THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - 10 May 2024

A Day of Doing Art, Part One

Ice ages consist of many climatic cycles. Cold and warm weather periods alternate with each other. The last big cycle in the Catskills was perhaps about 16,000 years ago. That, called the Grand Gorge advance, consisted of several shorter cycles. The last one of those witnessed a glacier rising about halfway up Kaaterskill Clove. It reached just above a waterfalls called Fawn’s Leap, then the climate warmed and the glacier ground to a halt. Melting followed and the ice retreated out of the clove. It left a very sizable boulder behind, and that is something geologists call a glacial erratic. See the lower left of our first picture. Erratics are rocks, often very big ones, that were transported, physically shoved by glaciers, to where we see them. Even by erratic standards this is a rather large one. It is a picturesque one too; that turned out to be very important.

This is such a commonplace thing in the Catskills that it hardly even deserves mention. But something special happened right there - much later in time. In 1858 German landscape artist Paul Weber, along with another artist arrived at this same site. Weber set to work sketching that boulder and the scenic landscape behind and above it. The other artist went a little further up the canyon and worked up there. Weber looked upstream and sketched what he saw. The other looked downstream and did the same. Each picked a special view and turned it into art. Little did either of them know that they were working on some of the best paintings of their careers. 

Weber would turn his sketch into a magnificent oil painting. See our second illustration. His draftsmanship was perfect. His colors are actually quite a bit better than what is seen in nature. He called his image “Scene in the Catskills.” That’s the sort of title we like to see. That means that nobody knows exactly where it was actually done. But we thought we could fix that. We have spent a lot of time exploring all through the Catskills and we also know a lot of people who have also done the same. No, we don’t know every boulder by name, but we know where and how to go looking for them. We were confident that we could locate Weber’s image. It’s the sort of thing that we love to do. We asked around and we were told to go looking above that waterfalls called Fawn’s Leap. We already knew there were many large glacial erratics there and so it was a promising location. We hiked up there and did indeed find that very boulder. But there was more. Behind it we saw what we think is called Bobcat Ravine, a small stream that, ever since the end of the Ice Age, has plummeted down the south slope of Kaaterskill Clove. We placed our feet exactly where we thought Weber had been and absorbed the very same view that had inspired him.

Nowadays, the trees, a new generation of them, are a little taller than they were in 1858. They block much of the view of Bobcat Ravine and the hills rising above. But, otherwise, the site has hardly changed at all. (Except for the sounds of nearby highway traffic) Still, although we had located the site of an important painting, we still needed more to flesh out the geological story. How, exactly, had this landscape been shaped. We wanted to look below the surface and into the past. We love the paintings that were done by the Hudson River School artists, but we want to see so much more. What, exactly, was the ice age history recorded in this view? We needed to see beneath what was on the surface of Weber’s painting. Let’s come back next week, catch up with that other painter and see what we can learn then.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”