To geologists, there is a simple question. How did these waterfalls, with their hazards, come into existence? Haven’t waterfalls just always been there? Well no they haven’t; they were brought into existence by geological processes. We just have to be observant enough to figure out those processes.
Why is it that when a large group of mammoth bones are found, a disproportionate number of them are males?
Make your way to Rte. 214 and head north until you reach Stony Clove Gap. That’s a very sizable boulder at the Devil’s Tombstone Campground in the eastern Catskills.
Good hiking weather is coming up soon enough. Maybe you should climb Overlook and see the geology up there for yourself.
It’s an important unit of time here in the Catskills.
Our intrepid local geology columnists examine signs of glaciers at North Lake’s Site 151.
Two geologists hike up to an old bluestone quarry and find some rare fossils.
The artists of the Hudson River School captured their landscapes in a way that strikes a chord with all of us. We look at their paintings and our hearts beat as one with theirs.
Now we are ready to continue on toward Kaaterskill Clove itself. It used to be that the trail up the canyon was officially a dead end. It ended at the bottom of the falls, and hikers were discouraged from going any farther. Now, however, as we have seen, you can climb the stairs and hike on to the top of the falls.
We stand at the top of the falls and look down to see a glacier filling the valley below us; as we watch, it slowly rises up the canyon and then we have to step out of the way as it swells up over the falls themselves. We lift up into the air and turn around to watch as the flow of the ice continues on to South Lake. Geologists can do that sort of thing.
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