'Round Cement Mountain

     You know you're getting old when it seems to take years to climb the stairs. The 'stairs' I'm thinking of are the stepped pools of the lower Battenkill River. Starting from the confluence with the Hudson there are a half dozen of these damned flat waters leading up to Center Falls. Above there the river flows free. Each stair step offers short, interesting paddle trips. A while back I had the idea to profile each of them starting from where the two rivers merge and working upstream. 

Battenkill meets Hudson

     The exertion must have been too much for this tired farmer because I seem to have stalled out at Middle Falls. Long time readers may notice a pattern. I was also going to visit all five of the state forests in southeastern Washington County. Did four but the fifth is still awaiting my arrival. And then there was my plan to do a series on all of the canal locks. Two done with quite a few to go. As the saying goes... a man's reach should exceed his grasp.
     Years ago I was among a group of paddlers who met with the developers of the Middle Falls hydro facility. We worked out access to the river for canoeing and fishing. Unfortunately there was never any signage and the site, strewn with rusty equipment and overgrown, was unappealing. Although I launched from there a number of times, it always felt like trespassing. Consequently, few people used this section of the river.

     Today the situation is much improved. The Battenkill Conservancy working with Boralex (the current hydro operator) has created an attractive place to park and get to the water. Look for a Corridor Connection sign on the Easton (south) side of the river at the Rt. 29/40 bridge. It's a short carry to where you can either float over the top of the debris buoys or go around where they attach to the shore on the upstream end.

     The dam creates a pond with very little current. On a recent trip we easily paddled to above the Hegeman Bridge and could have gone further if time had allowed. While certainly not wilderness, the area has a primitive feel. Lush vegetation crowds the banks. It's as if you are on a southern bayou. Dense patches of Japanese knotweed (an invasive) are especially noticeable. 
     Early in the trip, just beyond the houses and backyards of Middle Falls, you'll see a narrow channel leading into a wetland of emergent aquatic plants. This can be explored, dependent on water level. A little further look for Hartshorn Brook entering on the left as you paddle upstream. Another rewarding place for the naturalist. Cat tails, pickerel weed and lily pads galore.

     The river here is wide and lazy. Cottonwood, sycamore, black willow and box elder line the shore. We saw a variety of birds including blue and green herons, a white egret, cormorants, kingfishers and cedar waxwings as well as the ubiquitous geese and ducks. What appeared to be an osprey nest crowned a structure in the Peckham quarry and eagles are also a possibility.
     Mention Cement Mountain and most locals will look at you like...well, like you've got cement in your head. But look at the topo map and there it is: Cement Mtn. You can see all 50 feet of it rising up from the right bank as you paddle upstream. Obviously, Everest is not about to be dethroned. 

     This is part of a five mile long block of limestone/dolostone that outcrops from Bald Mountain south thru Middle Falls and on into the Town of Easton. This feature has been a controversial enigma to geologists for many years, with a consensus gradually emerging that it is part of a carbonate shelf that developed off ancestral North America some 500 million years ago. During the Taconic Orogeny pieces of the shelf were broken off and scrapped along beneath the mudstones being thrust up onto the edge of the ancient continent. Subsequent erosion has left some of these fragments exposed, much like melting will reveal the detritus carried by a glacier. 

Screen shot of geologic map by W.B. Bosworth - blue band is carbonate block

     This detached block is what creates the falls here and the energy of the water has been put to use in many ways. The area was originally known as Arkansaw and then Galesville before finally settling as Middle Falls. Grist, plaster and woolen/knitting mills have harnessed the river in the past. At the base of the falls you can still see the foundations of some of these early enterprises. Today the hydropower is used by Boralex to make 2MW's of electricity. That's enough for 900 people.

     The carbonate rock has also been extensively quarried from the earliest days up to the present. Robert Lowber operated ten lime kilns at Bald Mountain in the 1850's and 60's. Some still stand. There's also a large water filled quarry between Rt. 40 and Fiddlers Elbow Road. Kids use to swim there but now it's off-limits. Today the Peckham Company has operations right where you launch canoes. They produce crushed stone and asphalt from the deposits of Cement Mountain and also have a newer quarry a few miles to the south. I'm guessing that the mountain got its name from the plaster and cement industries that John Gale developed here some 200 years ago. 

