THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - 19 May 2024

A Day of Doing Art: Part Two

Last week we traveled back to 1858 and caught up with German landscape artist Paul Weber. That was in Kaaterskill Clove, above Fawn’s Leap and below Wildcat Ravine.  He and a second artist, his student Harriet Cany Peale, found beauty there and went to work capturing that beauty on canvases. Harriet was the second wife of renowned artist Rembrandt Peale so she had a strong background in art.  On this day Weber and Peale were both practicing landscape art. They are listed among those of the Hudson River School of Art. As we saw last week, Paul Weber found a remarkable boulder and began sketching it and its picturesque surroundings. Harriet climbed another 50 yards upstream. She found a ledge to sit on and, looking downstream, sketched another very different image. See our two illustrations. A full 162 years later another man and another woman came to the same location. That was the two of us. We stood at the very same spots they stood but we saw very different images, and a very different beauty. Take another look at our first picture.

Harriet’s painting is quite remarkable. It was a featured painting in a 2010 Cedar Grove exhibit entitled “Remember the ladies.” Not only is it a gem of a canvas, but it speaks of an ice age history. The two of us spotted them as being a cluster of glacial erratics. They had all been dragged from the Hudson Valley below by advancing ice. That glacier and those boulders had gotten this far when the climate began warming. The ice melted away leaving the erratics behind. They had been waiting here for many thousands of years. They waited for Weber, Peale and then they waited for us. They had different stories to tell: one for Paul Weber, another for Harriet Peale and a very different one for us:

May 10, 13,076 BC – We have traveled back in time but are located right exactly where Harriet Peale would someday be sketching. Our day in the distant past is a cool and overcast one, with off-and-on snow flurries. It had been warming in recent decades, and that had triggered powerful flows of meltwater. The canyon hereabouts had been scoured clean by these flows. That left a lot of bare bedrock all around. As geologists we couldn’t help looking deeply into all of that. We don’t see much real biology here, just a few mosses and lichens. Nature has been trying to stage a post-glacial comeback but that will be a futile effort. In fact, right now, the seasons have actually been starting to get colder again. A new cycle of glaciation has begun. Those mosses and lichens are thinning out and will soon be disappearing.

We are the mind’s eyes; we can go anywhere; we can do anything. We rise up high into the air and look east. Ice in the form of the Hudson Valley glacier is once again pushing to the south. Shoved from behind, a lot of it turns west and rises up the clove, heading towards us. We remain hanging high up in the air and watch as the ice approaches us. But now the climate does what climate’s do. Once again it begins to warm up and the advancing glacier grinds to a halt. For a moment we can reach out and just barely touch it. But then it begins to melt and retreat back down the clove. We look down and watch that retreat. Below us, masses of sediment are being left behind by the melting ice. Several very large boulders are poking through those heaps of earth.

We continue to remain suspended in the air as centuries pass by beneath us. Our mind’s eyes are very patient; they can do that! Slowly, the flows of a restored Kaaterskill Creek wash away some, but not all, of the sand, silt, and clay down below us. Those boulders and a few more of them emerge from the earth and settle into the locations that would someday so very much captivate Harriet Cany Peale. She saw their beauty; we saw their ice age history.

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