The Enterprise — Melissa Hale-Spencer
Stories abound about this house with a tower in New Salem.
The mist-enshrouded history of Ireland is replete with stories of ghosts and other supernatural manifestations. I have Irish ancestors on my mother’s side, and from the time I was very young I became aware of the fact that some of them believed in ghosts the way the rest of us believe in traffic lights: They are there and we have to deal with them.
When I was in college, I attended the wake of an elderly Irish family friend in a small town in the Adirondacks and one of my great aunts approached my mother to express her grief and then said, “Oh Mary Jane, it’s so sad. But I knew someone was going to die. A few nights ago, I woke up and there was a ghost rattling rosary beads against my window.”
You had better believe that that story got told and re-told at family gatherings for years afterward!
But whatever part our family history might play in my interest, I have had a fascination with tales about ghosts from a very early age — I wrote my first ghost story when I was 10. But in my later years, my interest has centered on the stories and psychology of people who believe in ghosts.
That undoubtedly played a large part in my decision to write my doctoral dissertation in American literature on the fiction of Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” and whose novel (subsequently a film) “The Haunting of Hill House” made her famous.
One critic characterized her works as combinations of “sorcery and psychiatry,” which nicely nails them down.
And over the years, my cave-exploring activities and my work with the Heldeberg Workshop have occasionally introduced me to perfectly reasonable-seeming, rational people who will tell me point blank that they have had an encounter with something other-worldly, that they live in a haunted house or that they know intimate details about one.
But my personal contact with stories of several reputedly “haunted” houses and sites in the Helderbergs began a good number of years ago when I was teaching a course at the former Vincentian High School in creative writing. At the time, the “Foxfire” series of books were very popular, detailing as they did folk tales and ways in the back hills of Appalachia.
I set my senior students on a project to track down interesting people and stories from the Helderbergs and write them up. As a result of my summers at the Heldeberg Workshop, I had become friends with Frieda Saddlemire, the legendary school teacher and historian from Knox, and she had suggested several contacts.
While all of them turned out to be interesting and earned the students who wrote about them respectable grades, two of the stories the students had ferreted out were remarkable, though one — of which much more later — never got written up by the students who had uncovered it.
It got shot down fairly quickly as a result of an interview I had with a person connected to the story. Subsequently, I elaborated on the events I heard about in that interview and turned them into a novel I am struggling to get published.
(The other story tracked down by two students is one I have been attempting to gain more information about for many years with virtually no luck. It involved a fantastic tale that they dug up as a result of a meeting with a source who insisted on remaining anonymous. While it did not involve ghosts, it was the sort of thing that a writer with the mentality of H.P. Lovecraft might have conjured, and it deals with that very peculiar-looking vine-covered building that looms darkly on the west side of the Knox Cave Road between Warner’s Lake and the village of Knox. But as I am still in hopes of someday tracking down the truth. I will say no more at this juncture!)
A dozen or so years afterward, I had confided in a few friends and associates that I was at work on a novel about a haunted house, based on a story that a pair of my students had uncovered in that folklore assignment. But I guess that kind of confidence — like a bit of juicy gossip — is very difficult to keep under wraps, and before long I was being contacted by various people who claimed to have been involved with ghosts or knew someone who had been.
Most of the stories seemed to involve spirits of remarkably uninteresting character. But a couple were intriguing.
One concerned a venerable old Victorian-style house on a road south of the village of New Salem in which one of the officers of the Heldeberg Workshop lived. She had invited the workshop’s board members over one fall night for a gathering, and a number of us admired the beautiful antiques she and her family had collected over the years.
She then informed us that her house had what she described as “the most interesting antique of all: We have a ghost.” Or more precisely, they had a “poltergeist,” which is described as a “mischievous spirit.”
She asserted — and her husband and teen-aged children backed her up — that soon after they had moved into the house, they would sometimes come home to find furniture moved around and drawers pulled from dressers and the contents — usually socks and underwear — would be spilled onto the floor; rugs would be found rolled up, and locked doors would open and close on their own.
Curious events — but somewhat silly and not particularly threatening. The events had become less frequent in recent months, and the family had arrived at a theory: Before they moved in, the house had stood empty and somewhat dilapidated for a number of years. They concluded that a spirit in the house had felt lonely and the arrival of living, breathing humans with children had sent it into paroxysms of joy, which it was expressing through a series of mischievous acts.
Well, perhaps.
Another, creepier tale came to me by way of a self-described psychic — whose name I will not mention because I have always believed she derives way too much publicity by mentioning it herself! In any event — hearing that I had been at work on a novel about a haunted house — she contacted me and told me that a very old home in the beautiful valley of the Onesquethaw Creek south of Clarksville had once harbored a malign spirit.
Every Christmas Eve — precisely at the stroke of midnight, she told me — the windows in one upstairs bedroom exploded outward, sending shards of glass and wood flying to the ground. She asserted that the owners of the house had called upon her to perform some kind of exorcism and that, as a result of it, the events had stopped.
She also insisted that under no circumstances should I approach the owners as they did not want any publicity and, in any case, would deny everything.
Again — well, perhaps
But then — why had she contacted me in the first place? However, I am getting ahead of my story. Something had been brooding in my mind for a number of years.
Back when I had been teaching that creative writing class at Vincentian High School, two young men among my students had come to me with a tale they had gotten from a relative of one of the students who lived in New Salem.
There was a house there, they said, that had long had the reputation of being haunted and, although it was at the time unoccupied, they had the name and telephone number of a woman who had lived there not long before with her husband.
The young men wanted me to contact her and ask if there was indeed anything to the story and if so if she would be willing to be interviewed so they could write up their folklore project. Therefore, one school day before classes began, I called the number; I got an answering machine and left my name, the school’s phone number, and a rather vague reference to the fact that I had been told she might have an interesting story to tell about a house in New Salem.
Less than three hours later, while I was just wrapping up a lesson before the bell rang to change classes, the school secretary knocked on my classroom door and told me I had a visitor. As it happened, my lunch period followed, and so I was able to meet and speak with her.
She proved to be a young, attractive woman perhaps in her early thirties, quiet, composed, cordial if rather formal, and not at all seeming to be a nervous type. There was a small conference room where we could talk; she had requested that we speak privately and I anticipated that she was about to tell me that the young men who had given me her phone number were prying into something that was none of their business.
She began in a rather offhand almost bland manner, telling me that she had gotten my phone message and that it was really not a good idea for the young men to go knocking on the door of the house in question.
But her demeanor changed rather abruptly. She began to recount a series of increasingly hair-raising events that she insisted had happened to her and then to her husband and within 20 minutes she was literally in tears and shaking, beseeching me to tell the young men to stay far clear of the house.
Her tale was punctuated with the refrain that has probably been spoken by everyone who has had a bizarre experience that might involve the supernatural: “I know you will think this is crazy, but you must believe me.” After all these years, the interview still gives me goosebumps when I think about it.