     Paddling upstream beneath an old railroad bridge you'll hardly be aware of all the mining and industrial activity that has gone on just a few feet away. Nor will it be obvious that 12,000 to 13,000 years ago this area was entirely submerged beneath the waters of glacial Lake Albany. From the present site of the Village of Greenwich the meltwater swollen Battenkill flowed into the lake depositing its sediment load as a large fan shaped delta that stretches from the Hand's and BJ's fields to the south to the Rt. 29 fairgrounds and on up to the Bald Mountain flats. When Lake Albany eventually drained the river began cutting down into its delta until it encountered the newly exposed barrier of the carbonate block where it makes a sharp right turn and flows along the edge of the limestone, finally jumping across it at Middle Falls.

Google Earth screen shot - Cement Mountain on lower left

     You can paddle thru all this history and even pass under some lost history at the site of the Hegeman Bridge. Here an old, much loved metal truss bridge was replaced with a bland concrete structure some years ago. We turned around above here but with time and energy you might be able to go all the way up to the base of the next dam on the backside of Greenwich. With a slight current the way back goes quickly. Just point the bow downriver and be sure to turn right at Cement Mountain. 

      
      

Varvey Interesting

     I see a book. A 13,000 year old book! Looking at the same scene, most people would see nothing more than a bare, muddy bank. And they'd probably put a little distance between themselves and the nut case babbling on about a book. But look closely. See those thin horizontal layers stair-stepping up the slope. Don't they resemble the pages of a big, open book lying flat on a table?

     These are clay varves. They are another of the many landscape artifacts bequeathed by glaciation. Drumlins, eskers, deltas - those are big topographic features difficult to miss. Varves, on the other hand, lay mostly hidden and it takes some kind of recent excavation to expose them. Even then, they are often visible for just a short time before being cloaked by vegetation...books once again stored in the basement where no one sees or reads them.

     Varves are annual layers of sediment deposited in post-glacial lakes. They occur in light/dark couplets. The lighter layers are rock flour released during the summer melt. They tend to be slightly coarser - silt and fine sand. The thinner, darker layers are clays that settled out in the still waters of winter. Varves vary in thickness depending on the warmth of the year in which they were deposited. They are somewhat similar to tree rings in that respect, building a record of the climate when they were created. Geologists use this fact to construct chronologies of glacial retreat.

Varve core showing winter/summer deposits 

- from North American Glacial Varve Project

Matching varve cores from different sites

- from North American Glacial Varve Project

     Much of the early research on varves was done by Gerard De Geer in Sweden. Indeed, 'varve' comes from the Swedish word for layers. Also in the early years of the last century, Ernst Antevs was using New England varves to document the recession of the ice front. His methods, refined and built upon over time, are still used to date deposits.

De Geer second from left, Antevs on right

- from North American  Glacial Varve Project

     While examining my varved slope I came across odd, rounded inclusions that seem to be the precursors of concretions. They appear to be of the same clay as the varves but slightly harder so that they remain when the surrounding material is eroded away. The concretions added strength comes from being cemented by percolating ground water containing silica, carbonate or iron oxides. There were reddish stains near the ones I saw suggesting iron oxides as the cementing agent. 

     Look for varves (and concretions) in the lowland areas of Washington County. These places were under the waters of Lake Albany and Lake Vermont and that's where the clays and silts settled out. Sometimes road work and ditching will expose them. Streams that have incised into the sediments can also reveal varved banks. 

     My photos come from a spot where the town highway crew had graded a bank that was slumping into the road. It's in a Hudson soil near what would have been the western shore of Lake Albany. The elevation is approximately 185 feet above sea level. I estimate the shale bedrock to be some 25 to 50 feet below the exposed varve and nearby field surfaces are 30 to 40 feet above. There could potentially be as much as 100 feet of varved clay deposits at this location although only about ten feet can be seen.

     Finally, here's one last varve tidbit. When I was a kid my buddies and I used to play on what we called the clay slide. It was a steep bank maybe 25 feet high that dropped into the Snook Kill stream. This was way before the time of water parks and Moms who shuttled their kids from one activity to the next. We were poor, our parents were always working, and we made our own fun out in the wild. I remember hauling buckets of water to the top of the bank. Poured down the slope, this made the clay slick enough for a heart-thumping descent and crazy splash into the water at the bottom. But it wasn't all smooth sliding. More like bumpity, bump, bump all the way down - no doubt because of the varved layers in the clay. Eventually we wore thru the bottoms of so many pairs of cut-off jeans that our mothers made us stop. To this day I think I still have bruises on my butt from the clay slide. But don't panic. There will be no photo documentation of that on this blog. 

***

     * A great site for more information is the Tufts University North American Glacial Varve Project. Access it here.

Varves from Lake Vermont

- from North American Glacial Varve Project