoned and alone in the wet sediments, which steadily drained away his body heat and he could no longer be fed.  

A team made up of members of the Kentucky National Guard and enormous numbers of volunteers from many walks of life began an ambitious project to excavate a shaft down through the debris at the mouth of Sand Cave in hopes of then digging sideways to intersect the passage in which Floyd lay.

But 13 days after his entrapment, the rescuers arrived to find Floyd dead of hypothermia and starvation.  It was a crushing end to a highly emotional drama. Sand Cave is today one of the historic sights of Mammoth Cave National Park, and a kiosk and a boardwalk guide visitors to its gloomy, shadow-enshrouded entrance.

The events that followed Floyd’s death are less material for tragedy than for grotesque comedy. Floyd was first buried in the family cemetery near the farmhouse on Flint Ridge. For a while, the notoriety of the events drew crowds to what came to be known as “Floyd Collins’ Crystal Cave.”

Members of Floyd’s family went on vaudeville lecture tours with slides and films of the events to captivate a certain kind of audience. But, after a time, the Collins family sold the farm and the cave and the new owner decided to capitalize on the tragic events by digging up Floyd’s coffin and placing it in Crystal Cave in the huge Grand Canyon passage.

Ostensibly this was an act of respect for the “Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known” as carved on a massive granite monument that was installed at the head of the coffin. But visitors to the cave could also pay an extra fee to open the coffin to get a look at Floyd’s body that was preserved under glass.  An undertaker dropped in on a monthly basis to keep the body presentable.

Evidently these morbid stunts were effective at drawing visitors to Crystal Cave and away from some of the other commercial caves in the area. In what must surely have been the most ghoulish event of the Cave Wars, one night someone broke into the cave and stole Floyd’s body.

It was found days later on a bank of the Green River minus one leg. The body was returned to its coffin and remained in the cave for many years.

Eventually, the National Park purchased the Collins farm and Crystal Cave and closed it to paying visitors, placing a padlocked steel gate at its entrance.

Finally, in 1987, at the request of descendants of the Collins family, the coffin and headstone were removed and taken to the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church cemetery on Flint Ridge where they remain.  Cave enthusiasts from all over the world stop to pay a visit to this peaceful, remote site and leave behind flowers, coins, and other memorabilia.

Ghost stories abound

No one seems to know precisely when the ghost stories began but, starting in the 1950s, the Cave Research Foundation — an organization of sport cavers and scientists — undertook extensive, meticulous explorations in Crystal Cave that eventually led to its connection to Mammoth.

Everyone entering the cave had to pass by Floyd’s coffin, and a tradition began — for luck or superstition? — to call out “Come along with us, Floyd!” when researchers ambled past it on their way into the miles of labyrinths that lay beyond.

Seasoned researchers would occasionally report they heard footsteps behind them when there was no one there, or deep breathing from no known source — or a remote voice calling “Wait for me!” when it was known that there was no one else in the cave.

A hydrogeologist working in the cave was startled to hear a telephone ring — one that had been placed there for emergencies in the days when the cave was commercialized. When he picked it up, he reported sounds like chatter at a cocktail party before there was a loud gasp and the line went dead.

Shortly thereafter, he discovered that the line to the telephone had been cut many years before and lay rusting in the dust of the cave floor.

One of the most disturbing stories came from a husband-and-wife team who one night were doing some geologic studies in remote Floyd’s Lost Passage. No one else was in the cave that night and they had locked the entrance gate behind them.

Going to the passage involves a challenging series of crawls and climbs and the careful traverse of two very deep and dangerous pits. It also involves passing a site close to the beginning of the Lost Passage in which some of Floyd’s rusted cans of food are visible.

The two separated, working at two different locations several hundred feet apart. Suddenly, the incredible silence of the cave was broken by a pounding noise.

Each thought the other was the source of the sounds — but they were so rhythmic and so persistent that the two soon sought each other out — only to learn that neither was making the sounds. Undoubtedly, memories flashed through their minds of the fact that, when Floyd was exploring the cave for days at a time, he used a jagged fragment of limestone to smash open his cans.

These people are world-renowned scientists and are not given to superstition or hysteria. Nonetheless, they decided that, discretion being the better part of valor, they would exit the cave at once.

They have been back to the cave many times, but have never again heard the sounds, although other explorers have also reported pounding noises in remote sections of Crystal Cave. Often witnesses will keep such events to themselves.

