THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Willows Looking Across the River

CATSKILL - Our visit to that old Dutch farmhouse south of Athens called the Willows comes to an end today. We can’t leave without standing on the river side of the house and gazing east, See our first illustration. That hill, out there, lies across the Hudson River and is called Mt. Merino. (Is it really a mountain or is it a hill? We will leave that problem for some other day) It may not look like much in this view but the two of us have always been intrigued from what we see from above, Take a look at our second photo, courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s Mt. Merino toward the upper right. It’s a striking image. There is an obvious symmetry to the mountain. Both the southeastern and northwestern slopes are steep and equally so. The northeastern slope is wide and uniformly steep while the southwestern slope thins and gradually tapers in that direction. There is a pronounced northeast to southwest orientation to the whole mountain. Once again, we have noticed a pattern, and we always know that with such a pattern Nature is asking us, as scientists, to figure out what it all means.

We are hoping that many of you who have been veteran readers of our columns will quickly guess why this is. Yep, it is an artifact of the movement of a glacier during the later stages of the Ice Age. We have long been studying and writing about the effects of the Hudson Valley glacier as it headed south. It was sort of funneled into the valley and steered by that funneling. That accounts for the compass orientation that we see here. But there is more that needs explanation. Glaciers are dirty, especially at their bottoms. There is a lot of sand and gravel down there and that makes them very erosive as they pass across masses of bedrock. Mt. Merino, a sizable knob, had long been right where it is today. But it’s very likely that it had, back then, a very different and very asymmetrical form. It was the ice of the advancing glacier that sculpted it into the streamlined symmetry that we see today. Geologists have a name for this type of landscape feature we call it a “rock drumlin.” Look to the southwest; that’s Church Hill, the onetime home of Hudson River School artist Frederic Church. That’s another rock drumlin, but it is smaller and not quite as well shaped.

The two of us have enjoyed our work at the Willows. We feel that it is important for us to call attention to important local historic sites. We thank the Greene County Land Trust, especially the staff at the Willows, for making us welcome and supporting our research. We encourage you to visit sometime this summer.

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