Have you ever been to the Devil’s Kitchen? That’s an especially picturesque landscape at the uppermost and steepest slope of Plattekill Creek in Platte Clove. You get there by taking Greene County Rte. 16 (Platte Clove Road) east from Hunter or west from the bottom of the Hudson Valley. At the very top of the road there is a small red cabin. Park nearby and follow the trail that starts at the cabin and go downhill until you get to the view of Plattekill Falls. That’s where we are going today. See our photo.
It’s commonly said that there are 17 waterfalls along Plattekill Creek. Collectively, they make this such a beautiful, even magnificent location. It’s very difficult to hike this rugged canyon bottom to top but, if you do, then you can see (and count) all those falls for yourself. But naturally, although we love the gorgeous landscape here, we also seek to look into it, deeply into it. What is the geological history that lies behind all this beauty? We looked up at that waterfall and began to see its past. That’s when we stopped being hikers and we came to act as geologists and started to genuinely understand what was there, right in front of us.
We have written about waterfalls many times over the years. We almost always speak of there being a capstone at the top of each fall. That’s a sizable mass of very solid rock, resistant to the effects of weathering and erosion. That capstone allows the falls to stand out as an often-towering landscape feature. Add a stream and, presto, you have a waterfall. In the Catskills we typically speak of that capstone being composed of ancient, Devonian aged sedimentary rocks. About 380 million years ago all the Catskills were part of a gigantic delta complex, something called the Catskill Delta. There were enormous masses of sand, silt and clay being deposited by each of the Catskill Delta’s many rivers. That ancient delta had numerous ponds, swamps and thick soils. But what any delta is especially good at is river deposition, river sands which would harden into river sandstones. Those make very good capstones. That’s of course, exactly what we thought when we first looked at this falls – but there was more, much more.
Take another look at our photo. We have outlined what we think are the cross sections of two Devonian streams that once flowed by right here. We think that there used to be a lot of streams that were up there so long ago, and that all of them combined to produce the sand that now makes this capstone, but those two river channels really stand out. We stood there and looked left and right. Then we turned around and looked east. We were transported all those 380 million years into the past that had once been right here. We looked around and saw those swamps. Then we saw those ponds. There was, all around us, a forest of primitive trees. But mostly there were rivers. We returned to the present and turned around again and looked at that waterfall – and the delta top that had once been here. Then we looked down the canyon. All this was repeated about 16 more times in each of the falls that are down there. There is a lot of history here.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blog at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”
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