But like perfectly reasonable, rational, knowledgeable people who have seen something that might be termed a UFO, an unidentified flying object, they will occasionally confide in a close friend or associate:  “Wait’ll you hear what happened in Crystal Cave today … .”

Of course, caves are inherently black, mysterious places where the silence is sometimes so overwhelming that one can hear one’s own heartbeat. But the sad events at Sand Cave and the subsequent ghoulish ones that followed Floyd’s death can be stimulants to the imagination — or something more?

And it becomes easy, especially at this time of year, to imagine that on dark, windy Kentucky nights a restless presence may indeed wander the brooding forests of Flint Ridge or the mysterious, dusty labyrinths beneath it.

There are places in the world and within the United States in which layers of rock — called strata — record hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history and are stacked atop one another like textbooks in geology, waiting to be read by the geologically literate.  Undoubtedly the most famous is the Grand Canyon into which trails descend, traversing around 2 billion years of our planet’s past along paths less than 10 miles in length.

In Albany County, Route 85 departs Interstate 90 and heads southwest, terminating in the historic village of Rensselaerville and as it skirts Albany and rises into the fastness of the Helderbergs it yields evidence of the last great Ice Age, the collision of continents that formed the Appalachian Mountains, and of the proliferation of ancient life-forms during the Devonian Period, straddling 450 million years of geologic time in 30 scenic miles.

This essay presents a guide to some of the most notable features in a drive that, even allowing for stops, can easily be undertaken in an afternoon — preferably on a clear one so that the occasional stunning long-distance views will not be obscured by our area’s notoriously unpredictable weather, which seems to have been especially fickle in recent weeks.

Setting the odometer at “0” as one’s vehicle leaves Interstate 90 onto Route 85 — for the next few miles a divided highway — one will almost immediately be passing by the extensive complex of New York State office buildings that rise between Washington and Western avenues and farther to the west the towers of the University at Albany will be visible.

The buildings are constructed on a thick layer of sand that is conducive to the growth of pitch pines and earned the area the name “Pine Hills.”  What most of the area’s residents are undoubtedly not aware of is the fact that some 10,000 years ago this stretch was lake-front property.

The last great advance of the Pleistocene glaciers ended about 20,000 years ago and after a brief stasis the great melting began as Earth underwent an extended period of warming.  Just as no one is sure why the Ice Ages occurred (aside from the general fact that Earth got colder), scientists are unsure what caused the steep and steady rise in temperatures. But rise they did and, due to the warming, the Mohawk and Hudson rivers carried vastly greater amounts of water than they do now.

For reasons also unknown, a blockage occurred in the Hudson Valley somewhere south of Kingston forming a great body of water known as Glacial Lake Albany that filled the valley from the natural dam clear up to Lake George.

Many of the hundreds of streams that fed into the lake formed sandy deltas that combined to form one great shoreline upon which the Adirondack Northway and Route 9 roll north — and upon which this stretch of Route 85 heads southwest. Subsequently, the wind blew the sand into vast dunes and the crescent-moon shape of some of them can still be seen in the parts of the Pine Bush Preserve.

Over time, great forests of pitch pine and patches of scrub oak and blueberry grew among them. Parts of the preserve that are undergoing restoration give an idea of the appearance of the sandy stretches thousands of years ago. But given Mother Nature’s prolific ability to reclaim empty growing spaces it will be interesting to see how long the areas currently being “restored” through the cutting of thousands of invasive species such as black locust trees will retain their resemblance to the ancient wind-swept dunes.

Areas “restored” only a few years ago already are green with great quantities of invasive plants, hiding the dune fields under newly-grown foliage.  Ecologists call areas such as these “pine barrens,” and the sandy expanses stretching north from Albany County in many ways resemble the great barrens of New Jersey.

Farther to the east was the lake bottom upon which the smaller sediments carried by the streams were deposited, and this is why much of the city and in particular downtown Albany are built on massive layers of clay. In the 1800s and early 1900s, foundries used the clay to make bricks — hence the explanation for why so many older buildings in downtown Albany and Troy are constructed from them.

The extensive areas of both clay and sand in most places obscure the bedrock that lies buried deeply beneath them. It is a dark, thin-bedded shale that dates from the Ordovician Period, making it about 450 million years old. It is visible in a few outcrops bordering the Hudson River. One such outcrop is exposed on both sides of Interstate 90 as it descends toward the Hudson and passes under Henry Johnson Boulevard.