The two students who had uncovered the story were disappointed when I gave them a vague reason not to pursue it — something to the effect that the current owners would deny everything and certainly would not allow the students to poke around. They subsequently found some other topic to pursue the nature of which I have long forgotten.
But the story of the house in New Salem had planted itself in my mind and — no pun intended — began to haunt me. I took a drive out Route 85 to get a look at it and noticed at once how it stood out from other houses in the village.
It had a tower on it — commonly called a “widow’s walk,” which indicated it had been built in the 1800s. But most striking was its color: Unlike most of the other houses in New Salem, which were painted white or yellow, this one was chocolate brown with turquoise trim.
But unlike the stereotypical image of haunted houses, it appeared well-maintained, with lawn and shrubbery neatly trimmed. And then there was its location. Obviously being in a hamlet with “Salem” in its name is evocative — but this house, unlike the haunted houses of Gothic thrillers, did not stand alone on a wind-swept moor or surrounded by dense forest.
It sat comfortably surrounded by close neighboring homes with their potted plants and bird-feeders and flower beds — in no way seeming to be the setting for the frightening story the woman had told me.
And the story was this: She and her husband had moved to upstate New York from a fairly rural area in a neighboring state. Her husband was, I believe, an insurance agent and worked in Albany, eight or nine hours a day, Monday through Friday and occasionally on weekends.
She was an artist and from time to time had worked as a substitute art teacher in various private schools as she was not certified in her former state or New York but on moving had decided to take a year off and concentrate on her paintings — acrylics and watercolors.
They had rented the house because they enjoyed the quiet of a home town and it was roomy and partially furnished. Previously, they had lived in an apartment and did not have a great amount of furniture of their own.
Rent was low, the house was conveniently located on a good road, and the views of the Helderbergs from the house — especially from the tower where she set up her studio — were gorgeous and inspiring.
Shortly after they moved in, some odd things began to happen — ominous music please! She would go up to her studio to find her easel knocked over and paint daubed onto a partly-finished canvas or onto the floor.
If she went out to shop, she might come home to find furniture moved around. (Poltergeist?) She contacted their landlord who insisted that he had not been in the house but that vibrations from heavy traffic on the highway might have caused things to spill or move around. (As the kids say — “Yeah, right!”)
On a couple of occasions, she would look out of a window and see a young auburn-haired boy, perhaps 12 or 13 years of age, in their backyard, staring up at the house. When she would go outside to ask him what he wanted, there would be no one there. (More ominous music!)
Then things got more unsettling. On one sunny fall afternoon, she was in the backyard of the house picking some late-blooming flowers for a bouquet when she looked up at the house and saw the boy inside — watching her from a window.
She dropped the flowers and raced inside — but the boy was gone. The front door was locked from the inside and the only other entrance was the rear door through which she had come in.
She called out and searched every corner of the house, including the basement but there was no sign of him. Shaken, she went to a neighbor’s house and inquired about the boy and later reported the incident to the sheriff. But her description did not fit that of any kid living in New Salem at the time and no one else had reported seeing him.
Now — in any ghost story, this is the moment of decision, or as a character in a Shirley Jackson story says, the moment of discovery of “the disembodied hand in the soup”— and generally the humans involved make the wrong decision.
Why would anyone stay in a house in which such things are going on? And, when I had asked the woman this question during our meeting, she gave the expected answer: The house was conveniently located, it was airy and roomy, it was well-kept-up, and the rent was very reasonable. (“And now we know why!” exclaims the reader.) And none of these events had taken place when her husband was at home.
Then things got much nastier. While she was taking a shower one morning, she heard the door to the bathroom suddenly open a crack and she swore she heard boyish giggling coming from just beyond.
She screamed and lunged for her bathrobe, but of course there was no one there when she opened the door fully and both doors to the house were locked from within. She hesitated to call the sheriff to report an intruder because she had not actually seen anyone and saying she “thought” she heard laughter would not be taken very seriously.
One day when she was vacuuming the living room, she looked out and saw a group of three or four kids sitting on the steps in front of the house with their bikes lying on the lawn. She went out and asked the kids if they knew of any boy in the area who might fit her description.
She said the kids had snickered and told her that other people living in that house had reported seeing such a boy. Their story was that, in the early 1900s, a family had lived in the house whose adolescent son had been climbing on the cliffs above New Salem with some friends and had fallen to his death. From that moment, his spirit had haunted the house.
Convinced that the kids were simply trying to scare her, perhaps having heard her stories about the boy from their parents — such news gets around pretty quickly in small towns — she was determined not to be driven out of the house by a disturbed adolescent. But, of course, the kids’ tale now began to loom large in her mind.
There was one climactic incident that finally drove her and her husband to leave. On a brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon, she and her husband were in the living room. He was lying on the sofa, watching a football game on TV, and she was reading.
Although the room was cheerfully bright, she had a reading lamp on behind her. Suddenly the light went out and the TV clicked off. Just as she was about to say, “The power’s out” to her husband, the room went black.
Now — understand, the window shades were up and the views out the windows were the usual ones: other houses, the street, the cliffs above the town. But no light was coming in.
It was as though the windows were nothing but illuminated paintings on the wall. The interior of the room was black as pitch and she could see nothing. She called out to her husband, but there was no answer.
Incredulous, she got to her feet and groped her way toward the sofa, tripping over a small footrest on the floor. She swore she heard again the boyish giggling and suddenly the darkness went away and the room was light again.
However, her husband was lying on the floor writhing as though he were having some kind of seizure. When she knelt next to him and called his name, she reported that the writhing suddenly stopped.
With his body contorted, his face broke into what she called “the most hideous grin I have ever seen in my life.” He then began to speak in an eerily smug, adolescent boy’s voice punctuated with a demented-sounding giggle. He told her that the house belonged to him and that he wanted her and her husband out now.
Terrified, she stood up incredulous of what she was hearing — when suddenly her husband’s body relaxed and blinking his eyes rapidly he said something like, “Honey? My God, I fell off the sofa! Did I fall asleep?”
He was not aware of the episode of blackness nor of the events that had followed.
They left the house that night. If she explained to me how they had managed to break their lease, I have long since forgotten. Her husband had supervised the moving of their furniture as she refused from then on to set foot in the house or for that matter in the hamlet of New Salem. And once they were out, she had never experienced any such events again.
I remember telling this story to Frieda Saddlemire — well, parts of it, anyway — and she nodded and said that stories had abounded about that house for years, some quite different and less threatening than the ones the woman had told me.
“You know,” she said — lowering her voice though only the two of us were there —“people up here in the hills really believe that kind of thing.”
But, of course, if a viewer flips around cable stations one by one it becomes obvious that there are millions of people in this country who believe — or want to believe — “that kind of thing,” given the number of ghost-chasing, haunted-house investigating shows that are on the schedules.
My novel is called “Come From the Star Lands,” taking its title from an eerie poem by John Greenleaf Whittier about a ceremony that calls back the departed.
