THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Glaciers at Twilight Park

Last week we visited Twilight Park and found ourselves on the south rim of Kaaterskill Clove. We watched as, 14 thousand years ago, all this was sinking into yet another chapter of the Ice Age. We were the mind’s eyes; we could do such things. Last time we watched as a glacier was coming down the Hudson Valley. It moved south and swelled up to fill all the landscape down there below us. The Hudson River occupies a large valley, so this became an equally large glacier. We looked around and everywhere we looked there had been a baren cold-climate landscape called a tundra. That was about to change. A large mass of ice peeled off of the valley glacier and headed west, up Kaaterskill Clove. That took it past us as we watched.

The glacier swelled up and filled the clove. It was being pushed from behind by ice that extended all the way back to highlands in Labrador. We heard loud cracking sounds and judged that the ice was yanking large masses of bedrock out of the ground. Moving glaciers do that and do it well.

We, the mind’s eyes, rose up into the sky. We looked west and watched as more ice peeled away from the main clove glacier and slowly headed northeast in the direction of today’s South Lake. It would have passed over Kaaterskill Falls except that those falls had not yet been formed. They would come later; it was the glacier that was there now. Next, we looked farther to the northeast. Ice was rising out of the Hudson Valley and passing across the Mountain House ledge. It flowed west and headed towards today’s North Lake.

Now there were two glaciers, and they were heading toward each other. One gouged out the South Lake basin, the other sculpted North Lake. Then the two collided. The collision of two glaciers sounds like an unlikely event, but this was mandated by the local geography, it just happened. The colliding glaciers pushed masses of earth up against each other. Have you been to the North Lake area? Now you know how that peninsula between the two lakes formed. And now you know how the two lakes, themselves, formed.

We are still the mind’s eyes. We rose a few miles into the sky and surveyed all these, the ice age Catskills. We saw a very sizable glacier coming down the Schoharie Creek Valley. It too was on a collision course - with glaciers coming down Batavia Kill, East Creek and West Creek. Then came the most massive collision – between the Schoharie Creek glacier and the one we saw in Kaaterskill Clove. That was where Lexington is today. See the jagged lines on our illustration.

We rose a few more miles higher into the sky and turned a full 360 degrees. All around us was this wonderful image of an ice age mountain range. What a privilege it was to see all this - if only in the mind’s eyes.