At mile 4.0, Route 85 crosses the Normanskill where the stream slices through the dunes as it flows toward the Hudson. Some years ago, it undercut its sandy banks setting off a massive landslide in this area, causing the stream to permanently re-route itself.

After another couple of miles and several roundabouts, Route 85 joins New Scotland Road and between miles 5 and 6 passes through the historic stretch of Slingerlands reminiscent of New England. The terrain beyond here is mostly flat, rising gently to the west and represents what must have been relatively shallow waters of Glacial Lake Albany.

Geologists estimate that the shoreline extended roughly to what is now the intersection of routes 85 and 85A at the Stonewell Shopping plaza in the town of New Scotland.

Helderberg Country

It is at this point that Route 85 enters what I have always thought of as “Helderberg Country”:  a landscape of agricultural fields, deciduous forests, scattered tiny villages, craggy outcrops of bedrock, and sweeping views of the massive escarpments.

Beyond the intersection of routes 85 and 85A, the surface material is a mixture of soils such as clay and sand and larger particles: semi-rounded pebbles, cobbles, and boulders, many of them eroded from bedrock tens or hundreds of miles to the north. Geologists call sediments such as these “glacial drift.” They were deposited directly by the great mass of glacial ice that buried this area thousands of feet deep at the height of the last advance, some 20,000 years ago.

At 8.2 miles, Route 85 passes the historic New Scotland Presbyterian Church, the cemetery of which entombs Winifred Goldring who in the first half of the 20th Century was the New York State Paleontologist; her meticulously-researched publication, “The Geology of the Berne Quadrangle,” with its accompanying beautifully-drawn stratigraphic map has long been a valuable resource for students of Helderberg geology.

At mile 10.7, Route 85 passes the site of the old Indian Ladder Drive-In Theater with its miniature golf course — gone these many years — and offers, in clear weather, an enticing view of the Helderberg escarpment stretching to the north. Shortly beyond the site, there is an exposure of bedrock in a road-cut on the left side of the road; in much of this area north and south of Route 85, these alternating layers of Ordovician-age shale and sandstone known as the “Indian Ladder Beds” are obscured beneath glacial drift or heaps of stone called “talus” eroded from the cliffs of the escarpment.

At mile 11.5, after passing through the hamlet of New Salem, the highway begins the steep ascent that takes it from one Landscape Region — the Hudson-Mohawk Lowlands — to another, the Allegheny Plateau.

Considering the shortness and steepness of the ascent, this is one of the most dramatic changes in landscape regions in the continental United States.

Though the region is locally called the Helderberg Mountains, geologists see it as well as the Catskills to the south as a vast eroded plateau, given that the rock layers that compose it are relatively horizontal and undeformed (except for some minor faulting visible in many areas in Albany County).

The great Allegheny Plateau — also known as the Appalachian — stretches from just west of Altamont south to Alabama and it was formed during the Alleghanian Orogeny; this was an episode of mountain-building that occurred around 290 million years ago, when the ancient landmass that would someday be known as Africa collided with ancient North America.

For a simplified visualization of this event, think of what happens when two cars in a parking lot crash into each other nose-to-nose: The hoods and engine blocks of the cars may be crushed and compacted and pushed upwards, but the rear parts of the cars may be only slightly warped and lifted up above the chassis.

During the Alleghanian Orogeny, the area to the east of us was crushed and elevated into the great chain of mountains that stretches south from New England. The rock within was folded, faulted, raised to great heights, and in many places turned into metamorphic rock; the land farther west was elevated but remained largely undeformed and became the Allegheny (or Appalachian) Plateau.

At the top of the hill, Route 157 cuts right and heads toward Thacher Park. Route 85 continues along a flat lower section of the plateau, offering on clear days broad views across and up the Hudson Valley to three mountain ranges: in the far north, the Adirondacks near Lake George; to the northeast, the Green Mountains in Vermont; and to the east, the Berkshires in Massachusetts — these latter two are actually the same range with different names. Farther to the south in New York State, they are known as the Taconics.

Following the westward curve of the landscape contours, the road passes outcrops of dark shale before descending slightly to the wide valley of the Onesquethaw Creek at 13.7 miles.  In the creek bed is exposed the Onondaga limestone, the uppermost layer of limestone in the Helderberg area.