It grew from being a novelette to quite a lengthy novel, and in it I have incorporated several of the other ghostly tales about the Helderbergs — called the “Helder Hills” in my book — and have managed to bring in some of the other non-supernatural tales of local folklore I picked up along the way.
The Helderbergs have a history and a folk tradition as rich as that of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, though his stories involve ghosts of quite another kind.
That house in New Salem looks now rather different from the way it looked when I first heard about it and the stories surrounding it. Painted a light shade of green with dark green trim, it sits comfortably among the other rather New Englandy-looking houses in the village — though that tower still seems a bit foreboding.
I know many people in the area, and to my knowledge whatever scary reputation the house once had has long passed, perhaps remembered only by some of the oldest residents of the hamlet and surrounding lands.
As I pass it, I am reminded of the closing lines of Emily Bronte’s classic novel “Wuthering Heights.” To paraphrase: Seeing today this well-tended, rather dignified-looking dwelling, it is hard to imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in the quiet earth.
Location:
Mike Nardacci, on an expedition with the Cave Research Foundation into Crystal Cave, stands in front of the Collins farmhouse, restored and maintained by the National Park Service.
— Photo by Art Palmer
The huge passage in Crystal Cave is known as The Grand Canyon. For many years, Floyd Collins's coffin was displayed here.
The shadowy entrance to Sand Cave has a sandstone cliff above it. Within the cave, Floyd Collins met his tragic end.
A kiosk is at the start of the tourist trail leading to Sand Cave. It was here that the “carnival” took place while rescuers made chaotic attempts to free Floyd Collins from the cave.
Floyd Collins’s tombstone is in the mammoth Cave Baptist Church cemetery. An inscription calls him “the greatest cave explorer ever known.”
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.
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— Photo by Richard J. Kinch
Sunlight streaming through a valley between two mountain peaks on the moon is the first light to show, creating this diamond-ring effect.
The viewing of a total solar eclipse is commonly described as “a religious experience.” It was perhaps fitting then that mine occurred on the grounds of a small Methodist church in the beautiful green hills near rural White House, Tennessee.
I was there at the invitation of Pastor Sam Brown and his wife, Debbie. Sam and I had attended graduate classes in geology years before at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. Subsequently, while teaching high school science courses west of Nashville, Sam had become a minister in the Methodist Church, sometimes serving several different rural churches simultaneously — a duty not unknown to many clerics in these times.
Having never viewed a total solar eclipse, I had for at least a year been formulating plans to travel south to see it, since it would be nowhere near totality in upstate New York. I also considered combining it with a visit to Mammoth Cave, since the line of totality was only about 50 miles south of that National Park. And when Sam invited me to an Eclipse Celebration he was hosting at his church, I accepted immediately.
The moments of totality were to begin at 1:26 Central Time, and having heard rumors that Interstate 65 was going to be overloaded with eclipse-viewers headed south from cities such as Louisville in Kentucky and Columbus and Cleveland in Ohio and other crowded areas of the upper Midwest, I had determined to get an early start from my motel near Mammoth Cave, intending to drive the 50 or so miles from Cave City to White House starting around 6 a.m.
But, much to my surprise, there was only light to moderate traffic even by 7 that morning. I therefore took a leisurely drive south, stopping for an enormous southern breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits, and grits and strong coffee and still got to the church following Sam’s directions by 9:40, finding I was the first to arrive.
The venerable old church sits on the edge of farmed fields next to a 19th Century Masonic lodge and a small, lovingly kept cemetery with weathered headstones. The eclipse viewing site was to be the broad parking lot before the church in which members of Sam’s congregation could gather with the safety glasses he had specially ordered.
Beyond the parking lot and a little brook was a grove of tall, closely-spaced trees that sheltered a picnic pavilion and a children’s play area from the hot Tennessee sun. The sky was a brilliant blue and there were only a couple of tiny, wispy clouds visible: perfect weather for viewing an eclipse.
I parked myself on a swing and glided back and forth for a while, enjoying the cool shade, the air that smelled of freshly-cut grass, and the songs of the cicadas, all the while appreciating the ambience and the sense of something wonderful to come. Sam and Debbie arrived within the hour, having driven up from the Nashville area on I-65 and they also reported relatively light traffic.
Shortly a parade of other cars arrived and a number of folks from Sam’s congregation emerged — all of them bringing with them plates of sandwiches, bowls of appetizers and salads, and a multitude of desserts and cartons of soft drinks.
The eclipse viewing was going to be preceded by a down-home church supper — a slice of Americana along with the astronomical event to come.
It had been interesting to me over the couple of days before the eclipse to overhear the comments and questions from the crowds in the airport and in a couple of restaurants I had visited. A sampling:
“Now — is the sun going to come between the Earth and the moon?” (Impossible: The moon is going to come between the Earth and the sun, blocking its light.)
“So which is happening: Is the sun going to stand still behind the moon or does the Earth stop turning?” (Not unless the Biblical figure of Joshua shows up!)
“If I am wearing the protective glasses, is it safe to look through a telescope at the sun?” (Good Lord, no! The telescope would focus the sun’s rays and burn right through the protective glasses and the retina of your eye.)
“Some places are charging 10 dollars or more to park my car. Should I spend the money to get a better view of the eclipse?” (Charging to watch the eclipse was a horrendous rip-off. Anywhere you could see the sun was as good a place to park your car as anywhere else.)
A solar eclipse is a wonderful combination of astronomy and geology. Simply put: The moon is a huge ball of rock roughly 2,000 miles in diameter held in orbit around the Earth by gravity.
When we look at a full moon, the dark features that make up the “face” of “the man in the moon” — sometimes called “seas” — are giant solidified flows of the volcanic rock basalt. The bright, high hills and mountains of the moon are anorthosite — another igneous rock composed largely of plagioclase feldspar; much of the rock that makes up our Adirondacks is anorthosite.
Since the moon is a solid body, it casts a shadow in space that we cannot see from Earth most of the time because space is dark. But, on rare occasions, the moon’s orbit causes that shadow to fall on Earth’s surface — and we experience a solar eclipse. (A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth’s shadow falls on the moon; since Earth is four times the diameter of the moon, its shadow is larger and so lunar eclipses occur more frequently than solar eclipses.)
To complicate the situation: The moon’s orbit around Earth is not a perfect circle; it is an ellipse, meaning that sometimes it is slightly closer to Earth — a position called “perigee” — and sometimes it is slightly farther away in the position called “apogee.” Although it is very difficult to discern with the naked eye, at perigee the moon looks slightly larger when viewed from Earth and at apogee it looks slightly smaller.
By an almost incredible coincidence — defying odds that must be billions to one — from Earth, the sun, and moon appear to be almost exactly the same size, even though the sun is around 900,000 miles in diameter — a situation that occurs nowhere else in our solar system
However, if a solar eclipse should occur when the moon is at apogee, it is unable to completely blot out the sun, which then appears as a bright ring around the black silhouette of the moon. This is called an “annular eclipse” — from the Latin word for “ring.”
