With an image by Karl Anshanslin
Years ago, we were lucky enough to hitch an airplane ride with a pilot at the Freehold Airport in Greene County. He flew us south to see the Catskill Front. That’s a wonderful landscape feature so it was something we really wanted to see from the air; you come to see so much more up there. Let’s talk about one of those things in today’s column. Take a look at our first photo. That’s Kaaterskill Clove out there. It’s quite a sight. We looked down and saw something that we never could have seen from the ground. That was a great fan of sediment spread out below the clove. See it on the lower part of our photo. Palenville is spread out all across the fan. The town actually defines the fan. Or perhaps the fan defined the town. But we looked again and then cranked up our mind’s eyes and gazed into its ice-age past as we flew by. We saw an enormous mass of ice rising above the clove and all across the western horizon. That ice descended into the clove itself, filling it to the top. But the climate had changed; it was warming up. Down at the bottom of the glacier we saw a gigantic flow of meltwater emerging from beneath the ice. This was a long ago and early manifestation of Kaaterskill Creek.
We looked down at it and saw that Kaaterskill Creek, after emerging from the ice, split up into numerous flows. Geologists call these distributaries. With time, a lot of time, each one meandered back and forth and spread sediment out across the growing fan. We had traveled into the past and actually seen Palenville itself coming into existence. That fan rose above the floor of the valley and on account of that, there is a very small chance of flooding. Millenia later that attracted people who came there and built the Village of Palenville. So, let’s call this the Palenville fan.
We returned to the present and looked at our photo once more. We were inspired to add the lines you will see on it (with just a little help from our friend, artist Karl Anshanslin). And, presto, we had an image of an hourglass. But, far more importantly, our hourglass gave us a metaphor for understanding the formation of Kaaterskill Clove itself. We were now able to envision the clove vicinity as being a gigantic hourglass. The clove had once been the upper chamber. Weathering and erosion had turned its bedrock into sediment, mostly sand. And that sand had flowed down an ancient and subglacial Kaaterskill Creek and then through the bottleneck and into the lower chamber which became the Palenville fan. Take another look at our image and you will see all this. This was such an interesting and even fun exercise; our endeavors and our thinking had given us a way of not just explaining Kaaterskill Clove – but of actually understanding it.
Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”
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