The Onesquethaw drains nearby Helderberg Lake, but in dry times of the year it may flow invisibly under the heavily-fissured rocky creek bed as the Onondaga limestone is a major former of caves. The nearby Clarksville Cave and Onesquethaw Cave among many others are dissolved from the Onondaga.

Devonian-period fossils

In times of rapid snowmelt or unusually heavy precipitation, the creek flows above ground, forming swirling rapids in this stretch. A clean light-gray limestone formed in a long-vanished warm, tropical sea, the Onondaga is studded with beautifully-preserved Devonian-period fossils including numerous corals and shellfish.

Beyond the creek bed, Route 85 briefly joins Route 443 and heads on a shoulder of the valley steeply uphill. Here the bedrock consists of alternating beds of thinly-bedded shale and thick layers of dark sandstone, and these strata extend south through the Catskills.

While the lower-elevation layers exhibit marine fossils — trilobites and clam-like brachiopods, among others — the higher-elevation layers near Gilboa and elsewhere south of the Helderbergs show fossils of primitive land plants and giant fern trees that obviously grew above water.

These layers are the eroded remains of what geologists term the “Catskill Delta.”  The name is somewhat misleading for there were numerous deltas that formed and co-joined during the Acadian Orogeny, a period of mountain formation that occurred during the late Devonian Period as North America collided with that section of the primitive European continent known to geologists as Avalon.

Towering, snow-capped mountains rose that were as grand in their day as the Rockies. Rushing streams poured from their flanks, carrying heavy loads of dark sand, clay, and mud, filling in the shallow sea in which the Onondaga limestone formed and producing deposits thousands of feet thick that would eventually be elevated by tectonic action into the Allegheny Plateau.

There are numerous outcrops visible in the Helderbergs in which the dark shale layers sit directly atop the light-gray limestone — compelling evidence of the rise of the great mountains to the northeast.

At 15.8 miles, there is a pull-off on the right side of the highway allowing a glimpse into the deep gorge that the Onesquethaw Creek has formed at the south end of Helderberg Lake. A mini-version of Ausable Chasm, the gorge features rapids, waterfalls, plunge pools, and numerous traces of the movement of small faults and the folding of the rock layers that probably occurred during the Alleghanian Orogeny.

In the gorge, the Onesquethaw Creek provides an example of what geologists call an “under-fit” stream.  The deep gorge shows signs of having been eroded by a stream with far more power than the Onesquethaw shows today, but at the time of the melting of the glaciers the ancient Onesquethaw must have been a veritable torrent and its surging, sediment-laden waters would have had sufficient energy to cut deeply into the bedrock, forming the steep-walled canyon visible today. It should be noted however that the gorge is on private property and permission from its landowners must be secured for entry.

At 16.4 miles, there is a view of privately-owned Helderberg Lake to the right of the highway; to the left are road-cuts through the shale/sandstone strata showing their thin layering and fragmentation.

Shortly beyond this point, Route 443 veers west toward Schoharie and Route 85 continues in a southwest direction, moving into a region of fields and forests. Meandering across the landscape are numerous stone walls made both of flat, angular chunks of the local stone and occasional smoothed or rounded boulders; these are “glacial erratics” — transported sometimes hundreds of miles from the Adirondacks or even Canada by the ancient glaciers and shaped by grinding against other rocks in the ice or in the streams that poured from the glaciers in summer.

Robert Frost found these rocks annoying in his famous poem “Mending Wall” as their rounded shapes make them resistant to stacking and easily susceptible to the pull of gravity.  The fields here as in the town of New Scotland are buried deeply in glacial drift; clearing these fields first of trees and then of the larger rocks in the soil for farming in the days of the pioneers must have been an appalling challenge.

At mile 24.4, a high glacially-sculpted hill appears prominently on the left side of the road. Like Bennett and Countryman hills near Clarksville, it exhibits a fairly steep north face, a flattened top, and a long, gentle slope to its south face — features of what geologists call a “rock drumlin.”

Fantastical village

At mile 26.9, Route 85 terminates at a T-intersection in the hamlet of Rensselaerville, a diminutive hamlet that very few residents of the city of Albany seem to be aware of — and those who have heard the name almost inevitably confuse it with the city of Rensselaer.