The Albany area experienced a dramatic annular eclipse in 1994. But, if the eclipse occurs when the moon is at perigee, it precisely if briefly blots out the sun’s disk. At such a time, all points that lie within the moon’s shadow experience what appears to be night — stars and all.
Then it is safe to look toward the sun without eye protection and viewers can see the hazy, glowing atmosphere surrounding our star called “the corona” — Latin for “crown.” But the whole thing is a brief spectacle, seldom lasting for more than a couple of minutes. The Earth rotates, the moon’s shadow slips along the planet’s surface, and the sun reappears in the sky in a sudden flash of light.
At our viewing spot at Pastor Sam’s church, the celestial show was to begin around 12:25 p.m. Central Time so, following the delicious lunch served by the parishioners, many of us headed out dutifully a few minutes after that time with our protective glasses in place and looked up at the sky.
The right side of the sun was no longer part of a circle: It looked as though a tiny, ebony-black, fingernail-shaped slice had been taken out of it. To anyone without protective glasses, of course, no change could be noticed because of the overpoweringly bright glare of the sun.
Over the next half-hour or so, the tiny slice expanded — now it appeared that some mythical beast had taken a huge bite out of the sun’s disk as nearly 50 percent of it disappeared behind the moon. And yet, to the unaided eye the (literally) blinding light from what was left of the sun still revealed nothing unusual.
It was only when there remained about 20 minutes to totality that it was obvious even to those with unprotected eyes that something strange was going on. For one thing, although the time was shortly after high noon and there was a brilliantly clear sky, it began to get cooler.
The temperature had been hovering in the mid-90s to that point and the air had been still: a typical, sweltering, late-August Tennessee afternoon. But, although there was no breeze, the air now had begun to feel cooler and more comfortable, the way it might have toward dusk.
But far more eerie was the light: Moment by moment, the amount of sunlight reaching the ground was fading, as if a massive cloud were passing in front of the sun. But there were no clouds anywhere near the sun: It was like being in a theater in which the lights are slowly dimming before the performance, but so slowly as to be barely noticeable.
It was at that moment that we came to understand the truth of the stories we have all heard about the terror that used to possess primitive peoples unaware of the cause of solar eclipses. The sun is the source of light, of growth, of life itself. To see its power diminish and to feel the coolness of night beginning to spread in mid-day, even among people in ancient cultures that could predict them, eclipses must have been traumatic.
As the moment of totality approached, some things not unexpected but still strange happened — birds that been happily chirping away in the surrounding trees fell silent and, on neighboring farms, roosters began to crow.
Now every one of the parishioners was outside, their protected gazes fixed upon the sky: And darkness fell like a gray blanket enveloping the landscape. The sun vanished behind the black disk of the moon in a few seconds and in a flash the corona blazed forth, enveloping the sun in its gaseous rays.
After a moment of utter silence the “oohs” and “ahhs” of the crowd became audible — but in awed whispers. Momentarily visible were a couple of stars and the planet Venus shimmering in the sky.
As an added treat, one of the satellites endlessly circling Earth and usually visible only near dusk or in the hour or two before or after sunrise or sunset appeared in the northern sky, moving south. The spectacle had an air of stupefying unreality, like a scene from a Steven Spielberg movie — the light show before the aliens arrive.
And, though it seemed to pass too quickly, as the sun began to reappear in a slim, brilliantly bright crescent from behind the blackness of the moon, we were treated to a rare spectacle: the “diamond ring” effect. There are mountains on the moon’s limb separated by deep valleys, and it is through these valleys that the emerging sunlight can first blaze toward Earth. The rays appear as a dazzling burst of light like a jewel on a golden ring before the whole spectacle dissolves in the surging glare.
And then it was over.
Within just a few minutes, the light levels began to rise along with the temperature. Once again, without protective glasses, the continuing passage of the moon from the sun’s disk was invisible.
Our crowd had seen something that the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants never have and perhaps never will see: a total solar eclipse. But for residents of New York State, there is a bright note in that fact: In April 2024, there will be another solar eclipse, and this time the line of totality will pass right through New York State.
It was, of course, interesting to consider the symbolic aspects of a solar eclipse. Shortly before the eclipse began, my friend Pastor Sam shared with me the essence of the sermon he had delivered to his congregation the day before.
A partial solar eclipse, he preached, was analogous to the condition of those people who let material things to some extent block their relationship with God; there is some darkness, but the light still shines through. But a total eclipse is comparable, he said, to the state of those who cut themselves off completely from the Almighty and give themselves over to possessions and pursuits and pleasure, ignoring all things spiritual. Nothing is left in life but darkness and cold.
Some might find that symbolism a bit too gloomy, but there is no doubt that such a momentous natural event lends itself to many interpretations. Perhaps one of the more interesting was presented to me in an essay that I have kept, written by one of my composition-class students some years ago in which students chose some abstract word and gave it concrete examples.
He chose the word “magic” and to illustrate it used such events as two close acquaintances in a chance meeting hundreds or thousands of miles from home; a kiss shared by an ideally-matched couple that sets off the electric smell of ozone; and the smile of a newly-born infant just moments after its birth.
But one image near the close of his essay has stuck in my mind all these years: “Magic is the fact that the sun and the moon, so different in their natures, when seen from the Earth appear to be precisely the same size. Coincidence, perhaps. Or is that the signature of God?”
At the little country church in the beautiful hills of Tennessee on the afternoon of that magnificent demonstration of the movement of the celestial spheres, some might find it not very difficult to answer positively his rhetorical question.
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— Photo by Mike Nardacci
The impressive Rensselaerville Falls formed when Ten-Mile Creek cut a canyon into shale and sandstone layers, following an ancient fault line.
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.
A "restored" section of the Pine Bush Preserve gives an approximation of the appearance of the area following the melting of the glaciers some 12,000 years ago when the stretch was part of the shoreline of Glacial Lake Albany.
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.
The Upper Gorge of the Onesquethaw Creek shows where the creek has cut deeply into layers of Devonian-age shales and sandstones.
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.
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— Photo by Mike Nardacci
Eroded pinnacles of the volcanic rock known as “tuff” tower above the valley of Frijoles Creek in Bandelier National Monument. Within and around the grottoes in the rock, the ancient Anasazi people stored food and carved out living spaces.
Scattered across the Southwestern states of the United States are the remnants of an ancient civilization as mysterious in its own way as that of the Etruscans or the Minoans. Evidence of the rising culture of the people long known as the Anasazi appears over 2000 years ago and reaches its highest stages of development in the 1200s A.D.
They are the ancestors of today’s Pueblo-dwelling people, and visitors to the modern-day villages at Taos or Acoma in New Mexico will see the resemblance of the ruins of the ancient people’s cliff-dwellings and free-standing buildings to modern Pueblo dwellings. Developed archeological sites easily accessible to visitors include Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, but other known ancient sites number in the tens of thousands, and no one can be sure how many more have yet to be discovered.
The beauty and ingenuity of construction of the dwellings and religious structures of the Anasazi are legendary, existing as they do in some of the driest, hottest, least inhospitable parts of the country — places that frequently resemble the arid, rocky landscapes being explored by robots on Mars. Inevitably, questions arise about why these people chose such places to live and how they were able to find sufficient food and water to survive.
More frustrating is the fact that the Anasazi did not have a written language and the many petroglyphs (carvings on rock faces) they left behind are both beautiful and tantalizingly abstract. They seem to depict a culture in which a spirit world and the material world existed side by side and frequently interacted. Perhaps none of the mysteries the ruins evoke is as profound as what appears to have been the sudden and possibly violent end to the Anasazi culture.
The first archaeologists to explore at Anasazi sites such as Mesa Verde found dwellings from which the inhabitants appeared literally to have grabbed what they could carry and fled — often leaving behind clothing, beautifully-crafted pottery, and partially-eaten meals on tables. If these discoveries seem comparable to similar findings at Pompeii, the cases are not in any other way parallel.
In the Southwest, there is no evidence of a sudden natural disaster such as a series of volcanic eruptions. Although an extended drought occurred in the 1200s, such events had occurred before and the ancient people had managed ingenious methods to survive them. In addition, objects too heavy to carry — such as stones for grinding corn — were often smashed to prevent anyone else from using them, strong indications that the sites were abandoned suddenly and under duress.
Archeological wonder
Located a few dozen miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Bandelier National Monument is one of the archeological wonders of the American Southwest. The site was first explored (and subsequently named for) Adolph Bandelier, an anthropologist of Swiss-American extraction.
It is situated where a clear stream known as Frijoles Creek that flows year around — a rarity in this arid region of New Mexico — has cut deeply through the surrounding plateau forming a craggy hidden valley. From time to time, the stream overflows its banks and, when it returns to its bed, it leaves behind — like the Nile River — a layer of rich soil.
Both on the creek’s floodplain and in the cliffs that tower above it are some amazing remnants of dwelling places of the ancient people. The floor of the valley is green and fertile and the remains of free-standing pueblos and walled gardens can be seen there today. But it is in the vertiginous cliffs that the handiwork of the ancients is most spectacular.
Here are artificial caves carved into the bedrock accessed by ladders or precipitous stairways that meander through crevices eroded into the bedrock forming natural windows and grottos. There are also homes and storage places built ingeniously into the bedrock, sometimes in harrowingly precipitous locations.
It is of course tempting to see these structures as having been built in such spots for protection — but it is also possible they were situated there for the same reason that modern people buy condos in high rises: The views are great!
The bedrock at Bandelier, hundreds of feet thick, is an igneous rock called “tuff” — not to be confused (as even some geologists have been known to do) with “tufa,” which is a chemical sedimentary rock often found at springs and seeps in areas of limestone bedrock. Composed of very light-colored dust and sand-sized particles and tiny sparkling quartz crystals as well as larger, angular pebble or cobble-sized rock fragments, the Bandelier tuff formed from the compaction of materials blown out of a gigantic volcanic eruption that occurred near Jemez Springs, New Mexico, over a million years ago leaving the giant collapse feature known as the Valles Caldera.
Though the caldera is quiet today, hot springs around its perimeter and occasional earthquakes indicate that — just as at Yellowstone National Park — a great pool of magma lies beneath the surface and could erupt again.
The great advantage of the tuff into which Frijoles Creek has carved its deep canyon is that the stone is relatively soft, and with the primitive tools available to the Anasazi people it was possible both to hollow out the shallow caves that were carved into the canyon walls and to shape blocks from which the free-standing buildings in the valley were constructed.
The blocks were also used to build walls and terraces surrounding gardens on the green, well-watered valley floor in which the ancients grew their staple crops of corn, beans, and squash. The plateaus above the valley were rich in game — there were herds of elk providing meat and hides, flocks of turkeys, rabbits, and other wildlife that could be used for food or clothing.
An ideal place to live
In sum, Bandelier was an ideal place to live, especially when compared to many of the other ancient settlements such as Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and hundreds of other sites that show the ingenuity of the ancient people in adapting to appalling geographic and climate conditions but were hardly ideal places to live.
In addition to having a moderate climate, Bandelier was largely hidden from the view of passers-by, it was sheltered from storms, it could be easily defended if necessary, and it had a well-watered, fertile space for growing crops. So the question naturally arises: What made the ancient people abandon such an ideal location, supposedly to vanish into history?
Well, to start with: The romantic notion that the Anasazi simply vanished, like Attila the Hun and his hordes after Attila’s legendary meeting with Pope Leo I, is simply incorrect. The Pueblo people today whose villages are scattered widely across the Southwest are the direct descendants of the Anasazi, and their oral traditions frequently pinpoint specific locations even down to individual ancient pueblo sites as their places of origin.
The appearance of a dwelling in a modern-day village such as the Santa Clara Pueblo near Santa Fe, New Mexico shows the direct influence of the heritage of the ancient Anasazi: their astoundingly beautiful pottery; the multi-levelled dwellings with upper homes accessed by ladders; the starkly beautiful simplicity of design; and the ubiquitous “horno” — outdoor oven — around which meals are prepared and family and friends will gather.
But the fact remains that something of staggering impact occurred during the mid- to late-1200s A.D. causing the ancient people to evacuate their dwellings on exceedingly short notice and to take whatever they could carry, destroy much of what they could not, and flee to the south, resettling in the areas in which their descendants live today.
Disturbing factors
Once the lack of persuasive evidence that the migration was caused by drought or other natural disasters is taken into account, other sometimes disturbing factors must be considered. Recent archaeological digs in sites such as Chaco Canyon have found strong evidence of ritual cannibalism and violent warfare, adding an unsettling note to the romanticized depiction of the ancients living in blissful harmony with other tribes and their natural surroundings.
Moreover, even the term “Anasazi” has come to be considered politically charged in many quarters. Derived from a Navajo word, “Anasazi” may be translated as the benign expression “ancient ancestors” — but it may also be read as “ancient enemy.” This ambiguity has come to be regarded as explosive and in scholarly literature today is frequently replaced by the neutral expression “ancestral pueblo people.”
However — it has been duly noted by serious historians that the people of ancient cultures did not live their lives for the approval of those of us living in the 21st Century and we cannot impose our values in interpreting ancient clues, even if those clues lead us to unpalatable conclusions.
Whatever our admiration for the accomplishments of the Anasazi, whatever our trepidation over evidence of violent behavior that may emerge, one simple fact remains: These people did not write history books or carve inscriptions on their monumental works.
The reasons that they fled from such ideal sites as Bandelier and sometimes left behind evidence hinting at dire events will likely never be known, and explanations in oral traditions are ambiguous and sometimes contradictory.
But in thousands of sites such as Bandelier, Mesa Verde, and Chaco Canyon we may see their artful, ingeniously constructed stone works, their exquisitely painted pottery, and their haunting petroglyphs, all of them evoking a world about which we know far little than we would like but within which we can see both glimmers of the creativity of the human spirit and shadows of the dark events of our own sometimes violent past.