With its steeply sloping streets, its historic buildings, churches, and cemetery, its tiny art gallery and elegant eatery, and the town-wide echo of flowing water from Ten-Mile Creek, the hamlet’s ambience evokes that of Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia — or to the more romantic-minded, the fantastical village of Brigadoon.

Taking a right at the T-intersection and ascending steeply to the west end of the village past the restored mill, one soon enters the Huyck Preserve.

The Preserve consists of over 2,000 acres of forest and includes Lake Myosotis, a wilderness lake that can be accessed both by foot or by car. A trail begins at the west end of the small parking lot and heads upstream along Tenmile Creek.

Almost at once, hikers will hear the sound of falling water. The trail crosses a bridge near the mossy ruins of a 19th-Century mill and offers the first tantalizing view of the Rensselaerville Falls. Just beyond the bridge, a trail cuts sharply to the right and upward and follows a somewhat exposed ledge.

The trail is comfortably wide here though to the right there is a drop ranging between 20 and 30 feet down to the water and hikers should proceed with care. After a couple of hundred feet, one arrives at a ledge approximately one-third of the way above the base of the falls, offering a stunning view of the waterfall.

Here the thin-bedded shale and massive sandstone layers have been incised by Tenmile Creek following a fault that has sliced through the rock layers creating a box canyon into which the overflow from Myosotis Lake plunges 125 feet down a series of step-like projections. The erosive effects of water and ice have caused large, angular boulders to break from the bedrock, creating lacy meanderings and cascades for the rushing waters.

At the bottom of the falls is a plunge pool bordered by flat shelves of the dark shale, and a sharp-eyed observer may see in some of the exposures wide ripple marks: evidence of the shallowing of the ancient waters in which the sediments were deposited by streams rushing from the high mountains rising to the northeast during the Acadian Orogeny.

Soon those deposits would form the so-called Catskill Delta on which primitive ancient plants including fern trees would grow. Millions of years later, the violent events associated with the Alleghanian Orogeny would elevate the layers far above sea level and perhaps cause the fault through which Tenmile Creek would begin its spectacular plunge toward the sea.

I have always taught my students that, to appreciate geologic history, one must have a good imagination.  Driving on Route 85, one begins on the sands of the immense delta that bordered Glacial Lake Albany some 10,000 years ago — a time which, to a geologist, is not much further back than yesterday morning.

But along the highway lies evidence of ancient seas, the rise and fall of great mountain chains, the effects of millions of years of weathering and erosion, and the more recent, Earth-altering events of the last great Ice Age.  There are few places in the continental United States where so much geologic history is revealed — and so easily accessible. For those with the inclination and imagination, the chronicles of worlds forever lost and gone lie almost literally in our backyard.

The classic view of the central temple of Angkor Wat is from the bank of the surrounding moat. When a gentle breeze stirs the water into tiny wavelets, the reflection of the temple’s five towers against scattered clouds in the mild Cambodian sky looks like a pointillist painting, with splashes of white and blue and gray and brown producing an image that might have come from the palette of Georges Seurat; when the surface of the water is mirror-smooth, usually at dawn or dusk, low sunlight softly illuminates the looming lotus-shaped towers or silhouettes them against the multi-colored western sky, creating a scene out of an ancient Khmer epic and its perfect inverted image.

But Angkor Wat is only one of hundreds of beautiful structures built by the kings of the ancient Khmer Empire. With the nightmare of the rule of the murdering Khmer Rouge over, archeologists and artisans are today back at work, restoring many of the structures and retrieving dozens more from the choking jungles — which, ironically, have in many cases saved the temples from collapse.

Unlike the great buildings of many other ancient civilizations — the granite and quartzite monuments of ancient Egypt; the marble beauties of the Parthenon and other structures on the Acropolis in Athens; the astounding achievements in concrete and brick of the ancient Romans — Angkor Wat and the many other temples and royal pavilions were constructed from one of the humblest of sedimentary rocks: sandstone.

The term “sandstone” is generic because technically any type of rock can be reduced to sand-grain-sized particles and then cemented together to form rock.  But the term usually refers to rock composed of silica sand — the sand found on many of the beaches and in many of the dunes of the Earth.  In some places, the silica is mixed with shell fragments of many sizes, producing “calcareous sandstone,” which weathers in natural acids just as limestone, marble, and gypsum will.