The Enterprise — Michael Nardacci
The classic view of the ethereal central temple of Angkor Wat is reflected in the surrounding moat. The temple’s walls and towers show scars of the chaos under the Khmer Rouge.
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.
Location:
The Enterprise — Mike Nardacci
A view of the 7,000 terra-cotta figures uncovered by Chinese archaeologists. The hangar which covers the pit in which they were discovered is over twice the length of a football field.
Located in northwestern China, the great city of Xi’an — pronounced “she-ahn” — like hundreds of other cities in China, exhibits an exhilarating mixture of ancient and modern.
In former times, marking the eastern end of the Silk Road, the city boasts hundreds of super-modernistic office buildings and apartment towers, though many stand empty — the result of China’s desire to put to work as many people as possible, without considering the fact that many of its citizens either cannot afford these high-rise digs or simply have no desire to live 50 stories above the ground. From a distance, modern Xi’an may look like a backdrop for a scene from a Star Wars episode — especially at night, when great numbers of the buildings feature light shows that out-do Times Square at New Year’s Eve.
But surrounding the central part of the city is a great wall — not the Great Wall, but a massive fortification nonetheless — built during the Ming Dynasty in the 1400s, which is a powerful reminder of Xi’an’s history. Starting around 250 B.C., Xi’an became the capital of China under Qin, the country’s first Emperor. Qin had conquered the other kingdoms that lay within the landmass known today as China, though evidence suggests that there was continued and often violent resistance to Qin’s autocratic and self-indulgent rule.
Guarded by jutting towers and with a scattering of beautiful Buddhist shrines situated strategically on its extensive esplanade, the wall protects what was once the central part of the ancient capital. Hundreds of crimson lanterns — lighted at night — hang from golden posts along the wall and sway in the wind, seeming to celebrate the new (if still limited) freedom that has come to China.
Today Xi’an has expanded far beyond the area enclosed by the wall and out onto the vast Plain of Guanzhong that surrounds the city and is dotted with shrines and tombs of Qin and the other emperors who dwelt here during the early years of united China’s turbulent history.
The Plain of Ganzhong covers hundreds of square miles and is formed by the conjoined floodplains of the great Wei River and seven other rivers and streams. Floodplains by definition are subject to disastrous overflows and in modern times a system of dams and levees protects the city. But over millennia, repeated massive flooding of the rivers has left thick deposits of clay and silt covering Ganzhong, which has now been left high and dry as a result of a dropping water table.
Aware of his own mortality, Emperor Qin made a bold decision — one on a par with the great pharaohs of Egypt such as Djoser, Khufu, Seti I, Ramses II: He directed his subjects to build for him a massive tomb, surpassing in size and grandeur the tombs of all of the petty warlords whom he had defeated in his quest to unite China under a single power: himself.
Thus, some miles from the city of Xi’an there arose on the Plain of Ganzhong an enormous tomb whose location is precisely known: Looking like a low, gentle hill, it stands covered in soil and foliage, visible for miles. But legends of its contents have cautioned archaeologists to put off opening it, as the current state of archaeological science may not be up to meeting its challenges. And so there the great mound stood for years, while around it, farmers went about their business.
Until 1974.
In that year, a farmer and some helpers were hand-digging a well, working their way down through the thick sand and clay sediments. They were down only a few yards when fragments of ancient bronze spears and pottery began to turn up; had they dug only a few feet in a different direction they would have missed them completely.
The diggers notified government archaeologists who continued excavating and soon made a stunning discovery: a life-sized terra-cotta head staring at them from out of the muck. Continued careful digging revealed that the entire body of the figure attired in minute detail as a warrior was there as well, albeit in fragments requiring reconstruction.
To call this discovery “the tip of an iceberg” would be a colossal understatement. For as excavations continued, more full-sized terra-cotta warriors began to turn up, first by tens, then by hundreds, and eventually by the thousands. Today they number over 7,000 and are displayed in a vast hangar the length of two football fields that covers the yawning pit in which they stand in 1000-foot-long phalanxes, appearing as though they are awaiting marching orders.
Each was attired differently from his companions and each was apparently an individual portrait of a foot-soldier. Most of the figures had been shattered in ancient times and required careful reconstruction, the result of the upheavals that followed the death of Emperor Qin in which rebellious subjects vented their anger against Qin’s extravagance.
In recent years, two additional pits have been opened, containing life-sized horses in battle gear and chariots along with soldiers of higher rank — lieutenants and generals — as well as archers and spearmen: the elite of the Terra-Cotta Army of Emperor Qin.
The term “terra-cotta” is Italian and means simply “baked earth.” It is an extraordinarily inexpensive and common material: those reddish brown flower pots on your porch and patio are terra-cotta, and it is commonly used for pipes, roofing tiles, and bricks as well. It is derived from common clay, a material found everywhere water has been ponded.
Extensive deposits occur on flood plains — upon which much of the city of Albany stands — and they underlie large stretches of the Schoharie Valley as well. A quick glance at the enormous number of structures in these areas built from brick confirms the presence of great quantities of clay.
Terra-cotta has been used for artistic and building purposes from ancient times, and terra-cotta statues, tiles, pipes, and sarcophagi from all over the Mediterranean world show the material’s easy availability and adaptability. Sometimes the baked clay is glazed or painted, but more commonly it is left with its natural fired-appearance: the quintessential “earth-tone,” derived from the presence of iron compounds in the clay which oxidize during firing.
But then of course the question arises: Why on Earth is the vast terra-cotta army there at all?
The answer lies in the concept the early Chinese — as well as other ancient cultures — had of an afterlife. If cultures conceived of personal survival beyond the grave, many of them considered it simply an idealized form of the best of life on Earth.
Wall paintings in the tombs of such people as the ancient Egyptians and the Etruscans depicted the deceased happily indulging in many of the same activities of the living, though with far greater levels of enjoyment and productivity.
But some peoples like the ancient Egyptians also believed that the deceased might be called upon by the gods to work in their fields and vinyards, and to save the dead the exertion bodies were buried with wooden or faience figures called “ubshabti” — often by the hundreds — that were expected to come to life in the next world and take the place of the deceased in whatever work the gods dictated. Qin could immerse himself in an indulgent life-style in his palace in Xi’an with full expectation that following his death, the feasting would go on forever.
Yet from all evidence the court of Emperor Qin was also a place of internal political struggles — tales of attempted murders, poisonings, and forced suicides have come down through the years, undoubtedly embroidered upon as the passage of time will do. There were also constant military threats from the recently conquered provinces whose subdued inhabitants were not enthused about being part of Qin’s recently patched-together empire.
And of course, there must have been many malcontents under his rule who were unhappy to see the empire’s wealth being squandered on Qin’s extravagant whims at a time when — like today — many citizens lived in squalor. Thus when he planned his magnificent tomb, Qin apparently made the decision to see that it was well guarded against marauders from both inside and out.
And so in the flat stretches of land surrounding the tomb he had his artisans create his terra-cotta army, ready to spring to life should the god-like emperor’s rest be in jeopardy from enemies either outside or inside his kingdom.
What else may hide beneath the soil near Qin’s tomb and the tombs of other emperors that lie nearby — some with brutal reputations and tastes as luxuriant as Qin’s — remains unknown. More recent excavations have found the graves of large numbers of men and women who were interred at the same time as Qin and the horrifying evidence is that they were buried alive.
Perhaps they were captured enemies doomed to serve as slaves to Qin in the next world; perhaps they were to serve as companions to the dead emperor in the afterlife; or perhaps they were killed because they knew too much about the secrets that lay within and around Qin’s unexcavated tomb rising a mile or so from the pits of the terra-cotta army. How ironic that so much stunning artistry was created under circumstances that speak of so much misery.
And yet — and yet — to look at the hauntingly beautiful individual figures with every item of clothing and footwear rendered in exquisite detail is to come face-to-face with men long dead whose demeanor projects a startling calm and dignity. It may be that the look was mandated by the emperor’s undoubtedly intimidating control.
But perhaps the soldiers really believed that in having their likenesses preserved in terra-cotta — a humble material given the touch of glory — they could share Qin’s luxuriant after-life.
Location:
The Enterprise — Mike Nardacci
One of the immense Imperial courts in the Forbidden City in Beijing has not a flower, blade of grass, or tree to offer shade for visitors.
The Forbidden City in Beijing was for centuries the home of China’s emperors — an incredibly vast, luxurious series of courts, plazas, and spectacular imperial buildings, including throne halls, offices, and residences for the emperors’ families and courtesans. It was strictly off-limits to the ordinary people of China. Begun as the imperial residence during the Ming Dynasty in the early 1400s, the complex grew to contain approximately 1,000 buildings.
The structures are marvels of traditional Chinese colossal architecture: upturned roofs adorned with figures from Buddhist history and Chinese mythology, elaborately carved wooden walls and pillars painted Imperial red. Constructed without a single nail, they stand on broad platforms elevated well above ground level surrounded by moats crossed by ornate bridges.
Visitors pass through magnificent gates into vast courts, each seemingly more impressive than its predecessor. Many are decorated with beautifully rendered Chinese lettering, transmitting whatever message a particular emperor wished to convey, but the essence is communicated without any translation: Power, power, POWER.
It is no wonder that, when the Communists took control of China, Chairman Mao Zadong saw to it that his immense portrait adorned the entrance to the Forbidden City — an ironic statement of the fact that the “classless society” now had a “People’s Emperor” in residence.
Yet, especially on a hot summer’s day, one fact becomes glaringly apparent: Nowhere among the bridges, esplanades, or terraces is there a spot of green. There are no sculptured trees or displays of potted plants anywhere.
The giant structures bake in the glaring Beijing sun and, from early morning to late evening, there is scarcely a hint of a shady refuge, save for the immense gated doorways in the walls that divide one huge open court from another. According to the Forbidden City’s official guides, the reason had to do with security for the emperors and their families and other government officials: A tree could provide cover for an assassin, as could an elaborate flower bed.
Better that the ruling classes and those guests invited into the confines of the Forbidden City should see its buildings in all their unobstructed grandeur than risk some arboreal or floral beauty spot which could give cover to an enemy with murderous intentions.
But Chinese scroll paintings and artwork on vases have often depicted idealized landscapes in which craggy mountains wreathed in clouds rise above forests and in which delicately-portrayed trees and flowers and waterfalls emerge from the mist, sometimes with a solitary figure or two or a pagoda dwarfed by the natural beauty. Traditional Chinese art and poetry have frequently centered on nature’s ability to diminish humans and their handiwork while at the same time celebrating the mystical beauties of the landscape.
Thus, it is less a surprise than a stunning revelation to pass through the penultimate gateway in the Forbidden City and enter the twisting pathways of the Imperial Garden.
All at once, the trappings of overwhelming imperial power are gone. Instead, visitors find themselves in landscape from a Chinese fairy tale, a world of ancient trees, fantastic rock outcrops, waterfalls, and flowers, and scattered and hidden among them elaborately decorated gazebos.
Above the garden is an occasional view of one of the large imperial residences, which in the lush setting seems to have lost its foreboding appearance and instead looks like a castle out of some ancient legend.
Chinese gardens
Unlike traditional European formal gardens, Chinese gardens must have the appearance of being natural, even when intricate design and planning have gone into their creation. Visitors to Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, and other great cities of China are often delighted to find gorgeous gardens and parks scattered everywhere — all of them the result of careful execution and giving the appearance of having been there for centuries, as though the vast boulevards and building complexes were built around them to insure that their naturally-formed designs remain unaltered.
In the gardens of the Forbidden City, the fantastic outcrops that form grottoes and border waterfalls and bubbling streams have been constructed mainly from limestone, and display features common in the vast karst areas of China. Huge boulders that have been weathered through or appear pock-marked are examples of what the Chinese call “Scholar’s rocks,” which have long been prized as décor in China.
They are found mainly on the shores of legendary Lake T’ai-hu, which lies in the Yangtze Delta near Shanghai. Heavily weathered into strange and often beautiful shapes by natural acids in the environment, they range in size from large cobbles to massive boulders, and in streams and waterfalls permit water to pass through and around them, often creating musical sounds and creating patterns in the flow.
Geologists call these features “honeycomb weathering,” but, where holes have been eaten right through the rock, they are commonly referred to as “tafoni,” apparently derived from a Sicilian word describing holes. Serving as reminders of the awesome power of nature and of Earth’s long history, they are ubiquitous as objects of contemplation in Chinese gardens.
But a careful observer in the Imperial Forbidden Garden will also notice some objects that have been brought from China’s vast caves, such as heavily weathered stalagmites situated among displays of Scholar’s Rocks. Stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and other structures deposited in caves by calcite-saturated dripping water have mystified and delighted civilizations the world over.
The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that they were actually slow-growing life forms, and the fantastical shapes they are capable of forming have given rise to many myths and legends. Like the Scholar’s Rocks, they clearly inspired awe for the power of the natural world in the builders of the Imperial Garden.
The “canon” for the features of a traditional Chinese garden involves four elements: greenery, flowing water, architecture, and rocks. Bordering the twisting paths of the Imperial Garden are beds of many kinds of flowers springing in lush, colorful displays and huge trees of many species, carefully color-coded to indicate their ages — some of which can be measured in centuries.
Cascades and meandering streams fed by hidden pipes seem to spring naturally from the caverns and pools formed by Scholar’s Rocks. The beautiful gazebos hidden among the foliage and rocky outcrops appear perfect settings for a poetry reading, a romantic dalliance, or philosophical contemplation, and somehow even on a summer’s day when the garden may be crowded with visitors, it manages to convey feelings of peace and harmony with nature.
Beijing and the Forbidden City have seen much turbulent history and even violence, most recently during the madness of the unleashing of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards. But how fortunate that, through centuries of upheaval and destruction, the Imperial Garden has survived to bring to the modern world such a ravishing display of man’s harmony with nature and awe in its mysteries.