But the sandstone of Cambodia’s Kulen Mountains from which the Angor temples are constructed is essentially pure silica, which does not easily weather chemically, and, given the often extremely humid climate conditions of Cambodia, is undoubtedly the reason that the Angkor temples have survived relatively intact for so many centuries. Had they been built from limestone or marble, the natural acids of the environment and the entangling vines would almost certainly have erased the many delicate architectural and sculptural features of the temples, leaving behind only sad, stubby remnants protruding from the lush jungle floor.

The earliest of the temples were constructed in the 10th Century by the first kings of what would eventually emerge as the ancient Hindu Khmer Empire, men with melodious names such as Jayavarman, Harshavarman, and Suryavarman.  Unlike the great temples of many Western civilizations, these Hindu religious structures were not intended as gathering places for worship by the faithful but as residences for the gods of the Hindu pantheon.

In this function, they exhibit some similarities to many ancient Egyptian temples. Only the attending priests entered a temple’s inner sanctum and worshippers would gather outside the building’s walls for prayers and rituals.  Thus, the temples’ architects did not have to solve the challenges of constructing and covering immense gathering spaces such as are found in Christian basilicas, Islamic mosques, and Jewish synagogues.

As a result, the temples’ interiors are dimly-lighted and maze-like, with long corridors, steep ascending and descending staircases, and small, often diminutive chapels in which statues of Hindu gods and goddesses — and somewhat more recent depictions of the Buddha — reside in the incensed gloom. Both interior and exterior walls are covered with thousands of square feet of beautifully detailed carved figures from the Hindu pantheon and with the enchanting “apsaras,” the winsome dancing maidens with smiles as enigmatic as that of the Mona Lisa.

A few miles from the main temple at Angkor stands a small temple known as Banteay Srei, and though unlike Angkor Wat it does not seek to overwhelm the visitor with vastness and mass, it leaves its impression though the astounding delicacy and intricacy of its carvings. It is familiarly known as “the Citadel of Women” because of its numerous carvings of Hindu goddesses and the ubiquitous “apsaras.”

Perhaps because nowhere do its many chapels stand more than 30 feet in height and the fact that until fairly recently the temple was protected by the vines and tree trunks of the enfolding jungle, the intricate, filigree-like carvings that seem to cover every square foot of the exterior and interior of the structures are preserved in stunning detail.  Here the hard Kulen Mountains sandstone has retained much of its original cinnamon-red color.

To wander through its open-air maze-like layout is to enter a fantastic world of goddesses and other figures out of the Hindu pantheon, alluring or sometimes frightening fantastical animal-headed humanoids, juxtaposed with delicately-depicted trees and flowers.

The Bayon

Closer to the central area of Angkor Wat is the great temple known as The Bayon, which the French archeologist and restorer Bernard Phillippe Groslier has called “the most amazing piece of architecture in existence.”  It was constructed by King Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th Century A.D. at which time the Khmer kings had briefly converted to Buddhism, and The Bayon shows the influence of both religions, though the Buddhist images dominate.

It is not as well preserved as some of the other Khmer temples; it seems to have been somewhat hastily constructed.  Consequently it has not weathered the centuries so well.  Nonetheless, even in its mildly dilapidated state, it captures the imagination as perhaps no other building on Earth.

The Bayon rises out of the jungle on a series of stone platforms in what a tourist guide describes as “a stone mountain of ascending peaks” capped by 37 towers, though archeologists speculate there may have once been as many as 20 more.  The looming towers are built of layer upon layer of gigantic stone blocks, and each exposed side of the blocks features a carving of the face of the Buddha — or, perhaps, the face is that of Jayavarman VII himself, depicted with his eyes closed in meditation and with the Buddha’s mystical smile.

The visitor tries in vain to count the dozens — then, hundreds — of faces of various sizes and states of preservation, aimed at the four major points of the compass. The fact that some of the faces are only partially preserved — a disembodied smile here, an ear or eyes on an eroded face there — makes the scene all the more mysterious and alluring.

The temple has the same darkened interior maze of corridors, staircases, chapels, and dungeons of many of the other Angkor temples. But the mysteriously smiling faces never suggest danger, even when one is ascending or descending one of the dizzyingly steep flights of stairs or is momentarily disoriented in one of the decorated corridors.

Rather, the general impression is one of peace and connection with the infinite among the smiling visages on the towers reaching toward the sky. As in Angor Wat, everywhere is the odor of incense, and at any turn a visitor may come unexpectedly upon a statue of the Buddha draped in a saffron-colored robe, bedecked with brightly-colored flowers and fruits.  From an unseen source may come the tinkle of copper bells or the chanting of monks: the effect is of a Buddhist mantra become tangible.