Location:
The Enterprise — Mike Nardacci
An outcrop of tilted bedrock shows the ongoing tectonic interaction of the Indian subcontinent with China.
For those of us “of a certain age,” our images of China probably derive from the late 1960s and early 1970s: scenes of grim-looking Beijing with thousands of stern-faced, androgynous-looking Red Guards marching, chanting, and waving Chairman Mao’s little Red Book, the images looking even grimmer for having been shot in black-and-white.
But the Chairman’s call for China to be in a state of “permanent revolution” has come full circle: Most modern Chinese find the whole Mao era to be at least an embarrassment if not a collection of horrible memories.
China has become a market economy and tourist guides talk openly of Mao’s atrocities; they tell of swirling rumors that his mummified body will be removed from exhibit in Tiananmen Square, and that his gigantic mausoleum that Ramses II might have envied will be torn down.
The Chinese people dress fashionably, markets in the big cities are overflowing with food and consumer goods, and private businesses are exploding. China still has many problems, among them serious air pollution and a government that permits a certain amount of economic freedom but far less political freedom.
But visitors to China cannot help but be aware that the winds of change are blowing as surely as those that sometimes carry thick clouds of dust from the Gobi desert over Beijing. And they become aware quickly of something else, too: China is an awesomely beautiful country.
I recently returned from a trip that took some friends and me to China, and our travels will be the subject of this and future “Back Roads Geology” columns. Our itinerary took us to Cambodia as well, and might easily be described in such clichéd terms as “eye opening” and “life-changing” — but in this case the clichés are true and they are not hyperbole.
Vast country
The world seems a much bigger and more fascinating place to anyone who has seen China. It is a vast country, with landscapes as diverse and spectacular as any in the United States.
Its high mountains result from the ancient collision of the Indian subcontinent with Southeast Asia, and exposures of distorted bedrock and China’s sometimes catastrophic earthquakes indicate that the collision is ongoing. Elsewhere are more lofty mountains and wilderness, the lair of the giant panda, and to the west lie the Gobi Desert and occupied Tibet and the Himalayas.
And much of China is karst terrain: thick limestone bedrock in which the agents of weathering and erosion in the humid stretches of China have carved out craggy pinnacles, hollowed out caves, pockmarked the surface with giant sinkholes, and formed gushing springs.
The great Yangtze River flows down from the Himalayas through some of the most stunning scenery in China, in particular the legendary stretch known as the Three Gorges where millions of years of river erosion have carved out a spectacle to rival — and in stretches exceed — our own Grand Canyon.
Downstream is the eponymous Three Gorges Dam — a technological wonder of the world but also a source of great controversy. While it has allowed the production of enormous amounts of electrical energy, it has also raised the river’s water level over a hundred feet, displacing 1.3 million Chinese and in the process flooding towns and archeological sites and causing much ecological change.
One thinks of the similar effects of the Egyptian High Dam at Aswan, the building of dams by the TVA — and the loss of villages and farmland behind the dam at New York’s Great Sacandaga Lake. Nonetheless — the stretches of the river from Chongoing (familiarly known as “Chun-king”) down to the dam itself have become prime areas for the visitor to China — and a few hours on a cruise ship through the region demonstrate why.
Even before reaching the magnificent vistas of the Three Gorges themselves, the scenery is evocative — one might accurately describe it as mystical. Though the landscape exhibits enormous pinnacles and buttes, as in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, the climate here is very humid and the walls of the gorge are thick with vegetation.
The Yangtze is brown as the Mississippi, partly due to the heavy sediment load it bares from locations as far away as the high Himalayas, and partly due to effluent from riverside villages and sediment from mines drowned as the water rose behind the great dam. The river cuts steeply through verdant hills and mountains dotted with small villages — some reachable only by boat — and temples and pagodas from China’s past, often situated on slopes that are so steep as to appear inaccessible.
A land out of legend
The beautiful Shibaozhai Taoist pagoda rises surrounded by lush gardens near the peak of a precipitous limestone promontory reachable only by a hike up a steep incline and a harrowing traverse of a swaying suspended bridge. The wooden structure was built over 400 years ago, 12 levels tall and constructed without a single nail.
Inside it are narrow, twisting passages and shadowy alcoves, within which reside over-life-sized statues of Taoist deities and heroes. Their presence is disorienting, but in a pleasing way — telling visitors that they have entered a world parallel to their own but governed by unfamiliar figures.
That the pagoda and so many other relics of China’s past survived the barbarity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution is often a tribute to the wisdom of numerous local officials and citizens; alerted to the destructive intentions of the Red Guards, the locals papered the walls of many pagodas, temples, and other ancient relics with posters of Chairman Mao. This made the structures sacrosanct and untouchable by the mindless mobs.
This is a land out of legend. The channel of the river becomes narrow, and the buttes and pinnacles become higher and more precipitous. Waterfalls burst from hidden caves and gush down steep, narrow passes, not unlike those in the Hawai’ian islands, showing as many shades of green as it is said that a true Irishman can distinguish.
Soon our cruise ship docks and we disembark at a confluence where a narrow tributary called the Shennv Stream joins the river, and, like the Yangtze, the Shennv flows brown with suspended sediment from the high terrain above it.
Here we shuffle into small, elegant boats, painted in the traditional colors of red and gold. The boats are motorized but surprisingly quiet as they glide upstream — as are we, its passengers — for we glide into a stunning landscape of steep green slopes, reaching upward to sheer faces of limestone rock.
Springs burst from the dense forests and here and there an ancient rock staircase ascends from the river shore and vanishes mysteriously into the dense growth high above. A cloudburst a few hours before has fed a number of waterfalls that resolve into fine spray before they reach the river shore.
The high peaks of the Shennv valley are draped in low-lying clouds and before us is the inspiration for thousands of Chinese scroll paintings, depicting mystical landscapes in which human constructions disappear into the drifting fog.
The evocation of the hidden valley of Shangri-la in James Hilton’s romance “Lost Horizon” is inevitable. Here in the valley of the Shennv is a world green beyond belief, appearing untouched by any human presence, far removed from the noise, the pollution, and the human turmoil of the world outside
Through centuries of Chinese history in which ruthless dictators and benevolent despots built their fortresses and walls and fomented revolutions and waged wars, the Shennv has flowed beneath towers of ancient rocks and dense forests of trees that seem never to have known an ax.
But soon it is time for our quietly moving tour boat to return us to our cruise ship on the Yangtze, time to return to a world of schedules and obligations and technology. And, in the days and weeks that follow, we are left to ponder: Did we, or anyone, really enter — if ever so briefly — that hidden, primeval valley?
And yet, in our thoughts remain those mysterious, mossy staircases, rising from the rocky banks of the Shennv and vanishing into the misty wilderness above.
— Photo by Mike Nardacci
The storybook entrance of Spider Cave, newly acquired by the Northeast Cave Conservancy, beckons research assistant Devin Delevan.
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.