Ta Prohm

Besides Angkor Wat itself, the temple known as Ta Prohm is perhaps the most familiar to Western eyes as its setting irresistibly evokes the romantic spirit of the Indiana Jones epics. Situated a few miles from Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm retains — by deliberate design of the archeologists — much of the appearance of the entire vast temple complex when it first came to the attention of Western explorers in the late 1800s.  Its extensive staircases, courtyards, chapels, and hallways have been left to a large extent wrapped in the huge above-ground roots of immense Silk Cotton trees and the smaller vines of the strangler fig.  And therein lies a paradox.

While the process known as “root-wedging” is one of the most efficient methods of breaking down rock — many of us have seen our sidewalks and driveways damaged or even destroyed by the roots of trees that get under or between concrete surfaces — the giant roots of the engulfing tropical trees at Ta Prohm and scores of the other ancient Khmer temples have held its immense carved sandstone blocks in place.

As many of the other temples were restored, the huge encasing roots were removed and any stones that had been displaced were returned to their original positions and secured with mortar. But at Ta Prohm, the visitor gets a sense of what it was that the first explorers saw when they trudged through the steamy jungle and laid eyes on the spectacular remnants of the ancient Khmer kingdoms.

The serpentine appearance of the huge roots and vines adds immeasurably to the haunting lure of the mazes of the temple’s interior and, where they hang suspended or wrap around the statue of a Hindu deity or a frieze of dancing “apsaras,” they evoke awareness of the passage of eons and hint at the glories of lost civilizations.

One wall carving that is not obscured by the huge trees presents a mystery that has provoked controversy from the day of its discovery, but it is well known to the local guides — some of whom are children who have played hooky from school and scurry about the temple, hoping to pick up tips from tourists for showing them what the kids call the “dee-no-soo”:  a stunningly accurate depiction of the dinosaur known as a Stegosaurus, triangular back-plates and all.

Given the fact that the critter has been extinct for at least 66 million years, is this carving simply an amazing coincidence — depicting some hitherto unknown figure out of Hindu mythology?  Or is it conceivable that some ancient Khmer sculptor had seen an almost-intact fossil of the beast or heard accounts of it from someone who had?

Needless to say — the accuracy of the carving and its mystical location have produced all kinds of so-called “non-mainstream” theories about its origin of the kind presented all too frequently on cable TV. It represents one more of the conundrums that the Angkor temples present.

Reign of terror

Sadly, visitors to the temples also learn of history that is much more recent than the annals of the Khmer kingdoms.  On the walls of many of the temples — and very obvious at Angkor Wat itself — are ugly, shallow holes: the scars of bullets that bespeak the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge, the Marxist thugs who took control of Cambodia while the Vietnam War raged to the country’s east.

At first welcomed by the United States and its allies as a buffer against the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot set up a dictatorship that even by the standards of 20th-Century atrocities is remarkable for its truly demonic savagery.  Horrifying evidence of the brutality is provided by the many beggars who haunt the ruins, often missing limbs or eyes.

At first, the Khmer Rouge forced its utopian plans for a pure Marxist state in Cambodia on the country’s peasants and intellectuals and former rulers, but the revolution soon turned inward as so many revolutions do and began killing its own members whose dedication was not regarded as “pure” enough.  Two million Cambodians died in the resulting slaughter, and though both the Khmer Rouge and the intruding Viet Cong called themselves Communist, their struggles for power were sometimes fought right within the Angor temples as control of the great buildings was held to be symbolic of political power.

Statues were beheaded and carvings were torn from walls and the beautiful artworks of the ancient Khmer were sold on the black market to raise money for Pol Pot’s draconian schemes. Miraculously, many have since been recovered and some have already been replaced — but the scars left upon the temples fade slowly as do the memories of the gentle people of Cambodia who lived through the Khmer Rouge nightmare.

The temples today rise like dreams from the misty jungle, their restored beauty and grace testament, perhaps, to the vitality and resilience of the human spirit.  But the scars of conflict that pepper the delicate towers and the intricate carvings also offer validation to the fact that, throughout human history, attempts to use force to bring about a worldly paradise have usually resulted instead in the creation of hell on Earth.